Home is Where the Heart Is
by Ooshka
Summary: AH/OOC Continuation of the series that began with Homestay. Follows Home Again. Eric and Sookie head towards their Civil Union and other relationship milestones.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N Yeah, it's not really like I went anywhere, is it? Apart from Jumping Beans, so my baby could be encouraged to do a bunch of stuff she really didn't want to. I should just stay home and let her poke the cat. It's a lot more entertaining. For her, not the cat. He's a bit stressed now. **

**So this is the next story. Originally I thought I might do the Civil Union as one story and then having Sam as another, but I think I'll just continue on and do it all as one. So that's where we're headed this time.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, although I do occasionally have references to babies who poke cats. **

SPOV

Probably having any kind of ceremony on the beach at Piha in November was going to be a dumb idea. It was now September and although that's officially Spring, it's really not. It was raining every day, it was still cold and Eric kept asking when it was going to be warmer. It was tempting to tell him he'd moved to entirely the wrong country if he wanted to be warm in September but I let him off.

Secretly though, I was a bit worried that the weather wasn't going to cheer up by November. I didn't fancy standing around on wet sand while the wind whipped my dress around. God, it would look like we'd wandered onto the set of The Piano or something.

It was all a bit stressful really. I was trying really hard not to be stressed. I didn't want to be one of those Bridezilla people that they make reality shows about. And I wasn't even really a bride, anyway. Maybe I was, I wasn't really sure.

Eric still wasn't really sure about the whole Civil Union thing at all. And that all came to a head the night we met with the celebrant, a rather lovely, if slightly eccentric woman called Octavia Fant, who turned up and talked us through what would happen and how she liked to conduct things, and urged us to write some of our vows ourselves, which made Eric look a bit pale as I don't think he was particularly keen on the idea of standing up and telling everyone how much he loved me. I think if he could have just put a ring on my finger, kissed me and signed a bit of paper he wouldn't have been at all unhappy.

And it didn't sound that bad to me either.

So Octavia came and went, in a flurry of colourful scarves and big hand-gestures and it was just Eric and I again. The kids were in bed, the rain was beating down again and Eric decided to pick a fight, again.

"From what she said" he began, "it really does sound like its pretty much like a marriage. And the forms are fucking identical when you look on the website."

"Well, of course it is, but it's not. If you get what I mean." Obviously he didn't.

"So, what I don't get" Eric said, wandering into the kitchen to put the cups we'd all used when Octavia was here in the dishwasher "is why then, we can't actually get married?"

I sighed. "I keep saying, and you keep saying you understand I might add, that I've been married. And this is different. So I want it to be different."

"Why?"

"Oh, God, you sound like Amelia!" I said, kind of hoping he might just laugh at that and it would all blow over. But he didn't. He just looked at me, waiting for an answer. "Why not?" I said in the end, because sometimes that does work with Amelia, then I picked up the dish-cloth and started wiping the bench a bit, just to have something to do with my hands.

Eric just looked away and sighed. "He really did a number on you, didn't he?"

"What?" Now it was my turn to sound like Amelia.

Eric looked back at me. "Bill, he fucked you over in a major way."

"I don't know what you're talking about" I said defiantly, and despite the fact I did have an idea what he was trying to say to me.

"Well you married _him_. And now you won't do it again. Fuck, Sookie. How do you think that makes me feel?"

"I would think you'd feel happy that I don't want it to all be the same again."

"I just want you to be my fucking wife."

"Well I will be. But we don't have to get fucking married first!" I was yelling and Eric was getting a bit loud too. This was not the best way to spend a rainy night at home.

"I still don't see why not? You, _you_ fucking asked me to marry you. I don't know why you didn't invite me into a fucking civil union then. I would have at least known what I was getting in to."

Eric glared at me, I glared at Eric. Then I got so mad I just threw the dishcloth at him and ran. It wasn't the best way to win an argument, God knows throwing things had never got me very far with Jason, who'd just throw something bigger back, and the one time I'd thrown my shoe at Bill in a fit of rage he'd just sat there sadly and talked about how he didn't think I was 'that kind of girl', which was kind of deflating.

But I was really mad. Mad enough to forget all the lessons of the last 35 years and just react. And then my reactions got even worse because I started to cry. I got to the bathroom and sat on the floor and put my face in my hands. This was not the way I thought my night was going to go.

Note to self though, when running off for a nice, long, self-pitying cry always lock the bathroom door behind you. Eric burst in and looked at me. "Stop fucking crying, Sookie" he said. He wasn't pleading and he really wasn't trying to comfort me. It sounded like a command and like he was really, really pissed off with me.

I looked at him and said "Fuck off, Eric", and at that moment, I really did wish he would fuck right off out of my bathroom. He could go back to the States or on one of his infamous bourbon-binges; I didn't give a flying fuck. As long as he wasn't standing there looking at me like he was now I really didn't care.

"No" Eric said, still standing there.

I looked around and wondered if throwing something might help this time. I could only lay my hands on my hairdryer though, and it was an expensive hairdryer and I liked it. Plus of course there was a chance it might actually damage Eric if it hit him, but that was the secondary reason for not throwing it if I was honest.

It's hard to find good hairdryers.

I reached up to get the tissues off the bathroom vanity and hoped that if I looked like I was settling down for a good long cry Eric might get the hint and leave. Or I could throw the tissues at him. But instead he sank down to the floor and sat with his back against the door, blocking the exit. He is incredibly annoying at times.

"I really don't get you sometimes" he muttered.

I blew my nose. "Well I certainly don't get you. You said you were OK with all of this, and now it's like...now it's like you're going back on your word." I blinked a few times to try to hold back the next lot of tears that were threatening to fall.

Eric dropped his head back against the door and looked at the ceiling. "I just…I'm just trying to understand why him and not me?" he said after a while, still looking up.

"It's not a competition; please don't turn it into one."

Eric looked at me and frowned. "No, I know. It's just well…I get you did it before, and it wasn't what you expected, and it turned out horribly etc, etc. But Sookie, this is us. It won't be the same. I feel…" Eric trailed off, I guess either he didn't want to say what he felt or he was trying to figure it out. I waited for a bit and eventually he said. "I feel that you're trying to hold me back…or, hold us back or something, in case it all goes wrong again. And it won't, at least I don't think it will. Although it's gone pretty fucking wrong tonight." He looked at me again and I guess he was laying some of the blame for it going wrong at my doorstep. I would have to take that, I was the one throwing things. But I was still mad at him for not saying any of this sooner and just letting me think we were all OK. He was an arse…sometimes.

Now it was my turn to have a think before speaking. Eric waited for me to say something. "I'm not trying to hold us back" I said eventually, "but I just want it to be…I just want it to be something we own, something different…" I trailed off; I wasn't saying anything new and obviously when I'd said it before it hadn't resonated with Eric. He didn't get me. I wondered if he actually got anything I said. Maybe I'd spent the last ten months talking to a brick wall. A really pretty wall, but a particularly dense one all the same.

I looked down at my hands, which were still clutching the tissue I'd used before. "You just don't get it" I said, quietly. I wasn't sure what else to do now.

"I want to, though" Eric said.

I looked at him. "Are you sure you just don't want me to come around to your way of thinking?" I asked. I wasn't sure that this wasn't all just a way to get me to go along with his idea of what we should be doing, which was getting married.

"I'd be lying if I said that I didn't hope you would" Eric said. I looked over at him. As annoying as that statement was I couldn't fault him for his honesty. Damn all those stupid counselling sessions, he'd obviously got something from them. "But" Eric continued, "but I really do want to understand why you feel so strongly about all this, because you obviously do. Strongly enough that you want to throw the most disgusting germ-ridden thing in the kitchen at me." Eric raised an eyebrow and I felt a bit sheepish about the throwing incident. Maybe I needed the counselling as well.

I bit my lip and huffed out a breath. "How much do you really want to know?" I asked Eric.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if I tell you stuff. About me. About…Bill, then I need to know you're not going to use it against me, that you're not going to turn around and tell me that whatever happened with him is better than what I'm offering you."

I looked over to see Eric's reaction to that. He looked thoughtful, which was better than angry. I would have loved to know what was going through his head. Although on second thoughts, maybe not. Maybe I really didn't want to know that. Maybe he really did think I didn't want him as much as I'd wanted Bill.

Maybe he needed a good look inside my head.

"OK" Eric said at last.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I am. If I'm ever going to understand then I need to know."

"OK then." I stared at the shower, and not at Eric and thought about where to begin. "On the day I got married I smiled so much that my cheeks hurt. Tara kept gushing about how happy I looked and that it must really be love because of that. I wanted to punch her in the face, but I always thought the wedding where the bride and the matron of honour got into a fist-fight would be Jason's, not mine." I paused and heard Eric chuckle, but I still wasn't looking at him.

I went on. "So anyway, I just remember sitting on that little stage at the front of the church, hidden under my big white veil and stuffed into my big white dress…I just remember thinking that if anyone could see what I was thinking, what I really felt, then they'd fly me to Hollywood and give me an Oscar there and then because I was obviously the best fucking actress who ever lived."

I snuck a look at Eric. "OK" he said. "I get that you didn't really want to marry him. But…I still don't get why it stops you wanting to marry me."

"When we got engaged, it felt wrong. I kept thinking I could just back out of it, but the wedding snowball started rolling and I realised I didn't want to. We even had to go to a whole bunch of classes in order to get married in the Church. They made us sit some kind of compatibility test so they could counsel us before we took the plunge. I just checked the answers I thought they'd want to hear, the ones that would cause the least trauma for everyone." I stopped. This was hard. Eric was at least being very quiet, but he still wasn't there with me on the page.

"So anyway, I just carried on regardless. I went through with it, doubts and all because I was a girl too scared to say no and upset anyone."

Eric snorted. "And yet…" he stopped himself, but I got the message. Not afraid to upset Eric, was I?

"But it wasn't just that. It wasn't just about not rocking the boat. When I think about it now, it wasn't that I chose marriage to Bill because I was so scared to be alone, although the alone part did scare the shit out of me. I chose marriage, not Bill. He just happened to be the only guy who asked me, hell, he was the first guy who ever showed an interest in me. And then he stuck around. And I didn't tell him to go. So of course I figured that marriage would naturally follow on. And I really, really wanted to be married. I maybe wasn't so worried about the who to." I looked down and wiped away the tears that were starting to fall again. I was so ashamed to be admitting this, even to Eric. Because that was what all the shallow girls of the world did, wasn't it? They spent their childhoods planning the perfect wedding then nabbed the first husband they could. I had been so stupid, and so selfish.

"And so this time…this time I didn't want it to be about the marriage. I didn't want to be the woman who just woke up one morning and went 'oops, lost one husband, wonder if I can snag that guy who passed out on my couch?' I didn't want it to be about choosing a…a…an institution which just has so many things, so many religious and cultural …I don't know, _things_, stuff, whatever. So much significance that I couldn't give a shit about. What's the point? It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with us." I looked at Eric, but he just stayed quiet.

"So I wanted it to be about us. About the fact that I don't care if we're married, I don't care if we never get married, but I do care about being with you. I want to be with you, Eric. Forever, full-fucking-stop. And I do like the fact of us standing there and telling other people that, that this is what we've chosen, that I'm yours and you're mine and this is our family. But I'm not choosing marriage. I'm choosing you. And not because I'm scared to be alone. If you walk out the door tomorrow, well...I'd hate it, but I'd cope. I know that now. I'm stronger than I was, and partly that's thanks to you. Because you and me...us, well that's the best thing I've ever had. And that's nothing to do with how we formally acknowledge that to the rest of the world, and everything to do with how I feel about you in my heart. And that's all that matters to me." I stopped talking and just looked at Eric. There wasn't anything left to say. That was it, if he didn't get it now he never would. I felt slightly sick; it was like stepping off the Harbour Bridge and hoping the bungy cord was really going to hold you. If it didn't and you hit the water there was really no recovery from that.

Eric looked thoughtful. "It matters to me too" he said quietly. "It really fucking matters that you chose me. And I was just worried…" he stopped and looked away.

I crawled over to where he was sitting and traced the side of his face with my fingers. "Did you really think I wouldn't choose you?"

Eric shrugged. "I didn't fucking know what was going on. You were starting to sound a bit like my dad."

"What?" I asked. That seemed a really weird comparison to just come out all of a sudden.

"He's spent fucking years going on and saying what a shitty thing it is to get married, how it's the worst thing he ever did, how he's never fucking doing it again. Why anyone would fucking _want_ to marry him, I don't know. But he seems to think he's a fucking catch."

"Oh. And, what? You wanted to prove he was wrong?"

Eric shrugged again. "I guess. Maybe. Don't know." I climbed into Eric's lap and put my arms about his waist. He held me against him. "But I do get it now. What you were trying to say. About it being about the us and not about the thing we're doing…that's it isn't it?"

"Yeah, that's it. Good paraphrasing."

"Mmm, comes in handy sometimes." Eric was quiet then he said "I like that there's an us. I guess...I mean...really, that's what I've wanted. From the start. For you to want there to be an us."

We sat there like that for a bit. And then I thought of something I wanted to ask Eric, but I wasn't sure what his reaction would be and I felt a bit reluctant to rock the boat. And then I remembered what I'd just spent the last however how-long trying to explain to Eric and figured if he didn't have his sea-legs now I should really throw him overboard.

"Eric?" I said. "So, when your dad said that it was a mistake, marrying your mum. Did you think he meant that you were a mistake?" I looked at him, but mostly I just saw his jaw. I wasn't sure his expression would give much away anyway; he was pretty good at hiding a lot of things.

"Yeah" he said. "I know that's what he meant."

"Oh." I rubbed his back, knowing there was very little I could do to make that one right for him. But then I suddenly realised what part of his problem was, it wasn't just the feeling that I'd marry Bill and not him. "Amelia and Felicia weren't. They were never mistakes. Not even when I was giving birth with a P-addict in the delivery room. They weren't mistakes. They were the best thing to come out of me being with Bill. I will never regret having children. And the fact that my relationship with their, um, biological father failed rather dramatically…well, it wouldn't stop me having any more."

I hadn't realised that Eric had still been a bit tense, until I felt him relax underneath me. "Oh, OK" was all he said to that speech.

We sat there like that for a few minutes more and then Eric started to move. "It's not really comfortable on the floor" he complained. "Next time you want to hide yourself away, can you maybe do it on the couch or something?"

I laughed. "Yeah, I'll remember that. Sorry about the dish-cloth. It is pretty gross, and throwing things isn't the best idea.

Eric kissed the top of my head. "You're forgiven. But I have to say, you don't throw like a girl."

"Of course I don't throw like a girl! You can't win at beach cricket if you throw like a girl! "

"Beach cricket? Is that an actual sport?"

"It is in our household. One day I'll teach you."

"Yeah, um. Great."

I got onto my knees and Eric stood up, and then held out his hand to help me up. "I might even add it into my vows, make you promise to learn about cricket or something."

"Oh. Would you be allowed to do that?" Eric asked.

I shrugged. "Guess so. I mean Octavia said it was all about us, so you know, we can do anything we like."

Eric got an evil gleam in his eyes. "No!" I said. "Don't you dare!"

"What?"

"Whatever you were thinking, it's not going in the vows."

"How do you know what I was thinking?"

"You'd be surprised how much I know about what you're thinking sometimes. Right, now sod off so I can get ready for bed."

"I love you, you know" Eric said as he opened the door. "Even if you do talk shit about knowing what I'm thinking."

"Ha ha, now bugger off before I start explaining why we think Australian's are a bunch of under-arm bowling cheats."

"Yeah, OK. I'm gone." Eric stepped through the door.

"But I love you so I might not."

"OK. Not taking any chances though."

"Very wise. It's a long story. Without even cats or Jason to liven it up." But Eric had disappeared into the bedroom and I'm not sure he heard.

**A/N ****The underarm bowling incident of 1981 took place when Australia was playing New Zealand in a One Day International cricket match. In order to prevent New Zealand from scoring the six they needed to tie, the Australian captain instructed his bowler to deliver the last ball underarm, along the ground. This action was technically legal, but seen as being totally against the spirit of cricketing fair play.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N So hello again to everyone! Thanks for all the reviews for the first chapter, and a big thank-you to all those alerting this story. I'm very flattered by all of you who've added to this your favourites after one chapter. You have such faith in me not to stuff it all up! **

**Disclaimer: Definitely not mine.**

EPOV

I left Sookie in the bathroom, still saying something about the stupid fucking cricket, and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Fuck, I'd blurted out that Sookie sounded like my dad and now, well, now I was stuck thinking about a whole lot of fucking shitty things that I didn't want to be thinking about. The night had been bad enough up to this point without having that on top of it. And somehow it didn't matter how many counselling sessions I'd had, it never really got any better.

Maybe, I thought, this was my punishment for telling Sookie that I still didn't understand her need to make this a Civil Union. Fuck, it was absolutely fucking identical from a legal point of view. I didn't understand why she had to make it something different, something no one else fucking did.

And hearing that celebrant-woman going on and fucking on for two hours about the ceremony just pushed me over the edge. So I snapped. And Sookie fucking caught me on the side of the face with that disgusting dish-cloth. She's got a surprisingly good arm on her.

I wonder how many terrifically gross things Jason's had thrown at him over the years.

I didn't really want to get that mad with her. I really did just want to understand what the whole fucking issue was and why she'd marry a total fucking loser and not me. And maybe, although I didn't know it at the time, I needed to know that she wasn't another version of my dad, trying to avoid a fucking commitment to anyone or anything.

Fuck, I so did not want to think about him.

Sookie came out of the bathroom and sat down next to me on the bed. "I'm sorry" she said in a small voice.

"It's OK. It's over now. I do…I understand. I don't …well, I wish you felt differently. But I understand. We'll make it all about us. It'll be…perfect." I looked over at her.

"Phfft" she said. "Nothing's _perfect_. I'll settle for, um…almost completely good with some excellent parts. "She smiled, and I smiled back. Yeah, we were OK.

The Sookie reached over and stroked my face. I really liked it when she did that. It was nice, and comforting and just made me feel…loved. Or something. "I'm still sorry that I had to hurt you" she said. "In order for you to understand. I really don't want to hurt you. And when I saw you lying in here, looking…well, you looked so sad. I don't want to make you sad. You shouldn't have to be sad just so I can get what I want."

"Oh no. No, I'm fine, Sookie. You didn't make me sad. I didn't understand and I guess I should I have said that earlier."

"Yeah. We both should have talked earlier. Because when you said you didn't get it…that you still wanted it to be a wedding, well…I was a bit worried that you were like me." She stopped stroking and just rested her hand on the side of my face.

"What do you mean?"

Sookie moved her hand away completely, which left me feeling lonely. "Well, I worried…I thought, um…that maybe you wanted the marriage so much, you weren't so concerned with the…um…the who to…" She looked away and I sat up and put my arms around her.

"Oh Sookie, how could you think that? Fuck. No. No, that's not what I wanted at all." She rested her head on my chest but didn't say anything. "Sookie I only want you. If you never wanted to marry me, I'd still always want you. It was always you. Fuck, when I turned up here to find you I wasn't thinking about marrying you. I just wanted to be near you. I like being around you. I like being part of your life. I really like fucking you." Sookie laughed and wiped a hand across one eye quickly. Fuck, I really hoped she wouldn't cry again, we'd had enough of that for one night.

"OK" she said "Well I do like the fucking, so I guess it works out."

"Yeah, it does. I think maybe I was just…well, maybe I just wanted to make sure it wasn't all going to fucking disappear on me. That you weren't going to disappear on me." Sookie looked up at me and frowned. I kissed her on the forehead. "I mean" I continued "I know you wouldn't, but I… I'm just fucking awful at the relationship thing sometimes. I don't normally fucking have them. So maybe…maybe I pushed you too hard?"

"I don't think so. I mean, it's not like you managed to push me away or anything. Even though that stupid woman across the road always asks me about my husband every time I see her when I go to bring the rubbish in. I think she secretly fancies you."

"The one with the red hair?" Sookie nodded her head against my chest. "Oh. But if you leave the garbage for me I'll bring it in and that solves the problem."

"Yeah. OK." Sookie sounded a bit dubious about that, but didn't elaborate.

We sat for a bit longer and I felt better, but I still had some really horrible thoughts running around my head that I couldn't banish. I wanted to feel good about where Sookie and I had got to tonight, but I couldn't fucking shake the memories it had dredged up.

"Sookie, do you feel better?" I asked, after a while.

"What? Oh, of course I do. Now that I know we're both on the same page I feel much better."

"Oh, no. No, that wasn't what I meant. I mean, um, do you feel better because you told me…stuff? About Bill, and you, and your past?"

"Oh. Um, yeah I guess. Although it's embarrassing." She hid her face in my chest.

"Why is it embarrassing?"

"Well no one wants to admit to being stupid, and I was really stupid. About some things, anyway. I don't think I'm stupid all the time. I hope I'm not stupid all the time. I think Amelia thinks I'm stupid all the time. The other day she told me she knows everything which was a slight worry." OK, we were getting a bit off-topic here with Sookie starting to slide towards another one of her discussions on whether or not Amelia was getting too big for her boots.

"You're not stupid and Amelia is just a kid" I said, trying to shut that one down.

"Yeah, you're right."

I took a breath. "So…I was thinking…maybe I could tell you something?"

Sookie looked at me, the curiosity written all over her face. "OK" she said. She seemed to really love it when I told her stuff. It wasn't something I really enjoyed. The less I said about myself the better. But Sookie at least didn't fucking go nuts about anything I did tell her. She mostly just stayed quiet and let me talk. I really loved that about her.

Only now I was pretty quiet because I didn't know what to say. "So what did you want to tell me?" Sookie asked after a while.

"Oh. Fuck, it's probably not important. It won't change anything." I was going off the idea in a major way now, maybe it was better to just move on and find something else to focus on. I pulled Sookie up for a kiss. That did help banish some of the bad stuff.

When we broke apart Sookie just looked at me though. "Um, are you sure you don't want to say something?" she asked. "'Cos, you know, I can cope if you want to tell me something bad…or, um, that you think I'm a mean cow, or that you still don't understand or whatever. In fact I think I'd rather that you tell me now if that's still the case."

I sighed. "No, I wasn't going to say anything about us, just…some other stuff I was thinking about."

"Like what?"

"Um…just my dad and shit. After I said that to you, about how you sounded like him, and, you know, you asked me…well, yeah. Anyway…fuck, I just keep thinking about it. About the day it all happened." And I really fucking wished I didn't. If there was a memory I wanted to erase that would be it.

"So, tell me then. Tell me what happened."

Sookie just kept looking up at me, and I just looked over at the wall and started. "Well, at first nothing much happened. I just came home from school. She wasn't there, but that wasn't that unusual. She'd leave a note for me and I'd get myself a bowl of cornflakes, watch some TV and then she'd get home before my dad did. Sometimes she'd be in a shitty mood and sometimes she wouldn't be and that was just fucking life. This day…_the_ day, there wasn't a note for me, but one with dad's name on it. I didn't really think anything of it. I just sat and watched TV. But it got later and later. And I thought that something must have gone wrong, but I didn't know what and I didn't know what to do, so I just sat there.

Then Dad got home and asked me what the fuck was going on. I pointed at the note and he read it and then all hell broke loose. There was a lot of swearing and he went around the house looking at stuff to see what she'd taken. I didn't know what to do so I followed him. Mostly she'd taken her clothes and shit, and cosmetics. She also took the blender. He was really fucking pissed she took the blender. And then when he'd done that it was like he suddenly realised I was there, and he looked at me and said 'why didn't she take you?' I had no fucking clue; I didn't know where she'd gone. I think I said something about the fact I'd been at school. He just said 'and what the fuck am I supposed to do with you?' and walked off to get a drink.

I still didn't really know what was going on, but I'd figured out she'd gone, and wasn't coming back soon. But I didn't know if she was coming back. And I figured if he didn't want me I'd go with her. But it never worked out that way, I never saw her again." I paused, Sookie didn't say anything. "So, yeah, that was a fucking shitty day really."

Sookie still didn't say anything, she just held me. It was nice. And she was right; it was kind of OK to talk about some of this stuff. But maybe not all of it. I hadn't told her the bit about how I'd gone to my room and packed a bag in case she did come back for me. And how that bag had sat under my bed until the day, about two year's later, when I'd walked in to hear my dad shout down the phone 'he's your fucking responsibility too'. And how I'd ended up burning the bag in the backyard which had really fucking pissed off the neighbour because the smell of a burning nylon backpack is pretty fucking acrid. Some things were just better if you didn't talk about them.

After a few minutes Sookie sighed. "Yeah, that was a shitty day" she agreed. "You must have had to grow up quite fast?"

I shrugged. "I guess. I never really thought about it. I just got on with it. Everyone does I think."

"Mmm, maybe only those who actually get past it do. Otherwise you'd maybe get bogged down in the thinking about it."

"Yeah, you're right. So…if you think I grew up fast, does that mean…does that mean you don't think I'm, like, too young for you?" I figured if we were getting it all out in the open I might as well ask. It had crossed my mind that the age gap was behind the not wanting to get married. That maybe she thought I wasn't, I don't know, old enough to be married to her or something.

"Nope, I don't. I don't even really think much about it now. Except, you know, if we play 'where were you when Elvis Presley died?' or something. Although I don't exactly remember that, but at least I was alive. Unlike some people here." She giggled a bit at that. Yeah, I didn't think I'd really missed much. "I think the only problem I ever had was that maybe I was, I don't know, going to hold you back or something. Because you know, I think, um, Bill had to grow up fast too. He had shitty bits to his childhood. And I may have only been 18 when we met, but he was only 20. I often wonder if maybe I sort-of kept him back from having the life he was meant to. Maybe that was part of his problem. Maybe he should have spent some of the time he was with me off with random women having a good time."

"Yeah, I tried that" I said. "Not sure it helps." Fuck, I didn't really want to be compared to Bill. But I could see where she was coming from, now, at least. Sookie was scared she was trapping us all into marriage, like she was some kind of black-widow. "I think he probably wanted to be with you, Sookie. He would have had to have been a fucking nutcase not to see you're worth it, that marriage to you, or a civil union, or whatever, is totally fucking worth it. I don't think you trapped him."

"No, well. We'll never know now, I guess."

"Not about Bill. But I know about me. And you're all I want." And then I thought that I might show her how much I really did want her so I rolled us over so she was beneath me and kissed her as hard as I could. I knew that I wanted her, and while I didn't exactly want Sookie to prove she wanted me back, while I was starting these days to figure out that she really did want me back, I still wanted that connection between us. I loved it when I was inside of her. I loved that she let me inside of her. I loved her. Pure and simple. Stupid ideas about marriage and everything. She was Sookie. And she was everything I thought I'd never have.

SPOV

It had been a bit of a fraught evening for the both of us. Eric flipping out over the whole Civil Union thing had been coming for a while, but it was still scary when it finally came out.

It seemed we had a lot to talk about. Eric talking about his childhood was particularly surprising. As much as I hated hearing what he'd gone through I was happy that he'd told me. Well, mostly happy. I tried not to smother him with my feelings about it all when he did tell me. But it was hard. The mother in me really hated his mum. More, perhaps, than I hated Lorena and Sophie-Anne, combined.

Mostly I wondered how guilty she felt. Whether she was still carrying that guilt around 21 years later. Because, God knows, there was a lot of stuff I felt guilty about. The times I'd blown Bill off from seeing Amelia was right at the top of the list, if I'd known what was going to happen I might have made more of an effort, but I was tired of all the drama and tired of trying to explain to a 2 year old why Daddy was a bit funny today. Or why he hadn't turned up at all.

But the 'if I'd known' game was a dangerous one to play. You could think that about a lot of things. If I'd known Eric was my final destination then maybe I might never had had kids with Bill, maybe I might not have married him, maybe I would have left him after a few dates thinking it was never going to work out. But it got to a point where you'd gone so far back that you were in danger of changing so much that you'd never become the same person you actually had. So if Eric had turned up, he might have found someone completely different. He might have run all the way back to the States and been glad to get the fuck out of Auckland.

In life, unlike Battleship, there were no do-overs. Although do-overs in Battleship were a Jason Stackhouse rule and I'm not sure they should be there either. Jason always seemed to do really well when we played Battleship.

There wasn't much I could do for Eric really, not in terms of making any of it alright for him. It would never be alright for him. I suppose he had better ways of dealing with some of the stuff these days, the counselling had helped him with that. But it was still there, lurking. All I could do was just be there for him. And just accept his need to have rather passionate sex in an effort to make himself feel a bit better.

It's not like I wouldn't have gone along with that plan anyway, even if we'd had a perfectly normal evening watching TV. It was a good plan, probably one of his best. Every time he had it. Or on the times I thought of it first.

Afterwards we lay there in the dark, Eric lying behind me. Bob lurking near the bottom of the bed hoping no one noticed he was there. He doesn't realise he snores though. But it's cute in a cat. It's actually kind of cute when Eric does it too, but I wouldn't tell him that.

"So what did you think of the celebrant, anyway?" I asked Eric.

"Um, she was a bit odd. She did talk a fucking lot about…well; it seemed like a lot of really weird-ass hippy shit really."

"Yeah. But she was OK. I think every celebrant I've ever come across was a bit like that really. They tend to um, take it all a bit seriously. And I guess it's their business isn't? Selling the idea of a whole romantic ceremony. But I don't fancy anything too…um, well. Too airy-fairy. Over the top. I actually kind of like the old-fashioned stuff. The whole 'for better or worse', because that's what life's like. It's really messy."

"Messy?"

"Yeah, stuff happens. Unexpectedly. It's not clear-cut. Or clean, or even necessarily what you thought it would be like. It just is."

"OK. So can I have that as a vow then? That you're agreeing to get dirty with me on a regular basis?"

"That, Eric, is terrible paraphrasing and no, you cannot. Nothing too dirty in the vows, thank-you."

Eric laughed. "What about the 'in sickness and health' bit? Can I have that?"

"Nope. Because you're a terrible patient. All that bullshit about how you never get sick and then the first sign of sickness this winter and you took yourself off to bed. The next time you get sick I'm taking you to the doctor and asking them to put me out of my misery."

"Um, shouldn't that be me out of my misery?"

"You would think that, but you're a really shitty patient, so no, I think if anyone's going it's me." Eric laughed. "I got my St John's cadet badge in home nursing and _everything_ and none of it prepared me for you" I grumbled, and he laughed some more.

"OK, so only in health then. If I get sick, I'm out of here."

"Yep. That's a good one. I'll agree to that."

Eric laughed again and I snuggled a bit closer to him. I liked the feel of him laughing against my back. It was nice after the rather stressful night we'd had. "I like this though, hanging out with you" I said. "Even if it is the middle of the night when normal people should be asleep. But I like it."

"Yeah, well we could put that it, couldn't we? The whole 'I will hang out with you in the middle of night even if I should really be asleep' clause."

"Yep, that's a good one" I agreed. "But now, we should probably actually go to sleep."

"Mmmm. There's no sleep-ins with Amelia around."

"No. She loves mornings. It's bizarre. When she's old enough I might send her to stay with Uncle Jase. He's the other early-riser."

"Yeah, but I can't imagine her down on the farm. Or maybe I can. Shit, she'd be running it in about five minutes."

"She would. I wonder if the cows would mind being bossed?"

Eric laughed. "OK, sleep now Sookie."

"Yeah, sleep now. I love you, Eric. I always will."

"I love you too, Sookie."

"Despite the fact that man-flu is not the real disease you think it is."

"Go to sleep, Sookie."

"It's just made-up" I whispered.

"Sleep."

"'Night then."

"'Night."

**Thanks for reading!**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N Hello everyone! Once again, thanks for the reviews and the alerts and favourites. It's so amazing that you're all still along for the ride with my characters!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

At the end of September three things happened. Felicia's reputation at daycare took a nosedive, Eric got sick again, and then he had a birthday.

I'd been running my classes as per normal. There were a bunch of toddlers running around a church hall in Mt Albert and I was helping the mums and nannies and grandmothers and dads in charge of them all with stuff like swinging them around a bar, and how to climb A-frame ladders, and how to swing like a monkey. Really, I loved my job. And the hours were great when you had kids of your own.

Except that Eric had actually been doing a lot of the drop-offs and pick-ups at daycare for me. It was much easier for him to do the drop-off because he was just heading up to the Village to his office, but he tended to do the pick-ups too, which meant I didn't have to bring my van home and then go back out in the car to get the kids.

Also, I think that while he liked getting the work done in his office, he tended to get a bit bored and lonely there. He might try and do some more work when he got home, but mostly I think he wanted to be around us all. He was lucky that his schedule was pretty flexible too.

So it was only when I checked my phone between classes that I got the message that Eric needed me to pick up the kids after I'd finished. I tried not to be annoyed, I really did. He was so good with the kids and it made my life so much easier.

But there'd been a lot of muttering about a sore throat this morning and I suspected that he'd taken himself home to bed on account of man-flu.

At the beginning of winter, Eric had announced rather confidently that he never, ever got sick. That had held true until Felicia had come home with her first cold. As she was still new to daycare, she was picking up every bug they had going.

Unfortunately, so did Eric. I sometimes wondered if he'd lived in an oxygen tent or something in the States because he seemed to have no ability to cope with any of the germs that the kids brought home. And kids are germy little things.

The first major cold that Felicia had come down with was a nasty one. After a week she was really chesty and was rubbing her ears, so I took her off to the GP to rule out any chest or ear infections. I also had to take Eric, who was convinced he was dying and probably needed antibiotics.

Felicia was pronounced OK by the doctor, she said Felicia's ears were 'slightly pink' but probably the antibiotics wouldn't do a lot unless it got worse.

Eric was told, nicely, that he had a cold and that antibiotics did absolutely sod all for the cold virus. I thought the GP was much more patient with him than I was feeling because he tried to argue that what he had was obviously really bad and there had to be something modern medicine could do for him.

Unlucky for me the doctor told him it was only rest and keeping up his fluids that would do anything. So of course when we got home, with Eric still grumbling that no one had handed him a prescription that would make it all better, he took himself off to bed and I was tasked with being his nursemaid.

And then I made the really stupid mistake of telling him he had man-flu and nothing more. He Googled it and discovered some stupid study that had been done which said that men do feel the effects of colds worse than women. Probably because they have really crappy immune systems or something. At any rate, Eric decided it totally justified his need to malinger and I got stuck with a large and slightly annoying patient. I had been a St John's cadet for several years as a kid and I really thought they needed to offer a new badge in dealing with your man when he has man-flu.

Or maybe they could round them all up and stick them in an infirmary? Like they used to do with TB or polio patients. Somewhere far away from their families.

In the meantime though, I was stuck with Eric. And his man-flu.

So I drove my van home from the Jumping Beans classes and swapped over to the car, before heading back out to daycare. I'd seen Eric's car at home but I hadn't stopped to say hello. I was running a bit late and had to get going.

By the time I got to daycare I was a bit flustered. I'd realised I should have gone in and asked Eric if he needed anything otherwise I faced the possibility of having to go out again. I sighed; I'd have to ring him before we left here.

I was obviously really distracted because I had trouble trying to find Felicia's name on the sheet where we all signed our kids in and out, for some reason she didn't seem to be listed where I thought she should be. I flipped the sheets of paper on the clipboard back and forth trying to find her, while at the same time willing my brain to just focus on the thing I was doing and not on all the other things I had to do.

What finally drew my eyes to Felicia's name was the handwritten note next to it which read Please see Karyn. Ugh. Karyn was the head teacher and being asked to see the head teacher was never a good thing. I couldn't help but think that Eric would have been a lot better at this, he could have dazzled her with his good looks and his exotic accent and she probably would have forgiven Felicia any indiscretions. I just looked like a slightly tired mother of two wearing an unflattering polo shirt who possibly had about four hundred other things I should have been doing. I was not impressive in any way, and unlikely to be let off any lecture that was coming my way. Bugger.

And then I heard another mother just going off at the teachers "How dare you allow this to happen? Why were you not looking after him? Why?" I could hear murmurings from the teachers who were obviously trying to calm her down. "But he got bitten. _Bitten!_ By another child. Like a…like an animal."

Oh fuck. This didn't sound good. Obviously this was the other side of the incident. The indignant mother whose child had been marked by, well, probably marked by Felicia putting the evidence together. I did have a biter. Ugh. I could see her off in the distance, sitting in the sand-pit and holding onto her spade despite the fact that another little girl was trying to take it off her. Please don't bite anyone else I thought.

So I loitered around beside the cubby-holes by the door until the mother I'd heard yelling at the teachers swept past me. Thank God she didn't have a clue who I was. I recognised the child she was carrying though. It was Mickey. And at that point I stopped feeling quite so bad. Mickey was the kind of kid I would have picked for being a biter himself. He had a bad temper and a permanent scowl which was mostly eclipsed by the ever-present trail of green snot. In fact if I had to hazard a guess, I suspected a lot of the germs in our house could be traced back to Mickey.

Karyn suddenly appeared and I fronted up. "You, um, wanted to see me? About Felicia?" I asked.

"Oh. Oh yes. Just step in here." I followed her into the resource room and waited for the worst to hit.

"We had an incident today" Karyn began "where, um, Felicia bit another child. Obviously we can't say who the child was…" I nodded in agreement, but didn't let on I'd figured it out already. Karyn continued "But we suspect that there was a certain amount of provocation on both sides and that Felicia wasn't the only one resorting to, um, physical aggression."

Well no, I thought, it's Mickey so I'm pretty sure he can dish out as much as he gets. But probably Felicia was unlucky in that what she did left a mark. She should really learn to be sneakier. I'd learnt that when fighting with Jason. Never leave a mark.

And then I thought that I was probably a really bad parent that I was thinking about ways to teach my toddler how to be a better fighter. But then again, it was Mickey.

All of a sudden I realised that Karyn was still talking. "So, do you agree with that?" she asked. "Oh, um…" I said, stalling for time and pretending to think.

"I don't think it's a major problem, we just may have to separate Felicia and Mi…the other child for a bit and make sure they're always well-supervised. So I think combined with explaining to Felicia why it's wrong and removing her from play if it happens again should do the trick. Lots of kids do this and they all get over it."

"Oh, OK. Well, yeah that sounds fine. I don't think she's a really bad kid. At least I hope not" I said.

"No, no. Goodness me, no. As I say it's a stage lots of kids go through. They don't think and they act first and just unfortunately some children use their teeth."

I sighed. "I didn't have this with her sister" I said. "She'd just yell at anyone she didn't like. I guess you weren't working here when she was a toddler but you've probably heard her, she's loud!" I laughed, but Karyn didn't. God, they were all so po-faced about this childcare thing sometimes.

"Well" said Karyn. "A lot of personality is genetic of course, and they are only half-sisters so I guess that might account for the differences, although all children are different." She gave me a smile, which I guess was meant to be encouraging. I was a bit stunned. Half-sisters?

And then I twigged why I couldn't find Felicia's name on the sheet. She was somehow listed under N now. I wondered when the fuck that had happened?

I didn't know what the protocol was. Did I tell Karyn she was completely wrong? What had Eric said? What had they assumed and he just hadn't corrected? How much did it actually matter anyway? Maybe I could say she was Eric's from a previous relationship and I had nothing to do with the kid who bit people?

In the end all I managed was a kind of lame "Oh, yeah" and I left it at that. I'd have to get the rest of the story out of Eric at some stage and work out what to do. At the end of the day Felicia and I had had enough attention for one day, if I started pointing out they had her surname wrong then they'd think I was really the world's most uninvolved mother. Quite frankly I was all for grabbing Felicia and just racing out of here at this point.

So I thanked Karyn for her time and went off to haul Felicia out of the sand-pit. Of course she kicked up a bit of a fuss and yelled "Mummy! No no no no!" at me, but at least she didn't bite me.

We walked over to the cubby-holes to get her bag and I tried to turn a blind eye to the fact the label on her cubby now read Felicia N. I would worry about that later. Right now, I had to get Amelia.

We walked into the pre-school side of the building and Felicia immediately pulled on my hand, trying to make a run for it. She loved being with the big kids, they had much better stuff. I spied Amelia and Felicia's shout of "Ah-la! Ah-la!" got Amelia's attention. She was busy arranging coloured stones on a light box.

"Come on Amelia, time to get going" I said.

"Hang on, I just need to finish this" she picked up a blue stone and looked at it, then over at the green stones she'd already placed, trying to work out where it should go. Felicia finally managed to pull away from my hand and made a run for the dinosaurs in the corner. I tried to be as patient as possible.

Eventually, Amelia decided that her work was done and she stood up. I went to get Felicia and had to prise a stegosaurus and a triceratops from her tiny fists, before picking her up, only to discover I'd lost sight of Amelia again. I finally found her on the other side of the room saying a long goodbye to all her little friends. There was much hugging and giggling. I didn't point out she'd be back tomorrow.

Amelia pulled herself away from her friends and we grabbed her bag and signed her out. As I now had two bags to carry I put Felicia down once we were in the entranceway. That was a dumb idea because then she wanted to climb up the stairs and run down the ramp which led to the toddler's side. Amelia and I had no choice but to wait while she did that circuit. Four times. How did she still have all that energy at the end of a day at daycare?

It was only by bribing her with food that I finally managed to get her to move towards the car. I just had to hope that I actually did have the muesli bar that I'd promised in my handbag.

I got the kids strapped in, gave Felicia her muesli bar. Found some raisins for Amelia and rang Eric, who sounded all stuffed up and miserable. And who wanted chicken soup. The nice chicken soup they had at Nosh though, not the boring ordinary kind from any other supermarket.

So we were off to Nosh then.

When I finally got home with the kids and the food I was well and truly tired and grumpy. Eric was in bed. Lucky old Eric.

I went into the bedroom to see him. "Hey" I said "How are you feeling?"

"Shit" Eric replied. "I'm all stuffed up and it's awful. And, oh, come here." I walked over to the edge of the bed. "Feel this" he said, grabbing my hand and sticking it on his neck.

"Yeah" I said, totally unimpressed. "Your glands are up. That's completely normal."

"Are you sure? It feels weird."

"It's just your body fighting off the infection. It really is normal."

"Infection? Do you think I need, um, antibiotics or something?" Eric looked worried, so I refrained from rolling my eyes at him and telling him not to be such a doofus.

I sat down on the bed. "Eric, it's a viral infection. Antibiotics won't help you. At all. Remember the doctor told you that?"

Eric made a noise of dismissal. "She wasn't even a specialist" he said. "I don't think she really knew."

"Um, what kind of specialist would you need? For a cold?"

Eric didn't answer me, but he was trying to think really hard about that one. Maybe there should be man-flu specialists I thought, ones who have oodles of patience for really annoying patients.

"So do you want some honey in hot water?" I asked him. I was a big believer in Manuka honey for colds. It probably didn't work, but I could at least guarantee that everyone in the house didn't grumble when I handed them a teaspoon of honey to take. And that way I could feel like I was doing something for them.

"Yeah, that would be nice" Eric said, leaning back against the pillows.

I stood up to leave, but then I remembered what had happened at daycare. "Oh yeah" I said. "Felicia bit someone today."

"Again?" Eric asked, sitting up a bit.

"Yep. Again. It was Mickey; well I'm pretty sure of that as I heard his mother having a rant when I arrived."

Eric curled his lip. "That kid is a fucking moron."

"I know! But she still shouldn't have bitten him." Eric just looked thoughtful. "Eric! Biting is not a solution. Not even if it's only the snotty-nosed morons of the world that she's biting."

"Yeah, I guess" Eric conceded.

I was about to mention the name thing when Felicia burst into the room yelling "Daddy! Daddy!" She then tried to scramble onto the bed but only got her torso up, leaving her little legs to flail about in the air until Eric hauled her the rest of the way up.

"Daddy!" Felicia said again, starting to bounce about with abandon. To her all beds were trampolines and I hadn't been able to convince her otherwise. Eric eyed her warily because she was indiscriminate with where her feet landed and she'd caught him in the groin more than once. She was always really sorry that she'd done it, and usually she'd bring him Sockie to cheer him up until he could unfurl from the ball he'd rolled himself into. But she still always forgot to be careful.

"So anyway, what happened was…" Amelia began, as she arrived in the room. "Maisie wanted to be the mummy, but I was the mummy, so I said to her that she had to be the big sister. But she said no. So Lily was the big sister and I was the mummy and Cooper, well, he didn't want to be the daddy. So I said he could be the person who comes to be the baby's daddy, like Eric, but Cooper said that wasn't a real thing and he wanted to be a dinosaur. So I said, well you don't have a dinosaur at home, but Cooper said he did. I don't think he does. No one has a dinosaur at home. So I told him he could be a tiger, but he really wanted to be a green tiger. Green is not a tiger colour, so that's just dumb. But boys are dumb. Mum, boys are dumb, aren't they?"

"Um, well not all boys…" I said, my brain trying to process Amelia's ramble which seemed to have started part-way through. I wondered if she'd been out in the family room talking to herself for a while.

"Mmm, boys are dumb. I don't want to live with boys when I grow up. I'm just going to live with you and Leesha. Oh and Eric. But he's not really a boy. He's just…he's just…um, well, anyway. I'll just stay here."

"Oh, OK. Well you don't have to get married or anything" I said to her.

Amelia climbed up on the bed as well and started adjusting my pillows so she could lean against them. "But I can still be a princess, can't I? Even if I don't get married?"

"I guess so. I mean, maybe you'll go to a school ball or something…"

Amelia's face lit up. "There's balls at school? I'm going to school next year. When I'm five. So there'll be a ball?"

"Well, not for about another 10 years after that" I said, as gently as I could.

"Ten years? But I'll be old."

"Old enough to go to a ball, Ames" Eric interjected. He was holding Felicia's hands so she could jump up and down reasonably safely. He was still watching her feet though.

"It's no good if I'm _old_" Amelia muttered.

Felicia sat down. "'ookie?" she said hopefully. "'ookie?" She gazed adoringly at Eric. Obviously he'd been selected as the person most likely to get the biscuits out. And she was even trying to speak to him in his own language.

Eric, however, looked over at me. "Fine" I said "I'll bring something back for you all." Amelia looked pretty settled now and leaned over to Eric "Can we put a movie on?"

And that was the problem with Eric taking to bed, they all moved in there and I was left with the glamorous role of nursemaid-waitress-cook. It was exhausting.

By the time I returned to the bedroom with Eric's honey in hot water, water for Amelia and Felicia and biscuits for everyone, Amelia had retrieved a selection of her movies. She spread them out on the bed and was busy making her selection. When she'd finally selected, I put it into the DVD player for her and left the room. She was currently going through a Disney princess phase and I was a bit princessed-out. I went to fold laundry.

Later on when I was making dinner Amelia came to join me. "So when you get married, you'll be a princess" she said. It wasn't a question, she had deemed it so, so it was so. Sometimes it wasn't worth getting into a debate with Amelia. And I'd tried to explain about the Civil Union but she thought I was talking a lot of nonsense and it was obviously a wedding. It was a bit scary when she agreed with Eric like that.

"And if you're a princess, will you get a fairy godmother?" Amelia asked. OK, so it had been Cinderella today then.

"No, I won't. Where would I get a fairy godmother from Amelia?" Especially one who wanted to deal with sick partners, toddlers who bit people, pre-schoolers with too many questions, piles of laundry and cats who insisted on being underfoot. I stepped over Bob to get something out of the pantry.

Amelia shrugged. "Well…one might just, I dunno. Pop up. I think that's what they do." She looked thoughtful. "Yeah that's what happens. They just appear. Like that. So you never know."

"Mmm. Still don't think so." But it did sound appealing.

"Well, if I get one, Mum, when I'm a princess, then I'll share with you."

"Thank-you, sweetheart, that's lovely."

"Yeah. But not Leesha. She doesn't need one. I don't think she wants to be a princess. I think she wants to be a dog or something."

"A dog?"

"Yeah, she's like, um. Bitey."

"Has she bitten you?" I asked quickly. I hoped she hadn't, and I also hoped I wasn't giving Amelia more ammunition to use against her sister.

"No, but she likes to bite other kids. She told me."

"Amelia, she doesn't talk that much. I don't think she would have told you that."

"Yeah she did. Well Eric said we don't bite people and Felicia was saying 'Nuh nuh' so I think that means she likes to bite people." Amelia loved to interpret whatever Felicia said and was always pretty adamant that her interpretation was correct.

"Oh, OK. No I don't think she meant that. I think, um. Well she shouldn't bite people and let's just leave it at that."

I got dinner ready for Felicia, Amelia and I. We were having pasta. I heated up Eric's soup and took it in to him, only to have to come back and find some crackers. I always forget about the crackers with soup thing. Who has crackers with soup? Toast would be much more normal.

After dinner I did the usual bath and bed routine, including the nightly sprint round the house chasing the naked toddler who got away. Felicia's time for a lap around the house was getting quicker and she didn't seem to pay any attention to Amelia standing there, hands on hips, saying "Leesha! That's not good. Be a good girl. I know you can be a good girl. Just be a good girl."

It was 7.30pm before I went back into Eric to collect his dishes and see if he needed anything else. I found him curled up, fast asleep. I took the dishes out to the kitchen and went to do the ironing.

The problem with going to sleep early is that you then wake up early. This shouldn't really have been my problem at all, except that at about 3am Eric nudged me in the side.

"What?" I said, sitting bolt upright and fearing the worst.

"I can't sleep" Eric said, pouting a bit.

"I, um…" I wanted to finish that sentence with 'don't care' but it sounded a bit mean. Even for 3am. "Well, you went to sleep early" I said in the end.

"Mmm. Well I'm sick and the doctor said rest would help, and I couldn't rest earlier when I had the kids. And I had to watch Cinderella with those annoying fucking mice. And Amelia and Felicia set up the farm animals around me on the bed. They used me as a wall to keep the cows in."

I patted Eric's arm. "Eric, its sleeping time now. Go to sleep." It was the same speech I gave Amelia when she wandered out of bed at night.

"But I can't sleep. I just told you that. I woke up a while ago, and I was really stuffed up, so I went out and took some of those cold tablets. But I can't get back to sleep."

I sighed. "Well the tablets are probably keeping you awake as well. Despite the fact they don't have the good stuff in them anymore. Because of the p-addicts of the world."

"Oh. Yeah. Well I can't sleep now, anyway. So I just thought…" Eric grabbed my boob. Maybe the cold tablets were helping him feel a bit better and not just keeping him awake.

"You thought we'd have sex?" I asked, although he was making it pretty clear by the way he'd pushed his groin up against me that that was definitely his intention.

"Well, I wondered…" Eric said, rubbing his thumb over my nipple. "I thought maybe you might feel the same way."

"So you woke me up?" I asked grumpily.

"I thought that was the rule? You know, if I wake you up properly I can have you?"

"I think I said that once. I didn't realise it was a rule now."

"No, it's a rule. And I think it's a good rule. Because mostly you're easy to wake up. Except when you've been drinking. Then it's really difficult." Eric started kissing my neck.

"You're a bit germy" I pointed out.

"It's nice to share. Anyway, if you're not sick yet you probably won't get it."

"You just want to have sex."

"I think it might help me feel better." Eric shoved his hand under my pyjama top.

"I don't remember the doctor saying anything about that."

"I Googled it."

"You Googled man-flu and now you reckon it's a real thing. It's really not. You can't believe everything you read on the internet."

Eric propped himself up on one arm. "Well I could get my lap-top and show you if you like. I can't sleep anyway, so, you know, if you want proof that's fine. Or we could just have sex and that would be that."

I thought for a minute. If he got the laptop out and started looking stuff up we could be here for hours while he found new weird and wonderful things that were supposed to help a cold. And no doubt someone, somewhere out there on the internet had probably written that sex would cure him.

Plus I was quite wide awake now and it's a well-known fact that sex helps you get to sleep.

"OK" I said. "Let's go with your theory that sex will help. But if you're not cured by the morning I think we can say this theory is a total dud."

"Excellent, fucking excellent" Eric murmured, as he pushed up my top and latched on to my breast. "I'm pretty sure that this'll work."

"Uh-huh" I managed to get out. I was pretty sure it wouldn't. I'd seen Eric get sick before and it hadn't been over this quickly.

When he was up and out of bed before me the next morning with no sign of any snuffles, sore throats or swollen glands I realised I'd set a precedent. We'd never know if it was the Manuka honey or the sex, but I could be certain which one Eric was going to give the credit to.

**GP is a general practictioner, which is who we would see in the first instance for most problems. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N Phew! Wasn't sure I was going to get this out today! I was hampered by an extra kid home due to yucky eyes. I say if all the kids there have it anyway, lets just mix the germs up, but that's just me, and no one's giving me any mothering awards!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I fucking hated being sick. And I never used to be, not at all. But I hadn't realised that kids spent half their lives covered in germs. Which they liked to wipe all over you.

I'd seen some study on the internet, where they'd stopped allowing the under-5's to visit old people's homes and the old people had stopped dying. I could kind of see why. Felicia, especially, seemed to be a germ-magnet. Although the fact that she was forced to share the sand-pit with kids who had constant running green snot didn't help.

Why didn't other people keep their fucking kids at home when they were sick?

So I was stuck once again with another cold, which Sookie kept trying to tell me was just a cold and not a secondary infection. I wasn't entirely convinced, but she was adamant.

It's nice when she looks after me though, although I notice now that every time I fucking get sick she's a bit less sympathetic than the time before. I don't think she realises that I'm fucking fed up with being sick too.

But she's still bringing me soup, so that's got to be a good sign. Of course she's still forgetting the crackers and I feel kind of mean pointing that out to her, but hey. Who has soup without crackers?

And I wasn't really intending to fall asleep right after eating, but it was lonely by myself now all the kids had been taken off for dinner and baths and there was only shit on TV so I just closed my eyes. Seemed like an OK idea at the time.

It did not seem like an OK idea at 2am when I couldn't sleep anymore. And after an hour I was really bored. I'd tried to will myself to go back to sleep, because after all, hadn't that doctor Sookie took me to said that rest was the best thing?

But it didn't happen. So I woke Sookie up for some company. Or for sex. Well, I guess it was both really. It's just absolutely no fucking fun being the only person awake.

Bizarrely, though, the sex cure that I'd told Sookie I'd seen on the internet (and it was bound to be somewhere on the internet) did actually work, because the next morning I felt a hundred times better.

Sookie looked a bit bleary-eyed and sleepy. I felt kind of bad for waking her up. But mostly I just felt fucking happy I didn't feel so sick and shitty anymore.

"You're up early" she said, as she wandered out to the kitchen.

"Yeah. Felicia started yelling quite loudly for some attention. I'm just not sure what 'Farfarsway' means in Felicia-speak. But I think that's what she was saying."

"Mmm, I have no idea either. Amelia do you know?"

Amelia was crunching on a piece of toast and chewed thoughtfully, while looking at Sookie. "Um" she said at last. "I think she's being Eric."

"But what's she trying to say?" I asked.

Amelia shrugged. "Can't remember. Hey, is this my peanut butter or the other one with the lumps?"

I checked the jar I'd used. Fuck. "It's yours Amelia."

"You sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure." Sookie looked at the jar as well, but just raised her eyebrows and didn't contradict me. Amelia went back to eating, every so often peering at her toast and scrunching up her nose.

Felicia was in the highchair with a bowl of Weetbix making a god-awful mess everywhere. But if I tried to feed her these days she got really grumpy and screamed when I tried to take the spoon off her. I couldn't understand why she'd prefer to get fuck all food in her mouth rather than have me help her, but Sookie said something about how she had to 'figure out how to be independent'. Make a huge fucking mess was more like it.

Bizarrely it was OK if I put tiny bits of my own food into her mouth as long as I used my hands or my spoon.

Sookie sighed, while pouring herself a cup of coffee. "Crap" she muttered. "I hope Felicia doesn't bite anyone today."

"Well, I can live with it if it's Mickey" I said, and Sookie glared at me. "What?" I asked, trying to get to the fridge to get some more milk out. "He's…well, he's just a little…oh! For fuck's sake, Bob! Move your fat ass out of the fucking way for once!"

I had just about tripped over Bob, again. You would think that I had been here for so long that he would have figured out by now to keep out of the way, but no, he had to fucking sit right there so everyone had no choice but to keep stepping over him. It wasn't like anyone ever forgot to fucking feed him, so I didn't know what his fucking problem was.

Sometimes I envied Sookie's ability to just manoeuvre around everything gracefully. I'd seen her carry a full washing-basket through the house and avoid all the piles of discarded toys, small children and fucking annoying cats that littered the floor with ease. I never fucking managed that.

I glared at Bob, who just padded lightly over to Sookie and rubbed against her legs. Felicia threw her spoon on the floor and yelled "Farfarsway! Farfarsway!"

I figured out what she was trying to imitate and I didn't make eye contact with Sookie. Fuck, I was already getting some blame for not being tough enough on the biting thing. I wasn't going to be blamed for Felicia yelling swearwords at random.

Sookie, however, had figured it out too. "You're right, Amelia" she said. "She is copying Eric."

I chanced a glance over to her and she raised her eyebrows. I tried really fucking hard to look innocent, but I don't think she was buying it.

And then she said something that caused me to pull out all the fucking stops on the innocent front. "Oh well. I guess all the Northmans have got to stick together, haven't they, Eric?"

Ah. Yeah. Fuck. I forgot about that little piece of information when I asked Sookie to pick up the kids yesterday. She hadn't done it in a few weeks. I really should have prepared her beforehand.

I never fucking learn either. I'm no better than fucking Bob.

"Yeah" I said slowly, thinking about what to say. Fuck it; I'd just go with the truth. It wasn't that bad. "Um, well a week or so ago they gave me this form to fill out, to update the contact details for Felicia, and I was trying to do that, but at the same time I was holding Felicia with one arm and she was trying to climb down me to get back to the sandpit, and Amelia, who I picked up first, was sitting there emptying her bag in case her hat was lost and making a fucking huge mess right in the doorway and getting in everyone's way and, well, yeah. I actually have no idea what I wrote on the form. Except I guess I do because when I got there a couple of days later they'd changed all the stuff so it said Northman. And I didn't know…well I didn't know how to say I'd fucked it up without looking like a dick…"

I trailed off. I'd spent a while trying to work out how to make it look as though they were at fault rather than it being my fuck-up for writing the wrong thing on the form. But I suspected that if I queried it, they had that form fucking filed away somewhere and all evidence pointed to me. So I just left it. But now Sookie had found out and the shit was probably about to hit the fan. She fucking hated stuff like this.

But when I looked over at her she just looked a bit thoughtful. Then she shrugged. "Well, it's only daycare. I mean, I don't know. I guess…" she frowned a bit and stared at the wall. "Well I guess it's something we could try. Or something. I don't know. I don't think it's important. For now. I'll think about it."

OK, Sookie was rambling a bit but the upshot was that I wasn't getting yelled at, which was fucking nice. I hated the yelling.

And then Sookie changed the subject completely. "You still haven't said what you want for your birthday" she reminded me. "And it's tomorrow, so you better hurry up."

I shrugged. I kind of had an idea, but I was sitting on that for a bit. I had to pick my time. Sookie made an annoyed face at me. "Well that's absolutely no help at all, Eric."

"Surprise me."

"OK, when people say that, it's just a recipe for disaster and you know it" Sookie said. Well I didn't really. I couldn't remember getting many surprises. Not nice ones anyway. So I just shrugged again and walked off to clean up Felicia's mess.

SPOV

Eric was just being annoying about the whole birthday thing. I had struggled enough with getting him a Christmas present when he'd first arrived and I wasn't having a lot more luck with the birthday present shopping.

The annoying thing was that if he just wanted something, he tended to buy it himself. He didn't think to gently suggest that maybe it would be something I could buy him. He just bought it.

Maybe he wasn't used to getting gifts. But it made my job harder.

So I'd bought him something but I wasn't really sure about it. I really wanted to know what he wanted because he was still a bit hard to read at times. Like with the whole changing Felicia's name thing. He had a completely plausible excuse as to how it had happened. We'd all been distracted like that and it was easy enough to insert your own surname. It had taken me several months before I stopped looking under the S's for Amelia's name. I mean I knew her surname was Compton, but it's hard to break the habit of a lifetime. And I always came under S.

So I could understand what Eric had done, but still. You had to wonder if there wasn't more to it. Somehow everything always turned out how Eric wanted it.

Oh well, I thought. I'll worry it about it later. It's still only daycare. It's nothing official. And I was still worrying about his birthday present anyway.

So Eric picked the kids up that day and I had a desperate wander around some shops looking for further inspiration for Eric's present. I wasn't sure that what I'd bought was really sending the message I wanted, but it looked like I was stuck with it.

For my birthday I'd got earrings. Ones which had been made to match my engagement ring. This just brought me to the conclusion that really, men needed to wear more jewellery.

Or maybe playing golf should be mandatory. There was always a lot of golf paraphernalia to buy them. But I couldn't see Eric playing golf.

Unless maybe Calvin asked him. Calvin had taken him surfing which to me, sounded like it wasn't going to work out at all. I doubted Eric's ability to stay upright. But apparently he did OK. He didn't race to do it again though.

None of this was helping me find him a present he was going to love.

When I got home Eric had started dinner, which kind of made up for the previous night where he'd just gone to bed. I was still surprised he was feeling better.

"So, the cold went away completely then?" I asked him.

"Yeah, it seems like it did. Fucking fantastic. I did not want to be sick on my birthday." He kissed me. "You're the best nurse ever."

"OK. But next time can I just not be the night shift nurse, maybe? 'Cos I'm exhausted!"

"Well, we'll see. I'd hate to see you replaced by someone, you know, all old and scary or something."

"Mmm. Yeah. That would be terrible."

"For me, definitely."

I watched Eric for a bit after he declined my offer of help. It was hard not to step in and take over. Especially when I could tell what he was searching for in the pantry and I knew exactly where it was. But he seemed to be coping. "So no more biting?" I asked.

"Nope. Nothing that was mentioned to me anyway. But I'm not sure Mickey's mum doesn't suspect something. She kind of glared at us a bit as they left. Fuck that kid looks like a retard!"

"Eric!"

"Well, I'm sorry, but he does. I keep saying it, but he's clearly not normal."

"Mmm" I wasn't disagreeing with him, but I wasn't going to openly agree.

Eric, however leaned over and whispered in my ear "You know I'm right" and I shot him a look which I hoped conveyed that he wasn't always right, but he completely ignored it.

The next morning was Eric's birthday and a Friday, so he got breakfast in bed. Well, actually most of the family got breakfast in bed because Amelia and Felicia wanted to hang out with Eric as well. Amelia tried to encourage him to open his presents faster, and hoped that she would be allowed to demonstrate proper present-opening technique. Felicia just knew something interesting was happening and wanted to poke all the things Eric was unwrapping.

The kids had nominally bought him some books and DVDs and also made him some rather lovely art-work. Amelia's came with a long explanation about the various witches, dragons and princesses that she'd depicted. Many of them seemed to be holding umbrellas. Obviously, they all lived in Auckland.

Felicia's was a few coloured blobs of paint that had run off the canvas at some point when she'd lost interest.

I gave Eric a digital photo frame for his desk, which he was very enthusiastic about. But I wished I'd gotten him something better. I just couldn't figure out what.

In the meantime I tried to make him a nice breakfast and not worry about the crumbs and jam smears that were going to be all over the duvet cover after the entire family had eaten on it. Including Bob, who apparently will lick the jam off toast if you put it down and forget to watch it. Lucky for Bob, Eric didn't see that.

The rest of the day passed quickly. Eric went into the office in the morning but came back in the afternoon and we took a trip out to Cornwall Park to see if any baby lambs had been born yet. There were lots there and they were very cute. Well, I thought they were. Amelia just gazed into the distance and told me the story of Jack and the special eggs and how he got eaten by a T. Rex. Felicia just ran around in a circle while Eric tried to catch her, while avoiding the sheep poo and muttering something about 'why couldn't she burst into tears so we could go home?'

Pretty standard outing for us.

But the evening was a non-standard outing, in that it was a proper grown-up date in honour of Eric's birthday. The kids went to Judith and Calvin's, we went to Molten.

We started off with glasses of bubbly and I raised my glass to Eric. "Happy birthday" I said.

"Thank-you" he replied, clinking glasses with me.

"Wow. Twenty-nine. I can't even remember twenty-nine for some reason. I guess it's one of those weird in-between birthdays. Anyway, next year's the big one. We'll have to do something special."

"Yeah. Well this is pretty special."

"It is. I love it when people cook for me."

"I cooked last night" Eric said, pretending to be indignant.

"Well, yeah. You did. But I suspect the chicken here didn't come frozen and already crumbed."

"Humph. You just don't appreciate my cuisine."

"No, I do. Of course I do. I just like, um, eating out too." I looked over at Eric, but he was smiling so I didn't think he was too worried.

We placed our orders and chatted through the entrees (which Eric still tried to insist were really appetisers. They really weren't). About half-way through the main courses I went for a bit of reassurance.

"So, um, was your present OK?" I asked.

"Yeah, the frame's great. I set it up this morning, but I just have to put some more photos on it. The test ones were OK though."

"OK. Well that's good. I didn't know what to get you. You're so hard to buy for!"

Eric shrugged. "I'm happy with most stuff."

"I know. But I wanted to get you something, I don't know. Special. It's your first birthday since we met."

"Yeah I guess."

"And I like your birthday, because now I'm back to being only 6 years older rather than 7 years!" OK, that got me a bit of a dirty look from Eric. He really didn't like the age thing. "So yeah, anyway. I tried to think of what you'd really want. But I had zero ideas and you wouldn't tell me a thing."

Eric looked over at me and leaned forward on the table. "Well, there is one thing I'd really like, Sookie" he said quite seriously, and with a serious amount of eye-contact. "I've been thinking about it for a while."

"What?" I asked, curious about what fantasy he wanted to re-enact this time. We did have the house to ourselves tonight of course.

Eric just stared into my eyes for a few seconds, slightly longer perhaps than was comfortable. "A baby" he said finally.

And then I said the first thing that came into my head. "Absolutely not."

**Thanks for reading!**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N I won't stop to chat, I'll just get on with it!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

As soon as I heard Sookie say 'absolutely not' I realised I'd fucked up. In a fucking major way. But there wasn't a good way to back out of it now; I'd have to press on.

"Why not?" I asked.

Sookie bit her lip and frowned. "Well, I just think it's a bit…soon, don't you?"

"Obviously not. I think it would be perfect."

Sookie just made a phfft noise. "Nothing's perfect" she muttered. "But this wouldn't be…prudent. Now's not the right time."

OK, this was not the response I expected. When she'd been going on and fucking on about how she'd wanted to get me something special, I thought this was it. That this was the special thing she could get me. Well, we could do together.

I loved Amelia and Felicia, I really did. But over the last ten months I'd discovered that I really, really loved being a dad. And I just, I could just see Sookie with a baby. And despite what Sookie thought it would be perfect, well, as near to perfect as anyone gets.

But she just didn't fucking see it my way. I wasn't sure she ever fucking did about anything.

I sat back in the chair. "Fuck, Sookie. Where has being prudent ever got you in the past?"

She looked angry now. "Don't you bring my past into this, Eric! This is not about anything that went before; this is about us, now. Let's keep it to that."

"Well, you're the one who fucking spent ages persuading me we didn't need to get married because you followed the safe route before. You went with prudent, and fucked up your life in the process, so don't tell me that prudent is all it's fucking cracked up to be!" Deep down I was aware that not only we were wandering off topic, but we were headed into some very dangerous ground. But I was so fucking angry and pissed off and, well, hurt that I didn't fucking care anymore.

"Look Eric, before you decide to drag up every little mistake I've ever made, just fucking back off. I'm not saying no, I'm just saying not now. Fuck, this time last year I didn't even know you. And everything happened so fucking fast that maybe it's not a bad idea to just slow down. We don't have to do everything in a year. That's just ridiculous."

"Ridiculous? What's fucking ridiculous?"

"Trying to rush things. I know that you have all these…these…ideas about what you want. And sometimes it's really hard not to get swept up in them. You're kind of overpowering." She paused and looked at me, perhaps waiting for agreement. Well I didn't fucking think I was so I really wasn't going to agree to that at all.

If anything she was just being plain pig-headed about the whole thing.

Sookie sighed. "So this time, I'm just saying not now. Someday, but not now. Let's just get the ceremony out of the way. Enjoy summer. Fuck, we've both got businesses that we're only just getting up and running."

"So, you won't have a baby because of your job?"

"Eric! Don't put words in my mouth!"

"Well, fuck, Sookie. I just don't get it. What's the point in waiting? Felicia's growing up and…yeah, fuck. I just don't see the point in waiting. We don't have to be on anyone else's timetable except our own."

"Well see there you go. We don't, do we? But I'd like some fucking say-so into what the timetable is." Sookie grabbed her glass and took a sip of wine and we glared at each other for a bit while continuing to eat our dinners. Mine pretty much tasted like shit now.

After a few minutes of heavy silence Sookie put her knife and fork down. "You think I'm getting too old to have kids, don't you?"

"What?"

"You think I'm getting old. That I'm past it. That if we don't race to have a baby now my eggs will dry up and you'll miss out. That's it, isn't it?" Fuck, I had seen some stuff on the internet which suggested that women's fertility did drop at 35, but I wasn't going to say that to Sookie at this point.

"No, that's not fucking it and you know it. If anything it's like you think I'm too fucking young to have a baby. All that shit about how you're now only 6 years older than me. Fuck." I couldn't think what else to say, so I went back to eating.

"Oh, Eric. You know that's not true. If it was I wouldn't be marrying you and you certainly wouldn't be step-dad to the kids I do have. You're just trying to say I'm making excuses because you know I'm right. It's too soon. It just is." Satisfied she'd made her point, Sookie picked her cutlery back up. I threw mine down.

"The world does not fucking revolve around you Sookie. How come you get the final say on everything, tell me that? How come it's you who decides we have a civil union? How come you get to decide on the baby thing?"

Sookie looked shocked. "Because I'm the one who has to carry a baby Eric! What did you think I was, your own personal brood mare?"

"No, but I thought you actually wanted to fucking have kids with me. You said you did. You've always said you wanted more kids. So why are you saying you don't now?"

"That's not what I'm saying and you know it! I'm just saying not now. But your head is too far up your fucking arse to hear what anyone else is saying, isn't it? God, you're infuriating!"

"Yeah, you can fucking talk" I muttered.

I was vaguely aware that we'd attracted the attention of a few of the other people dining. Molten was a pretty small restaurant and it was hard not to notice the couple having the rather vicious fight in the corner. I guess we were providing the entertainment for a lot of really bored couples tonight, probably it saved them talking to each other.

And now Sookie and I really weren't talking to each other either. Not at all. We finished the meal in silence and then Sookie made a great point of looking around the room, checking out the floral arrangement, re-arranging her cutlery and folding and re-folding her napkin. She wouldn't make eye contact with me.

The waitress came over, looking a bit nervous. "Um, can I get you anything else?" she asked, timidly.

"Just the check" I said. She blinked a few times and looked unsure.

"The bill. He means the bill" Sookie added for her benefit, before she scuttled off.

"Fuck, Sookie. I think she got what I meant. You don't have to speak for me all the fucking time."

"I was just trying to help Eric. Fuck, you're in a total mood now, aren't you?"

"Well, what the fuck did you expect? This was supposed to be a celebration, and now it's all gone to shit."

Sookie looked defiant. "I don't see how you can blame that on me, Eric. I'm not the one who brought the whole baby thing up."

"Well I thought you were the one who wanted to do something special for me. I didn't realise I was being that fucking stupid in thinking that you actually meant what you said."

"Having a baby, Eric, is not about me doing something special for you. It's about having a child that we love, and nurture and who, I don't know, who brings us closer together. Fat fucking chance of that happening now."

Yeah, she was fucking right. We couldn't have been further apart if we tried.

The waitress brought the check and I handed over my card and waited for her to come back with it. Neither of us spoke. When we left and walked to the car the silence was a roaring great ocean between us.

But I fucking wasn't going to try to cross it first. Sookie was now so pissed off that nothing would work. It had all gone to shit. I fucking hated my birthday. This was the worst birthday I'd ever had, and that included the one where I'd found Dad half-naked in a pile of his own vomit and I spent the rest of the night sitting with him to make sure he didn't die on me or anything.

Even that was more bearable than this day.

We got home and I couldn't look at Sookie anymore. I took off to the spare room to just get some space. I just wasn't sure how much space was going to make this OK again.

I was fucking worried that it was more space than I was prepared to give her. That my days here were numbered and that I'd finally fucked everything up beyond repair.

I guess everything has to come to an end eventually.

SPOV

I just didn't get where this baby stuff had suddenly appeared from. I mean, we'd talked about kids vaguely. Or maybe I'd said a couple of times that I wanted more kids one day, but all of sudden there it was. Eric wanted a baby. Now.

The whole thing just, well, terrified me. I was worried that he only wanted me because I'd have his babies; I was worried that he wouldn't want me if I said no. I was worried that if we had a baby he'd love it more than Amelia and Felicia. I was worried that if I didn't he'd just bugger off back to the States.

The little voice in my head, the one who's always out to hurt me the most, told me that of course he was going to leave now. It had always been on the cards, it had just taken longer than I'd first thought.

But everything has to come to an end eventually.

And from the way Eric had hidden himself away in the study when we'd come home, well. It didn't look good. He obviously didn't want to be around me anymore. I wouldn't give him what he wanted so I was just…I was just disposable.

He wasn't like he couldn't find someone else to have a baby with, after all.

I went to the bathroom and got ready for bed, waiting to see what happened next. I could hear the TV switch on in the living room. So I guess Eric avoiding me was what happened next.

I should have tried to sleep, but I couldn't. So I sat in bed and read my book, which just made me a bit sad because my nice romance novel, or little book of porn if you listened to Eric, just seemed a bit depressing tonight. It was never like that in real life. The hero didn't suddenly appear after you'd hidden a pregnancy from him and sweep you up in his arms and tell you it was all OK and you'd all be a family together.

The hero demanded you give him a baby or he'd fuck off back to the States. Well, he did in my story anyway.

My story sucked. Big-time.

After an hour or so Eric appeared in the bedroom. "I've made a decision" he said.

"Oh, OK." My horrible little inner voice started to do the happy dance of the person who knew they were right.

"Yeah. I'm not going."

"What?" I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly.

"I'm not fucking going. Unless you tell me to go. If you want me to go I'm gone, but until then, I'm fucking staying."

"Well I'm not fucking telling you to go. If you want to go, then go. But don't make it all my decision. You're the one who started this, so you have to finish it."

Eric just sighed. "I don't know why you're being so difficult" he said, kind of sadly. "I just thought, well I thought maybe I could get what I wanted. Just for once." Then he turned and walked off to the bathroom.

"I thought you wanted me" I whispered. But he'd already shut the bathroom door.

I spent the night tossing and turning and not getting much sleep. I'm pretty sure Eric did the same. But he was over his side of the bed and I was over on mine and there was a huge desert of space between us.

Next morning we got up and just didn't talk. Not to say good morning, not to ask how the other was. Certainly no one was apologising.

The silence was horrible.

Eric went to get the kids back from Judith and Calvin's and their chatter and squeals at least pasted over the crack that was widening between Eric and I.

And that's how it went for the weekend. We skirted around each other, avoiding all but the most necessary of conversation. We did separate things with the kids. Eric took them to the park; I took them to the mall. He worked in the study while I played with them; I did ironing while he played with them.

We were functioning, but that was it. It was like living with Bill again.

It was truly horrible.

The kids picked up on the tension. Felicia seemed extra-clingy and Eric spent a long time sitting beside her cot and holding her hand, or letting her climb all over him. Amelia just decided to bale me up and talk about it.

"You're grumpy with Eric" she said. "That's not good. You need to say sorry."

"Oh. Well, it's not that simple really."

"Why?"

"It just isn't Amelia."

"No it's not. You say to me I shouldn't be grumpy with Felicia and I have to use a nice voice. So it's the same for you. What did he do anyway?"

"Oh, well. It's hard to explain. We just, um, have different points of view about something?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, um." This was really hard to explain to a four year old. And I didn't really want to. But there was no avoiding the fact that something was going on. "It's just. Well, he wants something and I said no. Like when you want a biscuit and I say it's too close to dinnertime. So he just um has to come around, to my point of view."

"Will he?" Amelia asked.

"I don't know sweetheart." I wanted to say that he's completely annoying and there was probably a fat fucking chance of it, but I knew better than to run down the only father she really had.

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Will he leave?"

"No." Maybe, I thought

"I remember" Amelia said.

"Remember what?"

"When he left. Before. The other daddy left and then Eric left. Eric came back, but the first one didn't. And I don't know why." Amelia looked sad. "I just wish you'd give them what they wanted."

"Amelia, honey. It's not that simple."

"Why not? Why is it hard? Why, Mummy? Why?"

"Because it is. And that's all I can tell you. We just…it's something Eric and I need to sort out ourselves."

"Well sort it then. Because it's no fun here anymore." With that she stomped off. She really wasn't wrong about the no fun thing. Nothing much was fun anymore.

I'd catch Eric staring at me sadly and I was torn between wanting to punch him or hug him. He looked so hurt. And I wanted to fix it. But I also knew that this was not the right time to have a baby.

And this mess kind of proved I was right.

The bed that had once seemed too small for the both of us, now fitted us plus a large gap in the middle. Bob moved himself into that space quite quickly. He, at least, wasn't unhappy about the new developments.

Eric didn't even bother shouting at him, which was a bad sign.

And so it went on and on like this. Monday Eric went into work and I took the kids to the zoo. It just brought home how much I wanted Eric back, the old Eric who wasn't pushing me to have a baby. I even missed the version with the hangover who looked scared of the kids I did have.

I really missed him a lot. He was my best friend and I wanted him back.

EPOV

It was a fucking miserable weekend. I didn't know what to say to Sookie and she just tried to avoid me as best she could. At least she hadn't fucking told me to fuck off, but still. She'd said she wanted it to be my decision. Which wasn't the same as saying she wanted me to stay.

I wasn't sure she did want me to stay. I couldn't be certain she just wasn't fucking afraid of having to explain to the kids where I'd gone.

I didn't want to leave any of them. I couldn't imagine life without them, but we'd gone this far now and I didn't know how to get back to where we'd been. I fucking missed Sookie so much, she was my best friend. She was everything.

I went to work on Monday and just sat there, for about an hour, thinking about her. Wishing it would all just go away, that we could rewind back to Friday night and none of this would have ever happened.

I think that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about the baby. Maybe this wasn't the right time. Because if it was a choice between Sookie and a baby, then I wanted Sookie.

I just didn't know if she wanted me anymore.

SPOV

I realised just how completely crappy communication in our household had become on Tuesday when I pulled into the carpark at daycare and saw that Eric's car was already there. I was tempted to turn around and drive off again and leave him to it, when I noticed him standing there, next to his car, holding Felicia and engaged in what appeared to be a shouting-match with Mickey's mother.

Well, after the last few days I'd had, I was spoiling for a fight. And she'd do.

I'd parked the car and went over to join them. Amelia was sitting inside the car staring at what was going on, and Felicia was clinging to both Eric and Sockie and looking worried. Mickey was clinging to his mother's leg, picking his nose. And his mother was currently pointing her finger angrily at Eric and saying something I couldn't quite pick up. Whatever it was, it didn't look pleasant.

"That child is an absolute fucking menace" I could hear her yell as I got closer to them. "She should be locked up."

"Locked up? Why? Because she fucking bit your precious bag of snot?" Eric hissed back.

"Yes, she's no better than an animal. I don't believe it's the first time she's done it, either. She's just…an animal." She glared at Eric and I walked up to them.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Oh you're here now" Mickey's mother said dismissively. "I suppose you're going to tell me your daughter is completely normal too, which it's quite clear she's not. Even the teachers can't control her anymore. I think she's special needs." She looked quite pleased at that last comment and Eric looked livid. I was worried he was going to pop a blood vessel.

"Yeah, I don't think so" I said quickly. "I've seen worse" I glanced pointedly at where Mickey was sitting on the asphalt poking ants with his finger. Then putting his finger in his mouth. Euw.

"What are you trying to say?" Mickey's mother said, turning to face me rather than Eric.

"That people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones for a start. I don't think either of them is completely blameless. They're toddlers."

"Yours isn't a toddler, she's a predator."

"_Mine_ has a name, and it might be nice if you used it. Felicia's not a thing. If you don't know how to treat people with respect then I'm not surprised Mickey is picking fights with other kids."

"She bit him! I hardly see how that's his fault!" Mickey's mother screeched. Mickey seemed oblivious to what was going on. Maybe he was used to her going off like this.

Eric let out an exasperated sigh. "You know that's not what the teachers were saying" he said. "There's more to it than that."

"He has teeth marks! Teeth marks!"

Eric held out Felicia's arm. "So. Felicia has fucking bruises, care to explain those?" She did, she had some nasty purple marks on her arm.

Mickey's mother wasn't buying that. "Phfft. She's just a toddler. They fall over, you know that. That is hardly Mickey's fault."

"It is if he pushed her. He's fucking lucky it wasn't worse."

"You can't prove that."

"And I don't think you can prove Felicia bit Mickey" I added. "Unless you bring in an expert to compare the marks to her teeth."

Mickey's mother rolled her eyes. "I know it was her. It's always her. I heard the teachers telling him, your boyfriend."

"Fiancé" Eric and I both said together, before I continued, "Why were you eavesdropping anyway?"

"Because I want to know who the hell is picking on my son, that's why."

"Picking on him? I hardly think standing up for herself is fucking picking on him…" I cut Eric off before he got too carried away.

"Look" I said, trying to remain calm. "I think tempers are running a bit high now, and I don't think this is going to solve anything. I don't think either of them are exactly angels and we just need to trust the teachers to deal with it and leave it at that." I looked at Eric who nodded in agreement.

Mickey's mother just looked at me. "Well, I guess that's what you get when her real dad was a drug-addict. She's probably got defective brain cells or something."

I was too shocked by that to even reply. I wasn't aware of how well-known my story was around daycare. Obviously it was really popular. The good gossip always is.

Eric stepped in though. "So what's Mickey's fucking excuse then?" he asked. "Where'd his fucking defects come from? The kid is sitting there eating ants, for fuck's sake."

"Oh he is not" she said, reaching down to Mickey and pushing his hand away from his mouth.

"You" I said, having regained my powers of speech "Are a particularly horrible woman. You've taken an incident between two toddlers at a daycare and turned it into an opportunity to do nothing but make a personal attack on me and my family. Why? Does it make you feel good? I bet it doesn't. I bet it just makes you feel worse. You're sad and you're pathetic and you're not even worth talking to. Now we're going home and I would suggest you do the same before Mickey eats that stone he just tried to put up his nose."

She glared at me, turned to pick Mickey up, which made him drop his stone and burst into tears, and then she stormed off to her car.

"Oh, she made me so angry!" I said turning to Eric. But he didn't say anything. He just grabbed me with his free arm and kissed me, hard. It was lovely. It might have been lovelier if several of the other parents weren't staring at us, God knows I'd obviously given them enough to gossip about already, but I did my best to just not care.

Eric's kisses make me forget a lot.

Felicia had stopped being scared and was now giggling because she was squished between us. She was also grabbing handfuls of my hair and pulling. That was kind of painful.

When we broke apart we just looked at each other. "I've missed you" Eric said.

"I've missed you too."

He kissed the top of my head. "You were awesome" he whispered. "When you were standing up to that horrible woman. Really fucking awesome. And really hot."

I giggled, and then I stood on tip-toe to kiss him again.

Amelia, who had been watching the whole thing with interest, decided to join in. "Euw" she said. "It's not like that in Sleeping Beauty."

"Like what?" I asked, dropping my heels back down.

"Like…you know, that. All slobbery and stuff. Princesses kiss a lot nicer than you two do. Can I have something to eat?"

I laughed and so did Eric, and then I looked through my bag to see if I had anything for her.

I felt such a sense of relief that evening when everything seemed to go back to normal. There was still the slight cloud hanging over us left over from the weekend. But mostly, I had Eric back. There was no more talk of him leaving, only talk about the kids and how horrible that woman was and what had been happening with our jobs.

There was also a certain amount of groping. I'd even missed that.

After dinner, when Eric made coffee, I suggested that we watch one of the DVDs he'd been given for his birthday. So we snuggled up in bed and watched something about the war in the Middle East. It wouldn't have been my first choice, but it made Eric happy. And at this point I really just wanted him to be happy.

When the movie was over I went to brush my teeth and when I came back Eric was sitting there looking deep in thought. My heart dropped. This wasn't good. The little bubble of normality we'd created in response to this afternoon's drama was obviously about to burst. He was going to tell me he still wanted a baby and if I wasn't going to give him one, he was out of here.

I took a deep breath and sat down next to him, and waited. He didn't look at me. After what seemed like years, he finally spoke. "I think you're right" he said quietly.

I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly. I'd had so many possibilities going round and round my head of what he might say, and that wasn't one of them. "Pardon?" I asked.

Eric sighed, and turned to look at me. He cupped the side of my face with his hand. "You're right" he said. "About the baby thing anyway. It's not the right time. Let's just…let's just put it aside for now. I mean, I still want one. With you. Badly. But that's not all I want, and it's not the only thing I want from you. I still just want you."

"Oh, Oh, Eric!" I said, throwing my arms around him.

"Hey, no lip wobbling!" he said. "You were supposed to be happy when I said you were right. I might never say it again."

"I am happy" I said, wiping my eye with my hand. "These are happy tears. I was just so worried that you didn't really want me. That it was a baby or nothing."

"No, it was never that, Sookie. It's just…I mean. I never thought I'd have a family. And you gave me one, and it's fucking fantastic and I love every minute of it. And I just wanted more of that, so I got a bit fucking carried away."

"Yeah. Yeah, I think we both got carried away with the being pissed off with each other. But I do get what you wanted. And I want a baby too. But just not now. We have years yet, Eric. Years. I promise you that."

I tilted up my face to look at Eric and he kissed me. It was slow and just incredible. And then he pushed me back on the bed and just hovered over me, tracing my face with his hand. "I love you so much, Sookie" he said.

"And I love you too. I was so broken when I thought I'd lost you."

Eric smiled. "You'd never lose me. I'm too hard to get rid of."

"Yeah, I keep feeding you. I never learn!"

"Nope. You never fucking do."

I reached up to kiss Eric again. And then I suddenly needed more. And I needed it now. I started shedding my pyjamas and watched Eric do the same. I ran my hands over his chest and down his stomach and then I circled his penis and stroked him until he was fully erect. He ran his hands over my sides brought one between my legs, where he made small circles with his fingers.

I pushed his hand away and tried to pull him on top of me. Usually it was Eric who was so keen to have sex, to prove that we were OK. But tonight it was me. I wanted him inside of me. I wanted to be surrounded by Eric. I wanted to know that he was still here and he wasn't going anywhere.

And when I got my wish it felt like coming home. I pressed my face into his chest and tried not to cry. "You OK?" he asked. I nodded. I was more than OK. I was wonderful.

"I'm good…great. Fantastic" I said. "Just don't stop. I don't want you to stop."

"OK. I can do that" Eric said.

Later on we curled up together in the dark, the bed seeming a lot cosier than it had over the weekend. "I love you, Sookie" Eric whispered into my hair.

"I love you too" I said back.

"And I love our family. And I'll love our baby, if and when we have one. I'll love all our kids because they're ours. Don't ever worry about that."

"No. I won't. And they won't be defective like Mickey."

Eric chuckled. "No they won't. Our kids will be wonderful."

"If you definition of wonderful includes Amelia's long-arse stories and bossiness and Felicia's penchant for biting and swearing."

"Yeah, wonderful all the same. They wouldn't be them without a few personality quirks."

We were silent for a moment and then I said "I wonder what personality quirks the next kid will have?"

"Yeah" said Eric. "I wonder."

And then we both finally drifted off to sleep.

**Thanks for reading!**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N So it's now really humid and hot here. Stupid Spring. And I know it's Spring because I walked into the bedroom before and a skink ran past my foot. Currently he's still hiding under the drawers until I can be bothered to go and retrieve him. Stupid skink.**

**So thanks for all the reviews, and alerts, and favourites once again. Here's the next bit!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

After the whole birthday that should never have happened, or babygate, Sookie and I went back to normal. Mostly. We were still circling around each other a bit, trying not to push anything too much in case we just crumbled apart again.

I certainly was trying not to push any fucking thing. I'd been told I'm fucking pushy. So I'd learnt my lesson.

However the lesson didn't help me when it came to planning the reception for our civil union. Apparently it was incredibly annoying when I didn't voice a definite opinion on anything. Really fucking annoying. It made Sookie stomp around and mutter under her breath about me being 'no bloody use at all!' But I wasn't quite sure what to do. I'd fucked up so badly, and it was me who fucked it up, that I was a bit gun-shy now.

And now I wasn't sure I could do anything right. It always came back to the same thing. I was fucking useless at relationships. I probably shouldn't be in one.

So we carried on until the day I came home from work and found all three of them sitting around the dining room table waiting for me.

"Yay, Eric's here! Finally!" Amelia said as I walked in the door.

"Um, OK. Yeah, I'm here" I said, putting my bag down. "What's going on?" They were all looking at me and as far as I could see there was no food.

"Sit down. It's a family meeting" Sookie said. I sat down.

"Do we have family meetings?" I asked. Because this was all news to me and I wondered if I'd missed something somewhere.

"We do now. This is the inaugural one."

"Oh, OK. Um…is there food?" I hadn't had a lot of lunch and I was fucking hungry.

"There's pizza coming" Sookie said, rolling her eyes.

"Pizza?" asked Amelia. "Can I go and wait for the pizza guy?"

"No! We're having a meeting remember?" Sookie chided her.

"Oh, yeah" Amelia looked sad. She really did like to look out the window and wait for the pizza to arrive, and now Felicia liked to join her as well. I wasn't sure sometimes that those delivery guys didn't deserve a tip for being mobbed at the door by a pair of small girls while Amelia shouted "I'm having pizza for dinner" at them.

"Right, so do you remember what you wanted to ask Eric?" Sookie asked Amelia. Amelia looked thoughtful. "No" she said. "I forget."

"Really?" asked Sookie.

"Uh-huh" Amelia replied. "Is the pizza guy here already?"

"No he isn't. Hang on everyone, Amelia and I will be back in a minute." Sookie and Amelia took off to the living room for a consultation which left me with Felicia. She'd recently graduated from the high-chair to a booster seat on a normal chair. Up until this point she'd been pushing around the pile of farm animals that were placed on the table in front of her, but now she swept them to the floor with one arm. "FarFARsway!" she yelled, and then turned to me with her hand in the air for a high-five. I obliged her before bending over to retrieve her farm, while she poked the back of my head and giggled.

"So do you know what's happening, Leesh?" I asked her.

"Nuh. Peesa? 'ungry." She looked a bit sad, like we'd forgotten to feed her.

"Me too" I agreed.

Sookie and Amelia arrived back at that point and resumed their places at the table. "Right" Sookie began. "Amelia. Do you know what you're saying now?"

Amelia looked serious. "Right" she said, in perfect imitation of Sookie. "The thing is…well. What happened was that Mum said to me, did I want to ask Eric something. And I said yes. Um, but then I forgot. So, anyway, we went to the living room and…"

"Amelia, just say it, please!" Sookie said, sounding somewhat exasperated. I just stayed quiet. I couldn't quite figure out what the hell was going on. I just hoped it was over before the pizza got here because I really didn't want to delay eating any longer than I had to.

Amelia glared at Sookie. "I was saying it. So you have to listen to me."

"FarFarSway!" interjected Felicia.

"Leesha. You have to listen to me too. Because I'm the talking-girl." Amelia folded her arms and tried to look important. "Now, the thing is that, um…oh, OK. The thing is that Mum wanted me to ask if you want to 'dopt us. That's it isn't it Mum?" Sookie nodded. "OK then. Cool. I'm going to wait for the pizza guy." She jumped off her chair and ran off.

Felicia started banging on the table "Peesa! Peesa!" she chanted, squirming around until I pushed her chair back and lifted her down so she could run off after Amelia. "Ah-la! Ah-la!" she yelled to get her sister's attention.

So that just left Sookie and I sitting at the table with me trying to work out if I'd got what Amelia was trying to say. Before I could speak though, Sookie sighed. "That wasn't how I thought it was going to go" she said.

"No. Well, um. Adopt them?" I asked, trying to just cut to the chase.

"Yeah. I thought that it would be um, well um…prudent…" Sookie trailed off, realising I guess where she'd used that before.

"Prudent?" I asked, trying to be as neutral as possible. The last thing I really wanted was for Sookie to think I was fucking picking on her, but I was trying to work out where this was all coming from.

"Well, you know. In case anything happens to me. Which hopefully it won't, but you never know. And I, for one, know that you never know, so yeah."

"Oh, OK." I wasn't sure what I expected, but she made it all sound a bit clinical or something.

"So I thought" Sookie continued, "that I'd get the kids to ask. Well, Amelia anyway. But I don't think they got it. I think they just think it's like this and will always be like this and a bit of a paper and a new word probably won't mean anything to them. Oh well. It was a nice thought."

Sookie shrugged and then started to stand up, but I put my hand on her arm and she turned to look at me. "It means something to me" I said.

"Yeah? Even though Amelia completely botched it up?"

"Well, I got the general idea of it. But I think it means more coming from you anyway."

"Oh. Oh, OK." Sookie looked thoughtful. 'Why?"

"As you said, they've just kind of accepted me. They're not really going to understand the adoption thing for a while. But I like that you want it. It just…well, I like it anyway." I did. It kind of made me feel like I was more permanent or something, that I wasn't just tied to the kids through Sookie. But I didn't want to talk about permanence or its opposite with Sookie just at the moment. Everything still felt a bit, well, fragile.

Sookie nodded. "Great, well I'm glad you want to. I'll have to figure out how we do it, but I don't think it's a big thing." She stood up and headed into the kitchen to start pulling out plates and glasses.

"So, um. Why now?" I asked. "Why today?"

"Oh. You didn't realise? It's October. It's been a year. Since I started that contract. And we met."

Fuck. I hadn't realised. I hadn't really kept track of that date, but I guess it was stuck there in Sookie's brain along with every other little thing she seemed to keep a track of. Was I supposed to have done something to mark the occasion? I wasn't sure what.

"Oh, right" I said in the end. "No, I hadn't really thought. Fuck, has it really been a year already?"

"Yep. Definitely. I remember the date because of all the organisation that went into just getting to that point. Finding somewhere to park Felicia four days a week was not easy."

"OK. Well, happy first-meeting day then." I was going to go over to kiss her but there was a knock at the door and Amelia sprinted in yelling "The pizza guy's here! The pizza guy's here!" Then she turned to me and said very seriously "But don't tip him, Eric!"

"Yeah, fine." I looked over at Sookie who was trying not to laugh. Yeah, she didn't mind Amelia imitating her when it was directed at me. As soon as Amelia turned on Sookie she lost all sense of humour completely.

I grabbed my wallet out of my bag and went to rescue the poor delivery guy who was stuck outside with Felicia yelling "FarFarSway peesa!" at him through the door. I seriously suspected that they knew our house not just because I tipped them.

Dinner was noisy and messy as usual. Amelia had a whole list of new stories to tell us and Felicia just wanted me to give her some of my pizza. But there was chilli on the slices I was eating which she wasn't going to like at all, so there was a lot of yelling and arm-waving.

And when she threw her cup on the floor and I bent over to pick it up there was some food stealing as well. Apparently Felicia doesn't mind chilli all that much. She did spit some pizza out, but ate most of it. Having her sitting at the table with us was a bit of a nightmare. I'm not sure it was having the desired effect of really teaching her how to eat nicely with others.

Amelia just decided to lecture Felicia on being good but Felicia seemed oblivious.

After dinner it was a struggle to get them into the bath. Somehow having the pizza had given them the idea that this was a special night and they were a fucking handful. Amelia in particular, decided to be defiantly disobedient until Sookie finally lost her cool and yelled at her, at which point Amelia burst into tears and Sookie looked like she might too. I had to separate the pair of them and remind Amelia just what good behaviour was, which led to more tears but at least now she was clinging to Sookie and promising to be a good girl from now on in between sobs.

So at that point I could concentrate on trying to stop Felicia running round the house rather than sitting down and waiting for a story. Unfortunately, she's started to figure out that if she just ran in circles it's easier for me to wait and catch her as she comes past so she was getting fucking sneaky, and she'd either take weird detours or just hide, meaning you had to check under the beds and in the closets in order to track her down.

When the pair of them were finally in bed and all was quiet, I made coffee and took it into the living room to sit with Sookie. "Thanks" she said as I passed her cup to her.

"Yeah, no problem."

Sookie sighed, and took a sip of her coffee before saying "It didn't quite go like I planned it tonight."

"What? The pizza. Yeah, they went a bit feral after that."

"No, well. That as well. You'd think they could just appreciate the treat without going all stupid. And then Amelia! God, I felt like the worst mother ever. She just…she winds me up like no one else can. But no, I meant about the whole adoption thing. It was meant to be something special, for you. Because you've been a bit…sad or something. Since your birthday."

"I'm not sad" I said. At least I didn't think I'd been sad. Worried about a lot of things, but not sad.

"Yeah, you've been, um, off anyway. I missed the you that's always you."

"I just…well, that whole fight, it threw me a bit, I guess. I felt like…I wasn't sure about…things…"

Sookie looked worried. "What? Us?"

"Um...I guess." I stared at my cup and not at Sookie. "Sometimes I have these plans…and they never fucking work out. I wondered if I should just give up on them."

Sookie reached over and grabbed my arm, and I turned to look at her. "Hey" she said. "It's OK to have some plans. Just maybe don't, I don't know…ambush me with them like that. And it's OK if we disagree. We just have to figure out a way to work through it without it turning nasty. I'm sure we can do that."

"Yeah, we can."

"And so no more getting out of making any decisions about the reception. We still need to pick the wine, so that can be your job."

"I don't fucking know anything about wine."

"Well, me either. So just pick something that's not too expensive and go with that."

"Yeah, OK."

We finished our coffee and watched some TV before switching everything off and heading to the bedroom. Sookie went into the bathroom and I had some more time to think about everything. For a night that had outwardly seemed like so many other nights, there'd been a lot going on.

I thought about the adoption, really thought about it. I felt a bit bad that Sookie thought I hadn't really 'got' the whole offer she was making.

"I do want to" I said, as she walked into the bedroom.

"Um, what? Sex?" Sookie asked.

"Oh, yeah. Well that too. No I was thinking about the adoption."

"Cool. Well it will make sense." Sookie climbed onto the bed next to me.

"Yeah…and, well it makes me feel wanted, you know. By all of you. I like that."

Sookie frowned. "Why wouldn't we want you?"

I shrugged. I knew she did, but still. It was nice when it was official. "Oh, no reason. I just…I'll like being their proper dad."

"Yeah, you are their proper dad. No one else would put up with them now! That's it, you're all they get. No replacements."

And that was what I'd needed to hear and I hadn't even known it. I wasn't Sookie's version of the skanky step-whores Dad had tried to bring home for me. I was better than that. I was their dad.

I leaned over and kissed Sookie, pushing her back against the pillows. "So that's OK then?" she asked when we broke apart.

"Yeah, that's more than OK." Then I thought of something. "Has it really been a year?"

"Yep. Definitely." Sookie laughed. "This is SO not what I thought was going to come out of taking a short-term contract on. I thought…well, I thought I'd get some money and hang out with some adults and move on."

"Yeah. I can't remember what I was thinking when I came down here. Not much really. I think I was a bit fucked-off it was so far away."

"It is a long way away. But we like that. It makes us special!" Sookie giggled.

"You are special" I said stroking her face.

"Phfft. I bet that's not what you first thought of me."

"No, I'm pretty sure I always thought you were special."

Sookie laughed. "Nice try, mate! Of course you didn't think I was special."

I don't know why she never fucking believes me when I try to tell her this stuff. "So what did you think of me then?" I asked her.

"Oh, well. I thought you were, you know, tall, American…" she glanced sideways at me, grinning.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Well, you seemed a bit…morose, if I'm honest. You seemed sad."

I thought for a moment. "Yeah, maybe I was. But you cheered me up."

"Hmmm. Because you thought I was special?"

"Yeah."

Sookie sat up straighter. "So you thought I was special from the first time you saw me?"

"Um…" I wasn't sure how to answer this. "Um, well I always knew there was something I liked about you, you know, from the first time I saw you."

"You liked my boobs, Eric. Go on, admit it." She looked at me, daring me to deny it.

I shrugged. It wasn't really news. "Yeah, I liked all of you when you emerged from under that desk. You were hot." I leaned down to whisper in her ear "I really just wanted to have sex with you there and then."

Sookie smiled. "Yeah, that would have been so awesome. What with Andre being right there and everything."

"OK, well maybe I might have taken you somewhere more secluded first."

"So, you just wanted to have sex with me?"

"I don't know that I just wanted to have sex with you. I wanted to have sex with you and then maybe talk or something. I thought about it a lot. It got me through a lot of lonely hours in that hotel room."

Sookie laughed again. "Well I bet that stopped when you found out about my kids! Jesus, didn't you realise I was older than you?"

"Um, no it didn't, and not really." Sookie had some fucking weird ideas sometimes.

"So, hang on then. You spent ages and ages thinking about having sex with me and then you followed me home?"

"Yeah, but by that stage I liked you for more than that." Shit, I really hoped this night wasn't going to disintegrate into Sookie berating me for wanting to fuck her.

"'Course you did. But go back a bit. So there you were, in that hotel room, thinking about me? About having sex with me?"

"Yeah" I said. I had no idea where this was going, but I guessed it could be interesting.

"So I was like, what? Your personal fantasy?"

"Yeah. After a while the fantasies…the ones with you in them, well they were better than the porn that was on offer there. Fuck, that got repetitive." I stopped. Fuck, was that way too much information?

"So I was starring in your own personal…porn?" Sookie crinkled her forehead, but she didn't look angry. She looked kind of thoughtful.

"I guess so. Well, you're hot so you can't blame me." Fuck, I hoped she wasn't going to blame me.

"Hmm. So what did porn-star me do then?" Sookie asked. Oh, well this could be fucking interesting.

"Well, for one thing she used to be naked a lot."

"I can be naked" Sookie said, as she started to pull off her pyjamas. It was a big improvement because they were fucking ugly pyjamas.

"So then what did she do?" Sookie asked when they were off.

"Well…" I pretended to be deep in thought. "She'd usually help me get naked as well." Sookie leaned over and helped me pull my t-shirt off, before removing my jeans and underwear as well."

"So then what?" Sookie asked, smiling at me. "Tell me what porn-star me would do."

"Um, well normally she'd say something about how big my cock is and how she was desperate to have sex with me…" Sookie was shaking her head.

"Yeah, sorry. No way am I saying that! Your ego knows no bounds, does it?"

"Well I thought it was worth a shot. I'm pretty sure porn-star you never complained."

"Yeah, possibly because she was a figment of your over-sexed imagination. So, moving on, what's next after all the ego-stroking?"

"OK, well now I stroke you." I put my hand between her legs and moved it in circles against her clit.

"Well I just hope porn-star me appreciated this" Sookie said.

"Oh, I think she did. I'm pretty sure she also appreciated this too." I slid down the bed and positioned myself between Sookie's legs, which she obligingly parted for me. I placed a hand on each of her thighs and licked her slit a few times before sucking on her clit and rolling my tongue around it.

"You were good to porn-star me" Sookie said, kind of breathlessly, while she stroked the back of my head. Then she came with a shudder. I kissed her clit gently and moved back up to look her in the face.

"So, after you'd finished showing porn-star me what you were capable of, what happened next? What position did she let you, um, take her in?" Sookie was smiling, she was obviously enjoying finding out about fantasy-Sookie, or porn-star Sookie as she kept calling it.

I crawled further up the bed so I was braced over Sookie and I looked her right in the eye. "All of them" I said.

"Go on then, show me" Sookie challenged. I fucking love challenges.

I positioned myself and thrust into her. "Oh, that feels so good" Sookie moaned. "Fuck yes" I agreed.

"Better than porn-star Sookie?" she asked.

"Fuck yes. She'd make me wear a condom and they are fucking awful things."

Sookie laughed, and then she stopped talking and just started to move with me, pushing towards her own release. When I felt her clench and shudder around me I stopped, before pulling out.

"Oh" she complained. "Don't leave."

"I'm not going anywhere. Turn over."

Sookie rolled over and I grabbed a pillow to place underneath her hips before entering her again. We stayed like this for a while, but I missed seeing Sookie's face. She was so much fucking better than any fantasy I'd ever had.

I pulled out again and moved so that I was sitting back on my heels. "Come on" I said to Sookie "Climb on."

She shuffled over and straddled my lap. These days she was nearly as confident about her body as fantasy-Sookie had been. And her body was fucking better than I'd imagined. Not necessarily more perfect…just, better. Better because it was her.

Sookie lowered herself down. "This is better" she said. "Wow, porn-star Sookie would pull out all the stops, wouldn't she?"

"Yeah, but I don't...never mind."

"What?" she asked.

"Well I don't remember this…position being part of the fantasies. Her on top maybe, but not…so close. I like this with you though. I like it when your face is right there and I can kiss you, and I can feel your heartbeat so near mine. It's fucking fantastic." I ran my hand down her back and pulled her towards me for a kiss. I loved her like this. She was amazing

"I love it too. And I love you" Sookie said. And then we didn't speak for a while, we just moved together until she came again, squirming against me in a way which sent me right over the edge.

We stayed like that for a while, before Sookie kissed me on the nose and climbed off me, before she headed off to the bathroom again. When she came back I took my turn and we climbed into bed where I pulled her against me.

"I didn't ever think it would be like this" I whispered into her hair. "When I had all those fantasies,and all those plans, I never thought there'd be more than that. That we'd be more than that. That you'd give me…everything."

"That you'd end up adopting two annoying kids?"

"Yeah, that too. It's fucking weird when you think about the past year."

"It is. It's like everything before it was a big blur of…stuff, or something."

"Well, hopefully there's even better stuff to look forward to" I said.

"I'm sure there is. 'Night. Love you."

"I love you too. Goodnight Sookie."

**Thanks for reading!**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N Yeah, it's definitely Spring here. The offering we had last night was a field-mouse which ran under the couch and had to be retrieved by my hubby. It was quite cute, with a little white tummy. But it also had a bad limp, so couldn't go very far when we put it outside. That probably explains why, when I got up this morning, it's little corpse was lying across the hallway. My cat was not popular!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

"Incoming!" I yelled out the door as Felicia sprinted off, leaving me clutching the hairbrush. She really didn't like having her hair brushed. Unfortunately her once-fine baby-fuzz had morphed into a wild halo of curls that ended up knotty no matter what we did. And she'd rather that we just didn't do anything.

"I'm on it!" Eric yelled from somewhere down the hall. I hauled myself off the floor and stood up. I could hear Felicia giggling as she ran down the hall, along with Eric saying "Leesha! You know I'm going to get you!" I could hear some more giggling from Felicia, Eric thumping down the hall and then there was a really loud shout of "Fuck!" followed by an even louder crash, at which point the walls of our poor old wooden house shook.

That really didn't sound good at all. I ran into the hallway to find Eric lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Felicia was nowhere to be seen, having taken the opportunity to escape once and for all.

"Are you OK?" I asked him as he wasn't exactly racing to get himself back on his feet.

"Yeah. But the fucking floor is fucking wet. Why is the floor FUCKING WET?"

I shrugged. I had no idea, but he was right. There were definite wet splotches everywhere.

Eric started to roll over so he could stand up, wincing as he did so. Amelia, having heard all the commotion, stuck her head out of her bedroom door. "Is he dead?" she asked.

"No" I replied, offering my hand to Eric so I could help him up. He shook his head to indicate he was OK.

"Is he bleedin'?"

"No."

"So what's the problem then?" I turned to look at her for the first time, and noticed she was carrying the teapot from her favourite tea set. Water was sloshing over the top of it.

"Amelia were you carrying water through the house?" I asked her. She looked at me and blinked a few times.

"I'm having a tea party" she said.

Eric had made it onto his knees now. "Fuck, Amelia! That was a fucking stupid idea. Why would you do that? Why?" Yeah, Eric was really pissed and it was hard to blame him.

And Amelia wasn't that great at being blamed anyway. She tended towards the prickly and defensive. "DON'T YELL AT ME!" she yelled at Eric, before bursting into tears and going back into her room, sloshing more water on the floor in the process.

Shit. Now I was torn about who I was supposed to be dealing with. It wasn't often that Eric and Amelia fell out this way, normally it was a case of Amelia and I having a set-to and Eric intervening. I wasn't sure what to do. And there was water on the floor.

In the end I went to the linen cupboard and grabbed a towel and quickly wiped the worst bits on the floor before handing it to Eric who still looked really grumpy. Then I went into Amelia's room. Sure enough her little table was covered with a tea set and a fair amount of split water and she was lying on the bed crying.

"Hey" I said.

"I'm so SAD!" Amelia sobbed. "It's not fair. Eric yelled at me."

"Well, he was upset. He had a really nasty fall. He didn't know there was water on the floor. You should have let me know so I could help you clean it up."

"I didn't know either! It's not my fault!"

"Well, it is kind of. You have to be careful with stuff like that. You know how to be careful."

Amelia sniffed loudly and turned to face me. "I'm just little" she said, huffily.

"You're big enough to know better, Amelia. You really are." Amelia didn't say anything to that. "Come on" I said. "I think you need to say sorry to Eric."

"He needs to say sorry to me" Amelia said, but without a lot of conviction.

"Just go and say sorry, please, and then we can all finish getting ready. We need to clean up in here and you need your hair brushed again." We had a busy day and I needed to get everyone out the door soon.

"Fine" Amelia huffed, like she was doing me the biggest favour ever. She stomped off out of her room and I followed suit, thinking I'd get a bucket to empty all the water into.

I could hear Amelia say a very grumpy "Sorry, Eric" and Eric reply with a very grumpy "It's OK. Just don't do it again." It was going to be a fun trip to Piha today.

As I walked down the hallway Felicia was stationed near Eric watching him mop up. "Daddy's ouchy" she commented to me.

"Are you OK?" I asked him.

"I'll live. But my back is fucking sore. I think I might be a bit bruised."

"Do you want some ice?"

"No, let's just get ready and get going. This morning can't get any worse."

Eric stood up and went to put the towel in the washing machine. Felicia stood up to follow him and the fact that the back of her pants were now soaking showed she'd been doing her own bit to mop up the water. Terrific, now she needed a change of clothes.

Eventually we managed to get everyone in a fit state to get out the door. Amelia was grumpy when I brushed her hair again. A lot of what she was feeling was guilt, but typically she just decided to blame everyone else instead and insist she was the one hard done-by.

Only time was going to tell me if that was because she was four or because of who her biological father was.

I had the bags packed and in the car and I was just waiting on Eric. I could hear him in the bathroom. I could also hear Felicia in there singing him a rather tuneless song she'd made up. Yeah, there was no privacy around here anymore. Felicia was probably keeping an eye on Eric to make sure he didn't fall over again. Or maybe she was hoping he was. It was hard to tell.

The pair of them emerged and I asked Eric how his back was. He lifted up his t-shirt to show a patch on his hip that was definitely going to bruise.

"Hang on" I said, "I'll just put some arnica on it." I got the tube of cream and applied it while Eric tried to remain stoic. Amelia slunk into the room and Felicia went wandering over to her and said "Ah-la, Daddy's ouchy. See?"

Amelia didn't really look, but just muttered "He's not bleedin'." She and Eric didn't acknowledge each other at all. Terrific.

As I suspected the trip out to Piha was a bit tense. Well it was in the front seats. Eric was grumpy and I didn't know what to do to make it better. Unfortunately, Amelia was four and if she didn't want to feel bad she wasn't going to. So I left him concentrating on driving the winding road out to Piha.

It was pretty much back to normal in the back seat. Amelia was making up a quiz for Felicia which Felicia was doing really badly at. Amelia had one of Felicia's books open and would say something like "So how many cows are there in the field, 2 or 5 or 23?" And then Felicia would go "Cow! Moo Moo!", and Amelia would pretend to turn to the back of the book and go "No, it's 5. So now you've got zero and I've got 6. Next question…"

I knew what the origin of this game was, though. Eric and I liked to do the quiz in the New Zealand Herald every Saturday morning. It got a bit competitive. And that was even with me having the advantage over Eric when it came to the New Zealand questions, although I regretted buying him that book on New Zealand history now. I loved quizzes though; they were the best outlet for all the useless facts that roamed around my brain. And most of the time it was fun despite the bickering over whether the answer given in the paper was in fact correct.

It was nice to have someone to do the quiz with again. Because it was something I'd done with Bill as well, although I tried not to dwell on that fact too much. For all their differences though, neither Bill nor Eric liked losing to me. I liked winning though, so maybe I was going to have to borrow that book off Eric. When he wasn't looking.

EPOV

Sitting in the car all the way out to Piha did not make the large bump on my hip feel any better. Fuck, that had been a nasty landing when I'd gone down in the hallway. I just hadn't expected to have my feet go out from under me like that. Trip over something, yes, that happened all the fucking time in our house, but I usually didn't encounter mini-floods while running through the place.

It would have been nice of course if Amelia had been a little bit more fucking apologetic about the whole thing. I knew she was only four and didn't really think these things through, but, fuck, sometimes I don't think they realise I'm not indestructible.

So we drove out to Piha and I tried not to be too fucking grumpy about the whole thing, but really, it was probably just better that I keep my mouth shut for now. It didn't seem to bother Amelia though. She was chattering away as usual in the back, making up some quiz that poor Felicia had no chance of winning. Amelia liked winning as much as Sookie did.

We had two things we had to get through today, we were going to see that weird celebrant woman and then we had to go and talk to the people who owned the lodge where we were having the reception. It sounded simple enough, but of course it all had to be accomplished with two small girls in tow and with a large chunk of time in between the two meetings which we had to fill in.

As we drove further and further out of Auckland I wondered if it was such a good idea having the ceremony all the way out here. It had been my idea, when Sookie had said that something less formal might be good. I thought of our weekend out there last year and how fucking amazing it had been to spend that time with her and I suggested Piha. Sookie had agreed, possibly because she felt she'd railroaded me into the whole civil union instead of a marriage thing and she wanted me to get my way on something.

Of course I had thought about Waiheke as well, but wasn't sure whether or not Sookie going over on the ferry was such a great idea. She'd managed to work herself up to actually sit on deck with me on the way back from our couple of nights over there, but I didn't want to risk her calling the civil union off because she'd decided to stay at the ferry terminal in Auckland.

So Piha it was.

We got to the address that Octavia-woman had given us, and Sookie and I had a small discussion over whether or not it was actually the right place. There didn't seem to be a number anywhere, and I wasn't sure what we were looking at was actually a driveway.

Sookie checked the directions she had written down. "This has to be it. She said go to the end of the road and look for the hydrangeas. There's the hydrangeas." She pointed to a couple of bushes.

"Well, if you're sure…" I said. I had no fucking clue whether they were hydrangeas or not, although I suspected that these weren't the only hydrangeas in Piha. I started to drive up the track that led away from the flowers in question.

The track went on for a bit, and stopped really even being a track and started being just some ruts in the ground, and then eventually there was a shack in a clearing. I guess we were here then.

Sookie jumped out and let the kids out of the car. They were desperate to get out and run around. I wasn't sure this was the kind of place they could really do that though. There was a lot of…old junk lying around. A fuck-load of it.

We heard a voice say "Hi!" and Octavia appeared in the doorway of the shack, trailing huge fucking amounts of material behind her. "You found me OK, then?"

"Yeah, no problem" Sookie said, glancing in my direction. I don't know why everyone fucking expected me to know what hydrangeas looked like. If she'd planted roses I might have had more of a shot.

"Well, come in, come in" Octavia said and we all trooped inside. Amelia and Felicia were looking around trying to figure out if this was a place where they were allowed to run around or not. It didn't exactly look like a nice, tidy house where they couldn't touch anything, but Sookie had been lecturing them on the importance of being on their best behaviour so they were a bit unsure.

"Aren't you two just so sweet?" Octavia cooed to them.

"I am" agreed Amelia. "You smell funny." Felicia just looked at her and held onto Sockie in case someone might rip her out of her grasp.

"Well" said Octavia. "How would you two like to go and feed the ducks at the bottom of the garden while I talk to mummy and daddy?"

Amelia's face lit up for the first time all morning. "Ducks! Yeah, I want to feed the ducks!"

"Quack, Quack!" Felicia shouted.

"No, I don't think so" Sookie said, over the top of them. Yeah, there was too much junk around here.

"Oh?" Octavia looked confused.

"Mmm. I don't want them falling into the creek and drowning" Sookie murmured.

"Oh, well OK then. Let's get started." Octavia didn't look too annoyed but Amelia's face looked thunderous. She was not happy at all. I just hope she didn't decide to throw a tantrum, but she was obviously saving it up for later as she sat in the corner of the living room where Sookie asked her to and took out her colouring in. Felicia had some blocks, although she soon rejected them for some crayons as well. Now all we had to do was get through this as quickly as possible.

"So have you given much thought to the form you'd like the ceremony to take?" Octavia asked, after we'd sat on the couch and refused her offer of something to drink. I looked over at Sookie to see what our answer was.

"Um, not really. We've um…well, there's been a lot going on" Sookie said, biting her lip.

"OK, well I guess what I'll do is give you a few examples of what I normally say. Hang on there while I get my book." Octavia scuttled off and Sookie sighed and looked out the window. Amelia looked over at us and muttered "I wanted to feed the ducks."

"Not now, Amelia" I said to her, which just made her glare at me.

Octavia came back with a book full of various forms of services. Sookie and I started flipping through it, but after reading the first couple they all started to sound a bit the same. I had no fucking clue how you picked one. Sookie though kept going through them all, not so much reading as studying each page. She flipped all the way through and then went back again, looking at a couple of the pages. In the end she made her selection. "This one" she said, pointing and handing the book back to Octavia.

"OK, you're both sure on that?" Octavia said, taking the book off her and looking at me.

"Yep" I said. If that's what Sookie had chosen it couldn't be that bad.

"So, then do you want to add anything else in after that, like maybe a candle ceremony?"

I looked at Sookie. She shook her head before saying "No. No, we don't."

"Um, OK" Octavia continued. "Well lots of the couples I deal with like to add in their own touches, a personal kind of ceremony. If not lighting a candle then perhaps handing something over, something symbolic that means something to the both of you? As a token of affection and acceptance." She looked at us expectantly.

"No. That's definitely not us. We're not handing anything over; we just want a simple ceremony. You know, with words." Sookie said. I just nodded. I didn't really fucking care, the quicker the whole thing was the better really.

"What about, um, the girls?" Octavia asked.

"What about them?" I said.

"Well, do you want them mentioned in the ceremony?" This time Sookie looked at me. I guess this was my call then.

"Yep. I think we should" I said, and Sookie didn't contradict me.

"OK, well then finally it's just your vows. Have you written those?"

Sookie looked down at the ground. "No" she confessed, before looking at me.

"No" I said as well. Octavia looked a bit disappointed. I couldn't shake the feeling we were failing her class somewhere.

"Well, you know, the vows are all about you. About what's important to you. So it's really something you two need to work out, but I do have some examples here that I can give you to work from…" she scuttled off again and came back with another book from which she extracted a few photo-copied pages and handed them to Sookie. "I really encourage you to take the time to write them yourselves though; you'll be surprised with what you can come up with when you put your mind to it."

Sookie said "Mmm" and I just nodded in agreement. This vows thing was fucking hard. I kind of agreed with Sookie that the old-fashioned ones kind of worked. Except I suspected that Sookie wasn't going to promise anything about obeying. So that was something I knew wouldn't be in hers. As for what was going to be in mine, I had no fucking clue. I kept putting it off and hoping for the best. And it appeared Sookie was doing the same.

We were going to screwed at this rate.

We went over a few more minor details with Octavia and then she kindly offered to escort us all down to see the ducks in the creek at the bottom of her garden. Sookie had been right, sending two small girls down here unsupervised would have been a fucking recipe for disaster, but I think Amelia still wanted to disagree with her on that point.

As we were driving away from Octavia's I turned to Sookie. "Well that wasn't so bad."

"Mmm. But the vows thing is difficult. It's just…a lot of pressure to come up with something good, you know?"

"I do, I really fucking do."

We had some time to kill until the next appointment so we drove down to the beach and went for a walk along the sand. Felicia of course made a bee-line for the surf and had to be hauled back several times before she got too wet. No way was it warm enough for swimming yet.

We set up the picnic rug by the sand-dunes and I went to the small shop on the beach to buy fish and chips for everyone. When I got back Amelia was trying to talk Sookie into taking her for a swim. "Of course you can't go Amelia" Sookie said, before the food distracted everyone for a bit.

After lunch I helped Felicia start on a sand-castle. She mostly just wanted to move the sand around, and maybe eat some. Sookie watched us and just commented that she was glad she had a change of clothes for Felicia in the car. Amelia was sitting and sulking about the swim.

In the end Amelia decided to try me instead. She came over to me and stood beside me. "Eric" she said "Can I go for a swim?"

"No. I'm pretty sure your mom said no, and anyway, we don't have your swimsuit."

"Mum. And if you said yes, that would be OK."

"But I'm saying no too. There's no way anyone is going for a swim today."

"But we're at the beach! We go for swims at the beach! That's the rules!"

"No it's not. And I'm saying no. Just listen to what I'm saying, Amelia."

And then she lost it. "You are horrible!" she shouted. "You're mean and all you do is yell at me. I don't like you!" With that she started stomping off down the beach. Fuck, she was in a mood today and I didn't know what we could do about it.

SPOV

Amelia and Eric weren't getting on any better than they had this morning. They warned you about the terrible twos, but no one ever said it can get worse when they're three and four. Amelia was just so defiant these days. While I loved that she was never going to be a push-over, I did just wish she wouldn't lash out at us.

And I really didn't like that she kept falling out with Eric. Poor Eric, he just sat there looking a bit bewildered about the whole thing. I shuffled over on the picnic rug until I was nearer to him and I could rub his back. "Don't mind her" I said.

He frowned. "But I wasn't yelling, that time, was I?"

"No, you yelled this morning, but that was understandable. And you don't yell all that much. I don't think I'd heard you really yell for a while before that. Not since Felicia dropped your keys in the toilet after Amelia had forgotten to flush it. I think she's feeling a bit guilty about the incident with the water this morning and just doesn't want to admit she's wrong."

"Well she's got a fucking weird way of showing guilt" Eric muttered.

"Yeah, but she's four. Hopefully she'll get better with age."

"I guess." Eric still seemed grumpy, but he went back to helping Felicia with their big pile of sand. I watched Amelia stomp off down the beach, making sure she didn't get into any trouble, or start heading out to sea. Mostly though, she was breaking up the biscuits she'd still had in her hand and was throwing chunks to the seagulls.

In between watching Amelia I watched the other people on the beach. There were the usual mix of surfers and people with dogs. Piha was one of the few places you could still let your dog off the leash and it was popular with for that. There were a couple of Great Danes wandering around, looking huge, and a particularly entertaining Labrador who spent ages trying to work out how to hold both his tennis balls in his mouth at once and his frustration was palpable.

I must have spent a bit too long watching the Labrador though because I realised that I had lost sight of Amelia. It took me a while to spot her again. When I did I realised that the Great Danes had discovered Amelia had food and had gone over to investigate what she had. I also realised that there weren't two Great Danes, there were four. Who the hell owns four Great Danes?

They were probably lovely dogs, but they were big. Really big. Bigger than Amelia. And as much as she loved animals she looked like these ones scared her. "Um, Eric…" I said, as I started to stand up and walk towards Amelia, but before I could say anything else Amelia herself started to yell for help. "Mum!" she yelled. "Mum! Mummy!" And then as one of the dogs put it's huge nose right in front of her face she let out a particularly piercing cry of "Daddy!"

Eric took off towards Amelia leaving a perplexed looking Felicia to just watch him go. As he reached Amelia, the Great Dane's owners got there too, and they started to haul them back by their collars. Eric scooped Amelia out of the middle of the crowd of dogs and she clung to him as hard as she could, burying her face in his neck. I could see Eric exchanging fairly heated words with the owner who seemed to be quite apologetic. I guessed the dogs weren't going to eat Amelia but still, they were big dogs and there were a lot of them and it was a bit overwhelming for a little girl.

Eric carried Amelia back to the picnic rug and sat down with her still clinging to him like her life depended on it. "The doggies were scary" she said, looking at me.

"Yeah, they were big" I said. "I think they were just over-friendly though."

Amelia sniffed. "You say I'm over-friendly, but I don't try to eat people's biscuits."

I patted her on the head. "Well, you're not a Great Dane" I said.

She sat up a bit and looked at Eric. "Eric saved me" she said.

"Yep" I agreed.

"Even though I was mean to him." She looked at the ground. "I'm sorry I was mean to you" she said.

"That's OK, Ames" Eric said. "I'll always save you though, you know. If you yell for me."

"Yeah. I want to build a sand-castle now."

"OK" Eric said, moving his arms away from Amelia. She climbed off his lap and went to join Felicia in the sand.

Eric looked at me. "Do you think she realised?" he asked. "That she yelled daddy?"

"Don't know. She was really stressed." I didn't know.

"Do…do you think she was actually yelling for me?"

I looked at Eric. "I do. Listen to what she's telling Felicia." We were so used to tuning her out that we didn't hear half of what she said these days but I'd picked up something just then. Eric turned his head to where the pair of them were sitting.

"I nearly got eaten!" Amelia was saying. "By a monster-dog. Well, four monster-dogs. They're like…dragons. But they slobber. But it's OK. Daddy got me. He wouldn't let me get eaten. He won't let you get eaten either. Unless you put his keys in the toilet again. That's not a good thing to do, Leesha. You need to be a good girl…"

I looked at Eric and he looked at me, but we didn't say anything. We just sat there for a bit longer until it was time to get everyone changed and back in the car so we could go and see the people at the lodge. Hopefully we could get through that part of the day without anyone falling over or nearly being eaten by a Great Dane.

Or anyone else asking me if I'd written my vows. Now that was something scary to think about.

**Thanks for reading!**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N Just a bit of fluff today! Thanks for all the love you're showing this story!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Trying to get everyone in the car to go out always took a while. Felicia would run off and Amelia would get distracted and decide that she needed to go back inside and grab a doll, or I'd find her changing her outfit, or she'd just forget she was going and get involved in a new game. This morning's trip to the mall at Sylvia Park wasn't proving to be any easier, and for some reason, I was doing it all alone because I'd lost Eric. Usually, he was pretty easy to locate, but he didn't seem to be anywhere in the house at the moment. Well, not in the places I'd been looking when I was trying to find Felicia, anyway.

I had Felicia on my hip, which meant she was trying to jump out of my arms and had arched her body away from mine, which didn't really help me get her out the door. "Come ON, Amelia!" I yelled.

Amelia appeared from her bedroom, she was wearing about five plastic bracelets on each wrist and three necklaces. I guess the accessorising was what had taken the time. She sighed. "You're being bossy, Daddy says bossy isn't good." She stood there with her hands on her hips.

"He means you, not me!" I said. Well, I thought he did. It felt a bit mean saying that to a little girl, too, but really, he did. And I wasn't being bossy. And it's called mothering, not bossiness.

Amelia just sighed, suggesting that she knew better and started to follow me down the hall. It was a bit of an effort to fit through the front door because Felicia had contorted so completely that we had to go through sideways, but we got out the door and I shut it behind us, before walking towards the car, balancing my armful of squirmy child.

As we all reached the car I finally spotted Eric, he was standing by the letterbox talking to Andy. It was nice they'd had that shared wall built, I thought, so they could both stand there propping it up. I was going to say something, but Felicia, having also spied Eric, folded herself in half abruptly and nearly caused me to fall over on top of her.

I was struggling to get Felicia safely on the ground on her feet when a bit of the Eric and Andy's conversation drifted over to me. "Hopefully the pink t-shirt brigade won't be too much longer" I could hear Eric say.

I had no idea who he was talking about. And then I looked down. I had my favourite t-shirt on. The pale pink one with the blue and purple butterfly on it. I loved that t-shirt.

I looked at Amelia. Her t-shirt had white and dark pink stripes with little diamante hearts placed on the front.

Felicia was wearing another hand-me-down t-shirt of course. It was candy pink with a darker pink cupcake on it and the words Sweet As! underneath.

OK then, well maybe Eric is technically correct I thought. But I didn't realise that was his name for us. I mean it wasn't like we all wore pink every day was it?

We did wear pink a lot, but I was still grumpy with him.

I opened the car door so Amelia could jump in. Felicia had disappeared off in search of Eric and was poking him in the leg so he'd pick her up. "Hi Andy!" I called. "Eric? Are you ready to go?"

He scooped up Felicia and held her upside-down, which caused a series of excited squeals to escape, and then I could hear him saying goodbye to Andy. I just got into the passenger seat feeling a bit grumpy. Pink t-shirt brigade my arse.

Eric strapped Felicia into her seat and got into his. "You OK?" he asked, probably noticing my scowl.

"Yep. Fine." I said. I didn't know how to tell him I'd heard him. And I wasn't sure why I was so grumpy about it anyway. He probably didn't mean anything by it. After all, I was sure blokes talked all kinds of shit when they were together.

But still, if we were the pink t-shirt brigade, what did that make Eric?

EPOV

I still couldn't believe how long it took for us to leave the fucking house just to go to a mall. Sookie had decided we were going to start a bit of early Christmas shopping today which sounded fucking boring, but she'd promised lunch.

She also hadn't actually suggested there was a choice about going.

When I went to put the stroller in the trunk of the car, Andy was out collecting his paper from the letterbox and I stopped to have a chat to him. Apparently Ruby had started to crawl and Riley wasn't happy at all with the development. I sympathised, and could completely understand why standing in the driveway was preferable to staying in the house listening to Riley yell about his stuff being touched.

I did point out, though, that they should probably pick up anything too small before it got eaten.

Eventually Sookie and the kids emerged from the house, I was only alerted to that fact when Felicia appeared at my feet and tried to climb me. She liked it if I held her hands so she could walk up my legs and then flip herself backwards to land on her feet again. She also liked it if I held her by the ankles and swung her around upside down.

Sookie wasn't too keen on either move, I thought, but she had at least stopped wincing every time we did them. Although this morning she was looking a bit grumpy and I didn't know why. Maybe Amelia had done something again. She was usually pretty awful at getting ready for anything and I didn't doubt there'd been words between the two of them while I was outside.

So we headed off to the large mall at Sylvia Park with Sookie staring out the window, Amelia chattering away telling a really long story, and Felicia occasionally yelling at us all to make sure we hadn't forgotten she was there too.

I wished Sookie would say something though.

We found a carpark and Sookie finally spoke up. "Right" she said, "You get the pushchair out of the boot then, and I'll release the hordes."

"See" I said cheerfully, "I know what you're saying these days when you use all those weird-ass terms. It's like I'm bilingual or something."

Sookie snorted. "Yeah. Totally like being bilingual Eric." She smiled but it wasn't a genuine smile. There was nothing I could do though until she either said what was wrong or got over it. The kids were hardly going to shut up long enough for us to have a heart to heart conversation. In the car. In the Sylvia Park car park. Better to just get on with the day.

We got about three steps inside the door and I ducked sideways to get a coffee at Starbucks thinking I'd just catch up to Sookie before she noticed, but she stopped and then Amelia doubled back and demanded a fluffy and then Sookie said she might as well have something if everyone else was, and Felicia started chanting "mishmallo, mishmallo" because that was the only part of a fluffy she liked anyway. So we ended up sitting at a table with our drinks and I could feel Sookie's annoyance that her precious shopping time was being eaten into by my stupid need to have coffee.

So I didn't exactly think her mood was getting any better.

We eventually made it to The Warehouse. I hated The Warehouse. This one was a lot bigger than one in the city I'd been to with Sookie, all that time ago when I'd thought going shopping with her might mean she'd sleep with me. But it wasn't much nicer.

Sookie perused the toys looking for presents for other people's kids while Amelia shadowed her, in the hope of getting something herself, and I pushed Felicia's stroller around so we could look at the TVs. They were pretty shitty TVs, but there wasn't a lot else to look at. With any luck if I stayed on my best behaviour I'd be allowed to look at some better shops later on.

SPOV

We'd only been there 30 seconds when Eric tried to disappear on me. I could see him stepping towards the Starbucks as soon as we set foot in the door and I had no choice but to turn back and round him up, except that all the kids decided that what was good for Eric was good for them, and then we were stuck there, having coffee, without having bought anything that was on my mental list of stuff to buy.

It was annoying, but there wasn't much I could do. I wasn't about to turn into one of those women who yell at their partners in the middle of a busy shopping centre. It's bad enough when I have to yell at the kids when they wander off, I didn't want to have to yell at Eric as well.

Still, maybe a bit of a sugar-high would help the kids feel a bit better about having to go shopping.

Unfortunately it didn't. We went to The Warehouse and Amelia just told me repeatedly what she wanted me to buy her, and couldn't be dissuaded by me suggesting she ask Santa instead. Eric pushed Felicia off somewhere but I could still hear her yelling from where I was.

Why were both my kids so loud?

After we'd finished with The Warehouse I had to drag everyone through a few more shops. In Pumpkin Patch Amelia brought me every skirt in the shop and declared that she needed it. She didn't need any of them, she needed shorts. She announced that boys wore shorts and she wasn't wearing them.

Eric waited patiently, but forgot to watch Felicia so she had half the contents of a stand of baby-clothes in the pushchair with her by the time I got back to them.

I tried to look at a couple of shops for myself. Maybe I'd buy a t-shirt that wasn't pink I thought. That wasn't a good idea because I could see the three of them outside the shop looking bored and bits of Eric's lecture to Amelia about staying where he could see her reached my ears. Not to mention the fact that Felicia was now very keen on being released from the pushchair so she could run and kept shouting "Out! Out!"

I might have been feeling a bit grumpy with Eric, but I didn't like it when he looked that stressed.

We went to Borders so I could look for a few books to use as presents and I parked the other three in the children's section. By the time I came back to tell Eric he could go for a look around he looked a bit shell-shocked and Amelia was making her way through a large stack of children's books, all of which she thought she was taking home.

Felicia was just pulling books off the shelves at random and making a huge mess.

After that I let Eric off to do his own thing. I told him we'd meet him at the pub in half an hour for some food. He sprinted into the nearest electronics shop without a backward glance.

I pushed Felicia's stroller kind of aimlessly and half-listened to Amelia chatter away as she trudged next to me. I was trying to figure out why I was still feeling a bit, well, annoyed about the whole pink t-shirt brigade comment this morning. If you looked at it objectively, it was kind of funny.

But I wasn't laughing.

Was it the fact that he was saying it behind my back that worried me? I thought about that, but it wasn't really. There were worse things he could say about me, and the kids.

I thought some more while Amelia whinged about how she was starving and she wanted her fish and chips now. Felicia took her shoe off and threw it just for something to break the boredom. I bent down to pick it up and then it hit me.

I hadn't liked it because Eric had been excluding himself from our little group. I'd spent the past year trying to make sure that he was part of the family. We'd just filled out all the paperwork for the adoption so he was dad to the kids, I'd changed my will and we were getting married, or civil unioned anyway, very soon.

So, as completely stupid as it was, I didn't like that we were the pink t-shirt brigade and he wasn't.

"Mum! Mum!" I turned to look at Amelia. "I'm boooored! When are we having lunch? I want fish and chips!"

"Chips?" Felicia asked hopefully.

"We've just got one more thing to do first" I said to them, as I pushed Felicia's pushchair into another shop, to the sound of Amelia saying "What? It's borin' in here."

EPOV

I had had a feeling that this shopping trip was a fucking stupid idea and I'd been right. The kids were bored and Sookie was intent on wandering aimlessly again. I kept asking her what the plan was but she said she had a list, in her head. That didn't seem to be anything like a plan. It just seemed to be an excuse to look around. A lot.

I enjoyed my half-hour of time alone though. It wasn't so bad if you were looking around at the interesting stuff, rather than the things Sookie wanted to look at. But I wasn't saying that. She'd been grumpy all fucking morning and I didn't want to risk making it worse.

So I went to meet her at the pub where at least there would be food and I could sit down, well, as long as we had Felicia strapped into a high chair and she wasn't running around that was. They'd grabbed a table already when I got there, and Amelia had also found the crayons they kept for entertaining kids. Felicia was absent-mindedly chewing on a green crayon, but she threw it on the ground and yelled "Daddy!" when she saw me.

That was nice. She was always pleased to see me. Sookie actually looked pleased to see me too. That was nice too, but kind of hard to figure out. I wasn't sure why being left alone with the princesses of destruction would suddenly cheer her up.

But if I wasn't stupid enough to ask any questions about why she was grumpy in the first place, I sure as fuck wasn't stupid enough to ask any questions about why it would suddenly be reversed. Sometimes, it was just best to roll with it.

I sat down and Sookie handed me a menu. "I want fish and chips" Amelia said.

"I think both of them want that" Sookie commented. "And I'll have the chicken burger."

I put the menu down and went to order at the bar, making sure I asked for my burger without the fried egg or beetroot that were listed on the menu. Fucking weird country.

When I got back to the table again Sookie looked at me. "So" she said, "I realised that something was missing from your wardrobe."

"Oh?" I had no idea what she was on about. Maybe it was something I was supposed to wear at the ceremony. I was pretty fucking happy about the fact we were getting married on a beach and that while I'd been told I wasn't allowed to wear a t-shirt and jeans, ties and jackets were apparently not a requirement. And shoes were optional.

Sookie pulled out a plastic bag from under the table and handed it over. The logo on it was from one of the shops that sold mainly surfwear. "It's a t-shirt" she announced.

I frowned. "A t-shirt?" I couldn't figure out why I needed another t-shirt. Unless perhaps she'd been through the closet when I was looking and trashed some of my existing ones. Fuck, some of those holes were nothing and nearly fucking impossible to see.

"Uh-huh. Have a look" Sookie said enigmatically, smiling at me.

I looked in the bag and thought maybe there was something in here for the girls as well. I reached in and pulled out a t-shirt. A large, pink t-shirt with some kind of design on it.

I looked at Sookie and she shrugged. "Well I heard you this morning. About the pink t-shirt brigade. And I figured you might like to join us."

Oh. Fuck. That's why she'd been annoyed. Although she didn't seem annoyed now. She was smiling like the fucking Cheshire cat.

"You want me to join you?" I asked slowly,

"Yeah. So you can feel like part of the family. Properly. Let's face it; I don't want to be part of any club that won't have you as a member as well. You're really important to me." Sookie patted my arm and smiled at me.

Well, fuck. I guess that was a challenge.

"I'll be right back" I said, taking the t-shirt and heading to the rest-room. I pulled off the tags and switched t-shirts and was back at our table just as they were bringing the food.

"Fish and chips! How did they know I wanted fish and chips?" Amelia asked, but everyone ignored her.

I turned around slowly before sitting down so Sookie could admire her purchase. I didn't really give a fuck that it was pink, but it seemed to amuse Sookie. She pressed her lips together to hold in her laughter and just said "Lovely, Eric. Really lovely."

I shrugged and sat down to eat my burger, although I had to pick the bits of beetroot out of it first. So much for my order being clear.

"Eric's got a pink t-shirt" Amelia said, turning to Sookie. "I want a pink t-shirt." Sookie just rolled her eyes.

"Eat your lunch, Amelia" I said, and she went back to drowning everything in ketchup.

SPOV

Eric took the t-shirt with good grace and even put it on then and there. It was quite a nice pink. I would have worn it. But it wasn't my size.

Eric seemed determined to brazen it out though. To tell the truth no one much seemed to look at us as we popped into the supermarket after we'd finished lunch. And if they did I don't think Eric would have cared. Me, I would have rather done anything than stand out like that. But Eric, well. Eric's Eric.

We got home from the mall and the rest of the afternoon passed like most Sunday afternoons do. The kids played and argued and ran around. I did some housework. Eric tried to work in the study and then ended up playing with the kids as well.

He kept his pink t-shirt on though.

I made spaghetti for dinner. Amelia was now calling it spaghetti and not bisgetti, which was kind of sad, as that was one of her last remaining bits of baby-talk. Still, we had Felicia who now called it gegecki, so that was OK. Maybe that was the trick? You just kept having kids so you never ran out of babies?

I wasn't sure. Two kids were a lot to cope with at times.

When the kids were in bed and we were cleaning up in the kitchen Eric looked over at me. "So do you like the t-shirt on me then?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's nice. I really like that colour."

"Of course you do."

"What's that supposed to mean, Eric?"

"Well. You do wear a lot of pink."

"Phft. It's not all I wear."

"No. Well I don't care anyway. I like you in pink." He kissed the top of my head, and went back to emptying the dishwasher.

After a few moments though he said "So did it upset you then, when I said that to Andy? It was only…well. I was just talking."

"Um. Only because I realised you weren't including yourself. It was a bit silly really." It did feel a bit silly.

"Oh. I didn't mean to. Not deliberately. I kind of like the pink t-shirt brigade. They're my pink t-shirt brigade after all."

"Yeah" I said. "We are. And you wore the shirt for me, so thank-you."

"I like the shirt. I don't really give a shit about what I wear to be honest."

"No, I had noticed that. Some of those t-shirts of yours have so many holes they really need to be put in the ragbag."

"They're fine Sookie."

"If one of them shreds while you're wearing it one day, don't blame me."

Eric grinned. "Well maybe I'll take my chances with that."

Yeah, I thought. That's all I need, Eric losing his shirt out on the street one day and getting mobbed by a bunch of women.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked me, breaking me out of my thoughts.

"Oh, um. You. With your shirt off." Might as well be honest.

"Well I can just show you that if you like." Eric pulled the t-shirt over his head.

"Ohh" I said, pretending to be sad. "Now we're not part of the same club anymore!"

"I think I can fix that" Eric said, reaching for the hem of my shirt just as I turned to run from the kitchen.

**Thanks for reading!**


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N So here's the next bit. Hope you all like it, and thanks for the reviews as always!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It was shaping up to be one of those nights where no one was getting much sleep. First off there'd been the horrible wailing noises outside. "What the fuck?" Eric had muttered.

"Catfight" I'd answered as I flew out the bedroom door and through to the family room before I opened up the glass door and stepped onto the deck. It was quite chilly out here. "Fsssst" I hissed into the night, before clapping my hands a couple of times. I didn't want to be too loud and wake up the neighbourhood.

There was some movement in the bushes at the back of the section, but I couldn't see either Bob or his partner in crime, so I turned around and went back into the house.

I got back into bed and noticed Eric had gone back to sleep. Obviously he wasn't that worried about the feline fight-club in the backyard. Yeah, that'll last until he sees the vet bills, I thought.

"Your feet are fucking freezing" he murmured as I pushed them between his calves. OK, well maybe he wasn't totally asleep.

A little while later, just after I'd drifted off to sleep again there was another huge racket outside. "Fucking Bob!" Eric exclaimed, before leaping out of bed and opening up the French doors of the bedroom and disappearing out them, leaving the chilled night air wafting over me.

"Fuck OFF!" Eric said somewhere between a whisper and a shout. I guess he wasn't so worried about waking up the neighbours, probably thinking that if he was up it was only fair everyone else was too. I wasn't sure Andy and Halleigh would really feel the same way. Ruby apparently sucked at sleeping through the night and if they were asleep they probably didn't want to be woken up by the guy next door yelling at some cats.

But let's face it, I thought, it's pretty obvious who's doing the yelling. There aren't that many Americans in our neighbourhood. So it's Eric's problem if he gets yelled at in return.

I heard Eric throw something, and then he stomped down the stairs of the deck and, a few moments later, stomped back up them muttering under his breath. He walked back into the bedroom with Bob tucked under one arm and deposited him on the bed before shutting the door. "Go to sleep, Bob" Eric commanded, but it was now Spring and Bob had remembered he was nocturnal and he had better things to do than hang out with losers like us, so he was off the bed in one leap and padded through the house to the catdoor.

"Next time" Eric said, climbing back into bed. "I'm just going to let him get beaten up."

"Who was it?" I asked.

"I think it was that fucking ginger monster."

"Mmm, he's vicious. Bob's twice his size, but he's mean. So what did you throw?" Now I was awake I figured I might as well get the blow-by-blow account of what happened.

"Amelia's watering can" Eric said, trying to find a comfortable position, and moving me around in the process. I was now kind of used to the fact that I was basically Eric's version of Sockie and if he was determined to go to sleep holding me, there was no point trying to fight it.

"I hope you didn't dent it or anything" I said, as Eric finally stopped moving.

"It'll be fine. Go back to sleep."

But I had trouble getting back to sleep. I had a lot of things to think about. It was a week from the service and there was a lot to do. Top of the list was to write some vows. I was struggling with that one.

Eric nuzzled me and it was really scratchy. Second on the list was finding a way to do some bodily harm to Calvin. Eric really didn't need an excuse to stop shaving but Calvin had decided to rope him into participating in Movember. Of course he was doing it for charity. I hadn't yet figured out who he thought was actually sponsoring him to grow a beard because it sure as hell wasn't me, but he was adamant it was all for a good cause.

I was fairly sure I wasn't upset because Eric would look terrible in the photos of the ceremony. It wasn't that kind of ceremony. I suspected he wasn't even going to be wearing shoes.

But, still, Calvin wasn't my favourite person.

I'd just drifted off to sleep again when I heard a thud somewhere in the house again. Or I thought I did. "Eric?" I whispered. "Eric, did you hear that? That noise?"

"It'll just be Bob, and probably his latest gift."

"No, it didn't sound like Bob."

Eric was quiet, so I lay there for a bit, but didn't hear anything else. I worried a bit about the next thing on my list, which was what to do with the kids after the ceremony, and then I started to get dozy again.

But not dozy enough that I didn't hear the other noises that were happening now. They were skittery noises, with the odd dull thud. "Eric" I whispered again.

"If you want sex, just start and I'll be there in a minute" he murmured.

"Wake up!" I hissed.

"Sookie, I know you want me, but you're going to have to learn some patience" Eric said, rolling onto his back but not opening his eyes.

"Eric! I would thump you right now, but I think there's someone in the house and I might regret taking you out."

Eric just opened his eyes and looked at me, suggesting he really didn't think I had much hope of incapacitating him. Yeah, I knew I could. He didn't know half of the stuff I'd learnt from Jason. My parents really shouldn't have let him watch all those wrestling shows on TV. But now was not the time to start arguing with Eric about it.

I heard the noises again, and Eric's head lifted off the pillow. And then we both heard the giggling. "Felicia?" Eric asked me. "Sounds like it" I said.

We heard the sound of a chair scraping across the floor in the family room as we both got out of bed and headed that way. Eric switched on the lights and Felicia blinked a few times and went "Daddy!" quite cheerfully. She was perched on the dining table. As was Bob.

"Felicia, what are you doing?" Eric asked her.

"Patting Bob" she said, matter-of-fact. Well that made sense. I'd found cat fur on the table the day before, I guess sleeping on the table was cooler than sleeping on the bed. Plus, it was strictly forbidden and therefore instantly appealing.

"How did you get out of the crib?" Eric asked her. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Not only was she in a cot but she was also, when I last saw her anyway, zipped into one of those sleeping bags that kids wear instead of sheets and blankets. She moved around so much in her sleep that they were a god-send. But they also had a zip up the front. How had she undone the zip?

Felicia shrugged. "I got down" she said.

"Felicia" I said "its sleeping time now. You need to go back to bed and go to sleep."

"OK" she said. Eric reached over and picked Felicia up; I picked Bob up and put him on the floor. "Stay off the table" I warned him and he looked at me. No doubt he would be back there in about five minutes. But at least he wasn't fighting if he was.

We trudged into Felicia's room and Eric lay her down in the cot and we managed to get her back into her sleeping bag. The side of the cot was still up so she'd had quite a jump down to get out. I hoped she didn't do it again and hurt herself.

Eric leaned over her. "Go to sleep, Leesha" he said.

"'Night Daddy" she said. Eric kissed her and then it was my turn. "'Night Mummy" Felicia said, before rolling on her side and inserting Sockie in her mouth.

As Eric and I left the bedroom, Amelia appeared. "What's happening?" she asked.

"Nothing" Eric replied, carrying on into our room.

"Felicia got up" I said.

"But she's in the cot" Amelia said.

"Yeah, she jumped out. I hope she doesn't…" there was a thud and then I turned around to see Felicia scuttle back into her room.

I followed her back in and found her sitting in the corner of her bedroom trying to look inconspicuous. This was going to be a problem. For a long time I'd thought Amelia was my problem child, what with the constant questions and the fact she often wanted to defy me at every turn. But she'd never done anything like this. She just wasn't as physical. If I put her somewhere, she stayed there. She might tell me she hated it, that I was horrible, tell me 642 reasons why I was wrong, and finally pull out all the stops and burst into tears.

But Felicia was completely different. And that just didn't seem…fair. Surely if you had one kid, that was the blue-print and younger siblings should just be the same? So that you could apply all the tactics you'd been able to come up with first time around.

At this hour of the morning, I wasn't really ready to concede that nothing in life was fair. I wanted my carbon-copy children and I wanted them now.

Amelia had followed me in after Felicia as well and watched me pick her up, zip her back into her sleeping bag and handed Felicia Sockie who had been abandoned on the floor.

"Goodnight Felicia. Go to sleep" I said as I left the room.

"Why did Felicia get up?" Amelia asked me.

"Because she could. Now you need to go back to bed too."

"But Felicia was up."

"Well she's not now. It's sleeping time. Go to sleep."

"Fine! But it doesn't seem fair."

"No, it really doesn't. Goodnight, Amelia." I watched Amelia stomp off to her own room and then I went back to bed to find Eric snoring slightly. It was nice he could go back to sleep at the drop of a hat.

I lay there for a bit, half-expecting to hear Felicia again, but I didn't. At least not until I was nearly asleep again. And then I only heard her because she was trying to climb onto our bed. But she was on Eric's side, and had grabbed onto his leg to use as a handle and she was currently going "Daddy! Daddy! UP!", so I decided she was his problem.

She managed to haul herself up and she sat down on Eric. "Daddy?" she asked.

"You're not in your bed, are you Felicia? " Eric asked, without opening his eyes. I'm not sure if he thought that might stop it all being real, but if so, it wasn't working.

"Your bed" Felicia said.

"Get in" Eric said, lifting up the covers but still not opening his eyes. Felicia climbed under the covers and snuggled next to Eric.

Thirty seconds later Amelia came stomping around to my side of the bed. "Felicia's in here. Not in her bed. In your bed" Amelia announced, as if I hadn't noticed.

I lifted up the covers on my side. "You can get in too, if you like" I said. There was really no point arguing at this time of the morning. Amelia wouldn't go now unless we got rid of Felicia and there were no guarantees she'd stay put.

Amelia got in and pushed me over getting comfortable. I tried not to squash Felicia as I shuffled over. When everyone was sorted I had the least room of anybody in the bed. But I did finally manage to drift off to sleep. For the time I had left until morning anyway.

EPOV

It had been a fucking awful night. First Bob got beaten up by the neighbourhood bully then Felicia woke up and discovered she was better than Houdini at getting out of stuff. Fuck, that was going to be a problem.

Especially because it led to having two kids sleeping with us. I woke up and discovered I was half out of the bed, and Sookie was squished into about six inches of space between Amelia and Felicia. They were little, but they sprawled. And we kind of needed a bigger bed.

I got up and went to put some coffee on, leaving everyone else still sleeping. I'd not been sleeping so well this week as the ceremony drew closer. We were now only a week away and I had no fucking clue what to put in the vows. What did Sookie want me to say? If you looked on the internet there was all kinds of shit you could say, each thing more romantic than the last. And fucking cheesy. I didn't think Sookie liked cheesy.

Although maybe she would for this, it was hard to tell with women sometimes. Even women like Sookie, who fucking took no prisoners and kept insisting she could beat me up if she had to. I didn't care what she could do to Jason, I doubted she could do the same to me.

But I wasn't about to give her the opportunity to try either.

I sat and drank my coffee and pretended I couldn't see the small green corpse in the corner of the room. Fucking Bob. Guess that was my thank-you for saving him last night. I scooped the bird up and put it in the trash. He was a fucking menace, he really was. He contributed nothing and lived like a fucking king. I didn't know why Sookie was so fond of him. Surely she didn't like the dead things he was always presenting us with?

But the idea of being able to just give her something, rather than having to go through all this vows shit, that kind of appealed. Much simpler that way.

But I didn't know what she'd want for a start. I'd offered her a baby and she'd fucking turned that down. So I was out of big gestures, I really was. I sighed. If Sookie found out I hadn't written them, I was in deep shit. She'd probably finished hers and they'd be perfect, fucking perfect.

She always fucking knew what to say. I was pretty fucking hopeless, as evidenced by the whole baby disaster in the first place.

I scratched my chin. Yeah, this whole Movember thing had seemed like a good idea, and the not-shaving was nice. But now I was a bit itchy and I'd realised I was stuck like this for the ceremony. Fuck. But I didn't want to back out without a good reason and Sookie hadn't said she wanted me to shave, like I thought she would, so I couldn't come up with a good excuse for shaving now.

Fucking Calvin.

I took another sip of coffee and Amelia appeared, followed by Felicia. "We want breakfast" Amelia announced.

"Toast!" Felicia agreed cheerfully.

And the day began again.

SPOV

The day was busy. I had errands to run, chiefly I had to get to the supermarket as we were hosting a barbecue the next night in lieu of any hen or stag parties.

Eric watched everyone while I was out and when I got back it was time for lunch and Felicia's nap. Except that it's hard to nap if you're going to keep jumping out of the cot. In the end we left the side of the cot down so she wasn't jumping from such a great height. I was worried about her hurting herself. Eric said that if she can jump off the windowsill in the living room she's probably going to be OK. I hadn't known about that little incident and gave Eric a really dirty look. He just shrugged.

"Well, she's still in one piece, which I can tell, because I just heard her jump out of the crib again, so I don't think you can really complain now, Sookie."

"Yeah, but what was she doing on the windowsill in the first place?"

Eric shrugged. "She just climbed up. She seems to like climbing things."

"She's not like Amelia at all" I said, as if Eric could shed some light on why that was.

"Nope. She's really not."

"Amelia's such a…Compton" I said for lack of a better term. She really was. She was exactly like her aunts and her nana. And she looked like them, with her dark hair and her slightly olive skin which tanned despite the fact I put SPF70 on her. I was jealous of that fact, and of the fact that she would be able to get away without mascara when she was older.

"And Felicia's what? A Stackhouse?" Eric asked.

"I think she's a Northman, I really do" I said as she came out of her room, stood still when she saw us, then decided to brazen it out by yelling "Daddy!" and making a run for Eric, who caught her mid-jump in the air.

"You guys are _really_ noisy" Amelia commented as she walked down the hall to the bathroom.

"She sounds more and more like Lorena" I muttered, as I headed off to the kitchen, leaving Eric to try once again to return Felicia to her cot.

I had other things to worry about. Like the vows. I had no idea what to say. I kind of got the whole idea of saying stuff that was special to the two of you, but really, that sounded a lot more personal than I wanted.

I mean, what was I supposed to say? 'You turned up drunk on my doorstep and I let you stay. Let's spend the rest of our lives together.' Yeah, that sounded…desperate.

Or I could say 'Thanks for getting help with your drinking problem, honey. It was amazing how you managed to overcome the shitty childhood you had. By the way, your mother's never allowed to come for Christmas because I hate her guts.'

Or I could go with the old stand-by 'I really love it when you fuck me.' Eric might appreciate that sentiment, but I might have to literally bury my head in the sand straight afterwards.

So yeah, none of that was happening. I was starting to appreciate that stupid idea Octavia had told us, about the ceremony where you hand something over. I just didn't know what I'd give Eric. Maybe the keys to the house and the kids. I didn't have a lot else. Although I guess I was in there somewhere too, but short of jumping into his arms on the beach, how did I convey that?

I was over this, I really was. I wanted the old way where someone told me what to say. Where we said the same vows to each other and that was that.

And then I had an idea.

After dinner Eric went into the study to do some work. I left him to it for a while and then I wandered in.

"Oh, hi" he said looking a bit guilty. I squinted at the laptop. It looked like he was looking at a blank Word document.

"Hey" I said. "Um, how are your vows going?"

"Oh, great" Eric said. "I think I'm there."

"Really?" I asked. "Because I'm completely stumped."

Eric swivelled the desk chair all the way around. "Are you?" he asked, looking surprised.

"Yep. I have no idea how to make it sound good."

"Yeah…me either. I haven't actually written anything." Eric looked a bit sheepish, as I guessed he should for confessing that he was exaggerating before. But I didn't care.

"So I had an idea I wanted to run past you." I said.

"We elope. I hear Vegas is nice" Eric deadpanned.

"No, Vegas sucks. I hated the noise of the slot-machines. I only really liked the tigers."

"OK, so you've totally missed the point of Las Vegas. What was your idea?"

"Um, well…" now I was a bit nervous. What if he thought it really sucked? "I wondered if maybe we should write them together?" I said, looking over at Eric.

"Together?"

"Yeah, so we say the same thing. And we get something meaningful, but it doesn't have to be a competition to see who can write the best, most over-the-top declaration of love. I mean, we know what's behind it, this is just for everyone else. And they don't need to know every detail of our lives."

Eric looked thoughtful. "OK" he said after a while, nodding. "OK, let's do that. Go and get a chair from the dining room and let's make a start."

"Now?" I asked. I was kind of in favour of a bit of procrastination.

"Yep. Now. Before Felicia gate-crashes."

"OK."

A couple of hours, and a fair amount of what might be termed 'healthy discussion' later, we had something we were both happy with.

"So" I said, as we headed off to bed, "What do I get for coming up with such a great idea?"

"Sex" Eric said. "With me" he added, as if he thought it needed clarification.

"Great" I said. "'Cos that's just what I wanted."

Eric smiled at me. "Well, I do know you so well."

"Yep, you do." I went to brush my teeth and when I came back Eric was lying on the bed naked. "You might have to be quick though, in case Felicia does wake up."

I lay on the bed next to Eric and he pulled me to him to kiss me. "Yeah, but let's not put that in the vows. That I have to be quick. That gets filed under stuff between us. But you can make me promise to service you when you want it. That's OK."

I rolled my eyes. "No, that's between us too, Eric."

He chuckled and then rolled me onto my back. "Yeah, I guess it's nice to have some stuff that's between us. As long as it's not the kids. Fuck, they take up the whole bed."

"They do" I agreed, although I was losing a bit of interest in the conversation and getting a lot more interested in what Eric's hand, the one he'd slipped into my pyjama bottoms, was doing.

"And your pyjamas are between us at the moment" Eric said. "I think we need to change that."

"Uh-huh" I agreed, pulling my top over my head, while Eric pulled the bottoms down.

His fingers continued to move against me and he slipped two fingers inside me as well. I wrapped my arms around his neck and rolled my hips. The conversation between us had dried up but I don't think either of us really minded.

As I came I clutched at Eric, bringing him closer so I could bury my face in his neck and just enjoy his smell. I reached down and stroked his penis slowly, wanting to return a bit of the favour.

Eric withdrew his hand and moved over so he was lying between my legs, meaning I had to release him in the process. As he pushed in I smiled into his chest. His chest hair made my nose tickle a bit, but I didn't mind. It was a good kind of tickly.

Eric hooked one of my legs up and started to move with determination. He was breathing quite heavily now. I moved against him and then felt the tension building before I came again. I wrapped both my legs around Eric's waist and shifted my hips slightly and he braced himself on both arms and thrust, hard, several times before muttering "Fuck!" and tensing all over.

He lay over me and we stayed still like that for a minute or two. And then we heard a dull thud, followed by a giggle.

"Fuck" Eric said again, as he moved off me.

**Movember is a charity drive where guys get sponsored to grow moustaches, or beards. You sign up on a website to say you're doing it. Leads to a lot of straggly looking men for a month. I think they do it elsewhere now as well, but it's quite big in NZ!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N Hello again! Hope those of you celebrating Thanksgiving had a great time! Here, I can tell Christmas is just around the corner because I got sunburnt hanging the washing out!**

**Disclaimer: Still not mine.**

EPOV

I loved Felicia, but maybe I wasn't quite so fond of her when she appeared at the side of the bed at 5am and wanted to climb in too. I'd spent a good hour during the night repeatedly returning her to her own crib in an effort to get her to go back to sleep. Sookie kept saying that the key was to be firm, consistent and not let her think that being awake was more fun than staying in bed. I pointed out that I really wasn't having any fucking fun and Sookie was welcome to take over if she wanted.

Felicia just giggled.

Eventually though, she did fall asleep. Probably from sheer exhaustion. Once she was asleep it was hard to reconcile the sleeping child with the angelic look on her face with the tiny goblin who liked to run round in the middle of the night, chase Bob and empty cupboards.

But it didn't last, because now it wasn't quite morning, it certainly wasn't fucking anywhere near the time I wanted to be getting up on a Sunday, and here she was again, tugging at the bedcovers and saying "Up, Daddy! Up!" quite loudly, while Sookie lay next to me, pretending she didn't know what was going on.

"Felicia, you need to go back to bed" I said, trying to will myself into a sitting position, and failing miserably.

"Up" Felicia repeated cheerfully. She often gave the impression of not really understanding what was going on, but I suspected it was more the case that she remained convinced she was going to carry on with her original plan despite any objections I might offer.

And sometimes it almost seemed mean to try to convince her otherwise.

I managed to roll over to face her and prop myself up on an elbow. Felicia took that as a sign that things were progressing nicely and she held out her hands for me to help her up. I sighed and pulled her onto the bed.

"You've got to go to sleep if I let you in here" I said, as she climbed over me and wedged herself between Sookie and me.

"OK" Felicia said, crawling under the covers. Once she was settled I lay down again as well.

Then the wriggling started. Felicia's idea of going to sleep and mine were quite different. There was a lot of squirming and a small heel kicked me in the thigh several times. Fuck, she was as bad as her mother.

"Be still, Felicia" I warned her.

"Hmm. Up?" she said scrambling into a sitting position and looking around.

"Lie down."

Felicia just looked at me. Then she turned to look at Sookie. "Mummy, up time?" she asked.

Sookie sighed and rolled over. "It's really early" she said.

"Those were my thoughts, exactly" I agreed. Felicia sat between the two of us humming a song to herself. Then she squealed "Ah-la!" really fucking loudly.

Amelia stomped into the room. "You're all up" she said.

"No" said Sookie "We're not. We're trying to get Felicia to go to sleep."

"She's not asleep; she's in your bed. Why?"

"She climbed in" Sookie explained.

Amelia sighed, then climbed onto the foot of the bed and crawled up until she was sitting between Felicia and Sookie, who was moving ever-closer to the edge of the bed.

"Ah-la! Ah-la!" Felicia chanted, happy to see someone else up and about at this fucking ungodly time of the morning.

"Argh. Don't touch me like that Felicia! Mum! Felicia's poking me!"

"Felicia, just be gentle with Amelia" Sookie muttered.

There were a few moments of relative silence then Amelia asked loudly "What are we doing now?"

"Sleeping!" I said, probably more loudly than I'd intended but, fuck. Why didn't they want to sleep?

"No. That's boring. Let's do something else. I could tell you a story" Amelia said.

"No thank-you, Amelia" I said, hoping to cut her off.

"Oh. Um, well how about I tell Leesha a story. Once upon a time…"

"How about" I interrupted "I put TV on and you two sit there nicely and quietly for a bit?" I figured the drone of kid's TV couldn't be any worse than one of Amelia's long-winded stories and it might make them zone out.

I sat up and turned TV on and put it on the right channel. Only according to Amelia it wasn't the right channel, I needed another kid's channel. So I changed it. "Wot Wots" Felicia cried when I did and, stupidly, I thought this might keep them entertained for a bit.

They were quiet for about ten seconds. Felicia lost interest in the TV programme and started pulling my chest hair. "Daddy's nudie" she commented to Amelia.

"No he's not, he has pants on. Probably" Amelia sounded thoughtful.

"I do, and Felicia, that hurts" I told her.

"Sowwy" she said in a small voice. Then she braced a hand on the side of my head and reached over to grab the remote control off the bedside table. She pressed something that made the channel on the TV change which caused Amelia, who hadn't really been watching the TV anyway, to roar in indignation.

"Leesha! Don't touch that!" Amelia yelled, snatching it out of Felicia's hands. Felicia yelled back and made a swipe for it, but Amelia held it away from her. "Mummy said no, didn't you Mummy?"

"Mummy says be quiet now" Sookie said.

Felicia decided another attempt to grab the remote was a good idea. She stood up, but soon discovered that the bed wasn't a nice firm surface and she wobbled briefly, before sitting back down again, on my pillow so that her diaper-covered bottom was half across my face.

"Watch out, Leesha" I said, pulling away from her while steadying her with one hand.

"Sowwy" she said again, turning around to face me, having forgotten Amelia for the moment. She stroked my cheek. "Prickly" she commented.

"Yep" Sookie muttered from over on the other side of the bed.

"Uncle Calvin is too" Amelia added. "It's for sore bums."

"Prostate cancer" Sookie amended.

"Yeah, that" Amelia agreed. "I don't get how prickles helps that." Sookie and I were silent, knowing that any explanations would take a long time and would just lead Amelia into a whole bunch of random questions.

"Prickles" Felicia commented, stroking my face some more.

Then something plastic almost got poked into my eye. "TVs on the wrong channel. 'Cos of Leesha. Fix it." Amelia was trying to give me the remote then.

"Say please, Amelia" Sookie warned.

"Yeah, please."

I looked at the remote; it was hard to miss given that it was almost touching my eyelashes. I looked at Felicia, staring down at me from where she was sitting half on my pillow. I looked at Amelia, sitting behind her and leaning down waiting for me to do something. I sat up a bit and looked at Sookie, who had given up trying to sleep and was now staring at the ceiling.

"Who wants pancakes for breakfast?" I asked as I sat up and looked at the clock. 5.35am. Fucking fantastic.

"Me!" Felicia said happily.

"Are we getting up?" Amelia asked as I got out from under the covers. "I thought it was sleeping time. Mummy, are we getting up?"

Sookie was sitting up as well. "Yes we are, Amelia" she said.

"Oh. Well OK. If you really want we can get up early then."

I lifted Felicia off the bed and went to find a t-shirt to throw on. Sookie had disappeared into the bathroom. Amelia, realising she was in danger of being left behind yelled "Hey! Don't leave me!" and jumped down too.

It was going to be a very, very long day.

SPOV

After the stupidly-early start to the morning thanks to Felicia I was hoping the rest of the day would go fairly smoothly. I had been feeling pretty good the night before, due to the fact we'd actually written some vows, and maybe also because of the sex, but a night with the world's most nocturnal toddler had left me feeling a bit worn around the edges.

And that was before I'd tackled today's list of problems or the fact we were hosting a barbecue that evening for our friends.

And I wasn't even going to look out the window at the rain. If I couldn't see it, it might stop. You never knew.

Eric made pancakes for breakfast, which were popular, although I did wonder whether two small girls who were happy to get up at 5am really needed a sugar-high but maybe it would get us all through the morning. I just wanted coffee. Lots of it.

As I was clearing up the breakfast dishes in the kitchen Bob streaked through the family room making his 'I've got a really cool thing you'll love' noise. Shit. I hoped that wasn't a rat. For some reason they were always really easy to catch when it's raining.

"Eric!" I yelled, hastily drying my hands. "Eric, can you find Bob, he thinks he has something cool." I knew if I said rat Eric would suddenly disappear as well. He was really not fond of the rats.

"It is kind of something cool" Eric yelled back. "It's like a…mutant cockroach or something."

My stomach lurched. No, I thought. Not today.

Fucking Bob.

I followed the sound of Eric's voice into the living room and stood in the doorway. "Um, it's not a cockroach" I said.

"Well, no. It's really fucking odd" Eric said, reaching out a finger to touch Bob's prize which was lying on its back on the floor.

"Don't touch it!" I cried out, which made Eric turn to look at me. Yeah, that had been louder than I'd intended. And a lot more shrill. "Wetas bite" I said, almost using my normal voice.

"Bite?" Eric asked. "Is it poisonous?"

"No, this isn't Australia!" I said. "But it'll hurt. It'll be really pissed off that Bob caught it. Can you tell if it's missing any legs?"

"Um. No. It seems to have an awful lot of legs. It's not really moving them though. I think its dead."

"No it's not" I said rapidly. "They play dead. It's trying to trick you into touching it. So it can bite you."

"Sookie, I don't think…"

"Look, Eric, who's the expert on fucking wetas here? Don't poke it, don't antagonise it, don't do anything to it. Just get it the hell out of my living room."

"Well, how do I do that without touching it?" Eric looked over at me. He was trying not to laugh. At me. I almost hoped the weta did bite him. Serve him right. Honestly, he had no idea. They're vicious. And just…icky.

"I don't know" I said. "Use the dust-pan or something. Just…just…get rid of it." I looked at Eric, trying to get him to grasp the gravity of the situation. He wasn't buying it.

"I'm pretty sure I could just pick it up…" he said. "If I don't get near the front it shouldn't be able to get me."

"Well, it's your problem if it bites you."

"Fine, I'll get the dust-pan." I moved aside so Eric could come out of the living room and then I stood there, watching. In case it moved. When I was little this was my job, watch the weta that was climbing the curtains, or sitting on a shelf, or hiding in a cupboard until Dad got home and could return it outside. So I was pretty good at watching wetas. They didn't move quickly, but they were sneaky.

Eric came back with the dust-pan and pushed the weta onto it with the brush. He held it up closer to his face so he could get a better look. I was pretty convinced the close-up view wasn't that exciting.

I stood aside again as Eric came past. "You sure you don't want a look?" Eric asked.

"Just. Get. It. OUT OF HERE!" I yelled.

Eric came over to stand beside me, still holding the dust-pan with the weta in it. He shook his head. "I don't get you" he said.

"What's not to get?" I asked, stepping away from Eric and what he was holding. I thought I was perfectly normal.

"You can cope with the rats but not one small, harmless insect."

"Well it's not harmless for one thing…"

"Sookie, rats bite too" Eric interjected.

"Yeah, but…they have fur. And sometimes they're cute. Wetas are just…icky. I just don't like them." I stared at the weta lying in the dust-pan. I was not wrong.

"What's happening?" Amelia asked, as she appeared next to me.

"Bob brought in a weta. Want to have a look?" Eric asked, squatting down so Amelia could look in the dust-pan.

Amelia looked and shrugged. "It's pretty yucky looking. Does it eat people?"

I shook my head. "No, it's just a weta. They're mostly harmless really."

Eric stood up and out of the corner of my eye I could see him moving that dust-pan towards me. I was not going to jump, or shriek or do anything else stupidly girlie, but if he brought that thing any closer I was going to have to leave the room.

"Oh. Well that's kind of boring" Amelia said and she wandered off.

I took the opportunity to step further away from Eric again. "You're a lot braver when Amelia's here" he commented. "And you even managed to stop flapping your hands around for a bit."

I glared at Eric. "Yeah, well, I'm trying not to impart any fear to Amelia. Not that I am afraid, of course. I just have a healthy respect for things with really big…pincers or whatever the bitey bits are."

"Sookie, I really don't think it's going to bite you, or me. Look." With that Eric picked up the back end of the weta and held it up. The weta moved some of it's legs around a bit, but to be honest, it didn't look capable of putting up much a fight. Or maybe that's what it wanted Eric to think, anyway.

"You're…you're as bad as _Jason_" I managed to get out before I turned and walked away. Yeah, I wasn't afraid of wetas, but if I was, then it was all the fault of Jason bloody Stackhouse, that's for sure.

Eric laughed and headed off to return the weta to his natural habitat. Which was far, far away from me. They'd been trimming trees in Mr Dearborn's place over the back fence the day before and I guess the weta's branch had been cut down and Bob had found him wandering around.

I hoped to God that branch hadn't been a weta suburb or anything.

Thankfully when I next saw Eric he'd lost his new friend and had almost stopped teasing me. Yeah, he thought he was hilarious. I'd remember this the next time Bob had a rat. Maybe I could bribe him to bring one in? How would I tell him that's what I wanted though?

Maybe, though, he'd just get totally the wrong end of the stick and bring me a weta instead. Ugh. It would be useful to have a cat that understood me, but I suspected that Bob wasn't that cat.

We spent the morning doing housework and getting ready for the evening while Eric fretted about the weather. The rain was easing though, so we'd probably be OK. Well that's what I kept saying. It sounded plausible.

Eric kept trying to check the weather channel and look at the rain radar. I told him it was a waste of time. It's Auckland, so you look out the window and it's either raining, or it's not. But he never believes me. He just kept muttering about putting the barbecue under the sun umbrella.

I had my own worries. I'd been stuck with what to do with the girls after our ceremony. Eric and I were going back into the city for a night alone. In a hotel. I was quite looking forward to it.

The problem was that all our regular babysitters were unavailable. Tara and JB were getting his mum to collect their kids from Piha then spending the night in their bach. Judith was coming but she was about to burst and kept saying that she thought the baby was coming early, so I really didn't like to burden her with an extra two kids. Halleigh hadn't had a full night's sleep in 9 months and I suspected that dealing with Felicia at night might send her into a psychotic break.

So I was really running out of options. There was only one person left. Someone who wasn't going to the ceremony.

Lorena.

I found Eric checking through the fridge to make sure he had enough drinks cooling for later on. "I'm going to go and talk to her" I said.

"What? Who?" Eric asked, shutting the fridge. Oh yeah, I thought, he hasn't been privy to the train of thought I'd been running with for a while.

"Lorena. I'm going to go and ask her. About having the girls. She's still their nana, after all. But I'm going to do it in person. I think it would be better that way. Do you think? Or should I phone? Maybe if I bribe Judith, she'll ask for me? No, I can't really do that." I stopped, Eric was just looking at me.

"You're rambling" he said.

"Yeah, I know. But I'm a bit nervous."

"What's the worst that could happen?" Eric asked, leaning against the kitchen bench.

"She could say no."

"Well, you're no worse off then."

I sighed. "She could say no and tell me I'm a horrible person for getting married again."

Eric shrugged. "You already think she thinks that, so it wouldn't be news. And you're not a horrible person, so it wouldn't matter. And you still wouldn't be any worse off. But at least you would know, one way or the other."

"Yeah, you're right, you're right. I should just do it."

"You should. And you should probably go now, while Felicia is napping and before we have to get ready."

"I should. Is she really napping and not running about?"

"She is" Eric said proudly, which made me slightly suspicious.

"What did you do?"

"Um. Nothing much. I just figured out the key was getting out of the sleeping bag in the first place, so I fixed that problem."

"How?"

"Safety pin. I just pinned the zip to the material of the bag. Seemed to fix her."

"Well, good work. Let's hope she doesn't figure out safety pins, or else there'll be blood everywhere when she sticks herself with it." Eric looked thoughtful. Maybe he hadn't thought of that scenario.

"OK. I'm off then" I said, reaching up to kiss him goodbye.

"Yeah. Good luck" Eric said a bit absent-mindedly. Maybe he was still worrying about the safety pin.

I'd just worry about Lorena.

As I pulled up outside her block of flats I was half-hoping she'd be out. But I knew that if she was, I'd only to have to do this at a later date.

I walked up the path and knocked on the door. I could hear Lorena inside and a moment later she opened the door. "Sookie?" she said, looking confused.

"Hi, Lorena. I, was, um…well, I've come to talk to you. If that's OK?"

"Yes, yes. Come in. I was just finishing my lunch."

I followed her into the living room and she turned off the TV. She'd been watching Antiques Roadshow and eating a sandwich before I arrived, by the looks of it. It didn't seem the most exciting way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

"Can I get you anything?" Lorena asked me, resuming her seat.

"Um, no. I'm fine thank you. I've just had lunch myself" I said, as I sat on the sofa opposite.

"So, what can I do for you?" Lorena asked, fixing me with a stare that just made me uncomfortable.

"Well…" This was really hard. I twisted my hands in my lap and watched them intently for a bit. "I was wondering if I could ask you to babysit for me. Next Saturday night. And have the girls overnight." I looked back up at Lorena but couldn't really read her expression.

"Next Saturday?" she asked. "I'm playing bowls in the afternoon."

"Well it wouldn't be until later on. After dinner, say, that we'd drop them off…" I trailed off. Surely she knew what I was doing next Saturday. Did she want me to spell it out? I wasn't sure of the protocol.

Lorena turned and looked at the window. "I suppose I could…" she mused.

"The girls would love it" I said, a bit too brightly. "They love seeing you and it would be nice for you to have that time alone with them." As long as you don't say anything else mean about me, you poisonous bitch, I added in my head.

"And it would be a favour to you, wouldn't it, Sookie?" Lorena asked, as innocently as she could muster.

Shit. "Yes. Yes, it would" I agreed. "It would be a big favour to me. And to Eric."

"Mmm" Lorena pursed her lips at the mention of Eric's name. She was silent for a bit. I decided to go for broke.

"I think Bill would have wanted them to spend time with you. Get to know you" I said. Lorena didn't say anything to that. "So really, it wouldn't be so much a favour to me as…as maybe a way of remembering Bill. They're all that's left of him now. And I think it would nice for them to know more about where they came from. I'm open to that…as long as, well as long as things are…civil." I didn't want a repeat of Lorena telling Amelia I'd run Bill off.

"Fine" Lorena said after a minute's thought. "Yes, I can have them here next Saturday. They can have the twin beds in the spare room. Felicia's OK in a bed, now isn't she?"

"Yes" I said. Well it would be less dangerous for her to jump out of than a cot.

"Fine. You can just phone me sometime and let me know exactly when you're coming here and I'll be waiting for them." Lorena smiled at me, but really it was more like a grimace. She was trying though, I guessed.

"Thanks, Lorena. I really appreciate it. I just…well, next Saturday is going to be busy for us all. It's nice to know they'll be in good hands overnight."

I stood up to leave, and Lorena followed me to the door. "Thanks again" I said as I walked out. "I'll call you. 'Bye Lorena."

"Goodbye Sookie."

I started to walk down the steps to the path, when Lorena said "Sookie, wait just a minute." I turned and went back up the steps. "Yes?" I asked her.

"Um. I just wanted to say…good luck." Lorena said the last bit quietly and kept her eyes fixed on a point past my shoulder, but I got her meaning. I was right. She was definitely trying.

"Thank you" I said, before I turned and headed back to the car. Well that was another of the worries off my list. Now I was left with getting through the barbecue.

I looked at the sky as I got back into my car. Over the city there were bright spots, but if you looked South it was all dark, heavy clouds. The weather was definitely Eric's problem I decided. I'd done enough worrying for one day.

**Yeah, wetas are not at all nice to look at, but mostly they are harmless. Unless they're mad and they bite. They get mad sometimes when they've been manhandled by a cat and have lost a leg or two. Can't imagine why that would upset them. The appearance of today's weta is brought to you by Peppermintyrose who thought it was only fair that Eric should encounter at least one in NZ. We don't have anything poisonous here (that's Australia) but wetas often freak people out if they see them. **

**And The Wot Wot's are a kid's show made by our own Weta Workshop. If you have very small kids, they're very cute and quite entertaining.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N I would complain about how hot I am today, but I guess those of you in the Northern Hemisphere won't be sympathetic to my plight. But just know, it's really hot and sticky!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I was fucking glad when Sookie arrived back from Lorena's because we were rapidly moving into full crisis mode. Amelia was yelling "It's not ANYWHERE" from her bedroom and Felicia and I were just lying low in the family room and waiting for the cavalry.

"Um. What's going on?" Sookie asked as she walked in, and looked over at Felicia and me sitting on the floor.

"Amelia can't find her headband" I said. "The special one. That's silver."

Amelia came stomping in then, as if on cue. "I can't find my headband. It's gone. It's nowhere. I wanted to wear it today. Now I can't!" She looked at Sookie pointedly, expecting her to fix it. It was probably a good choice because in reality Sookie was the one person here who kept track of all of our stuff.

Sookie sighed, and left the room. Twenty seconds later she was back with the headband. "It was in the bathroom" she said.

"Oh" Amelia said, a bit stunned now she had nothing to complain about.

"What do you say?" Sookie asked.

"Thank-you" Amelia said, grudgingly.

"And what else did I teach you to say when I find something?" Sookie added.

"Um. You're awesome Mummy." Amelia muttered, scampering out of the room.

"Yep, I am" Sookie said, turning to me and smiling. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing. Just…what's with the whole 'you're awesome' thing?"

"Oh yeah, well I figure what's the point of kids if you can't have a fan-club? I make them give me a round of applause too, when I get a really great park at the shops. Although you of course have your fan-club permanently attached to you these days." She gestured towards Felicia who was standing behind me and pushing on my back in the hope I'd get on all fours and she could climb on and play horsies. I should fucking learn not to get on the floor with her, it just made me fair game.

"Yeah, but I don't exactly get anyone telling me I'm awesome" I grumbled, as Felicia yelled "Down!" in my ear, and tried pushing me harder in the hope I'd give in and do what she wanted.

"Well I think you're awesome" Sookie said, as she started to walk out of the room. "And you never know, maybe you'll get more appreciation from the next kid." She stopped mid-step and looked at me, but didn't say anything else, before she disappeared from view.

I hadn't known what to say to that. We hadn't really been talking about kids since the whole fucking babygate debacle and then she says things like that. I really wished I knew what the plan was. Or if there was a plan. Or if we were even going to plan. But I was really too fucking scared to ask her now.

Felicia was getting impatient though, and had now thrown her arms around my neck and was clinging to my back in the hope of a piggy-back ride. "Go, Daddy! Go!" she chanted. I figured I might as well oblige her so I stood up and ran into the hallway, with Felicia giggling all the way.

SPOV

I felt really good when I got back from Lorena's, and knowing where Amelia had stashed her headband only made me feel more of a success. Although I don't know why everyone else in the house seems incapable of remembering where they put anything. They're hopeless. Even Eric, sometimes. I'm fairly certain that if he didn't just put his keys down in random places all over the house they wouldn't have ended up in the toilet that time.

And then I made the flippant comment about another kid. I really should learn to shut up. I mean it would happen, sometime, one day. But I didn't want to give Eric mixed signals or anything. I could see he wanted to say something, probably to ask me when we were going to have this baby so he could enter it into his calendar and plan exactly what was going to happen.

Because that's the way babies worked.

I went into the bedroom and kicked my shoes off and pushed them all the way under the bed. If I left them sticking out too much Eric would only trip over them later on and get grumpy with me.

I sighed. I just didn't know about the baby thing. In theory another one would be great. I liked babies. But I was also aware that Eric and I hadn't been together all that long. And we had two kids already. And we had very busy lives. And I just hadn't got my head around how a newborn would fit into all of that yet.

So while I wished I could give him a definite answer I also didn't want to promise anything I wasn't prepared to deliver on. So we'd both have to suffer with the unspoken question hanging over us.

I gave up thinking about it for the moment and went into the kitchen. Eric had managed to disentangle himself from Felicia and was organising the meat for tonight's barbecue. I'd put him in charge of catering. He'd spent a long time at Nosh discussing stuff with the butchers there before making his selections. It was a lot different from my catering style of run into Pak N Save, throw things in the trolley and run out again.

"So how did it go with Lorena, anyway?" Eric asked as I came in. Well at least we'd moved past the baby thing I thought.

"Good" I said, looking through the fridge to find the stuff I needed to make a salad. "She says she'll have them. She actually wished me good luck."

"Good luck?"

"Yeah. For Saturday I guess. We didn't really talk about it. I didn't really want to rub her nose in it. But she said good luck."

Eric looked thoughtful. "Well, that was…nice?" he said, turning the statement into a question. Yeah, I wasn't sure if she was being genuine either.

"I guess it was" I agreed. "But we'll see how nice she is after a night spent with Felicia wandering around her flat."

"Oh, yeah. That could be bad."

I shrugged. "I said it would be OK if she slept in one of the single beds there. I think she might tip the portacot over if we take that around and set it up there."

"Yeah, you're probably right."

"So how did the safety pin trick go anyway?" I asked Eric.

He looked a bit guilty. "Um, well I knew she was awake when she yelled out ow" he said.

"So not that great then, huh?"

"No, I'll have to think of another plan."

I left him to his thinking while I made the salad. The weather was definitely clearing so it looked like we might be in luck for the evening.

EPOV

I was fucking thankful that the weather cleared up for the barbecue. I'd thought that I could barbecue under the sun umbrella if I really had to, but it didn't sound like fun. Sookie had pointed out that her dad had once barbecued in the garage during a cyclone but I didn't see why that was something to be proud of.

So everything was going according to plan. Amelia had cheered up now that she had the correct headband to wear to the function. Felicia was just curious about what was going on.

The guest list was pretty small, Andy and Halleigh, Calvin and Judith, Tara and JB and assorted kids. Really that was the extent of the guest list for the actual ceremony as well, with only the addition of Jason and some of Sookie's other relatives.

Sookie had spent a while convincing me to send an invitation to my dad. I'd pointed out that he wouldn't be fucking interested, but she felt it was the nice thing to do. We hadn't heard from him, thank fuck, and I was pretty confident he wasn't going to fly in and surprise me.

We just didn't have that kind of relationship.

The first guests to arrive were Judith, Calvin and Jessica, who immediately ran past me in the hope of finding Amelia. She ran straight past Felicia who'd been standing behind me as I opened the door. Felicia's head swivelled around. "Jessie?" she asked, before taking off in pursuit. OK, well they were sorted.

Judith walked in the door next, looking hot and bothered and fucking enormous. "Any day now. Any bloody day. And I won't be sorry. That's the whole point of pregnancy, to make you actually happy to go through labour just so it will bloody end."

"Hi" I said, conscious that I hadn't really asked her anything. Maybe she was like this because she was pregnant.

Or maybe it was because she was Amelia's aunt, after all.

Judith moved past me and waddled down the hall carrying something on a platter.

I turned back to Calvin. "Hey, Eric man" he said, shaking my hand. I looked at his face. The fucker had shaved.

"Hi" I said, raising my eyebrows.

"Yah" Calvin said, looking a bit sheepish. "I shaved. I fuckin' had to, man. Jude would not shut up about it. She was worried about what I was going to look like in the photos."

"The photos?" I asked. "For the wedding?" We'd hired a photographer to take a few pictures but I wasn't convinced Calvin was going to feature in them that heavily.

"No, the photos when the baby comes. She didn't want me looking like a fucking unwashed bum apparently." He dropped his voice down "I think she's been listening to her mum on the subject. Lorena had some very definite opinions on the matter."

"Oh, right."

"So really" he said, at a normal volume again "I had no choice."

Just then Judith walked back into the entranceway and took the cooler bag that Calvin was still holding out of his hands. "Yeah, you didn't" she agreed, and then she looked at me. "I'm surprised that Sookie hasn't told you to smarten yourself up." Then she walked off.

"Yeah…" I said thoughtfully. She hadn't said anything. I suspected she wasn't thrilled but she was leaving it up to me. It was almost like a challenge.

But I wasn't sure which way I should go on that one.

SPOV

This was a much better idea than a stupid hen's night where we'd all feel obliged to go into town and visit several bars and get really drunk. Not to mention the challenges.

At my last hen's night Tara had told me I had to collect the size labels out of random men's underpants. She wanted a full set with a small, medium and large. The first guy we'd asked had been so drunk that when he rummaged around in his underwear everything had fallen out. I'd been a bit traumatised, but Tara had laughed her arse off and decided that it was so entertaining I didn't have to do any other tasks.

So I guess it was worth it for that alone.

But really, hanging out at home was a much better plan. I didn't have to find a babysitter as the kids were running around the backyard with everyone else's kids. None of them had been deterred by the fact everything was still a bit damp from the rain and they were all hot and sweaty now anyway.

Judith was perched on a chair looking hot and sweaty too. I didn't really envy her. Pregnancy sucked at the end. She wasn't even due for another couple of weeks, but she was really hoping the baby came early as Jessica had done. There wasn't much she could do though if it didn't. Calvin was hovering around her looking remarkably clean-shaven. I wasn't sure what had happened to his Movember attempt, but it had obviously been abandoned at some point. This just left Eric continuing it on.

Halleigh looked tired too, although 9 month old Ruby didn't. She was crawling around and watching all the bigger kids. She was a real source of fascination for Felicia who kept going over to her, poking her way too hard, and saying "Bubba". It was no use explaining to Felicia that she was that size a year ago, and the baby who just sat there at everyone else's mercy. It was amazing what changed in a year.

Tara was helping me in the kitchen with the last minute things while all the blokes watched Eric on the barbecue. It always amused me how it took four grown men to watch some meat cook and if you left them to their own devices that's all you'd get for dinner.

"At least the weather cheered up a bit" Tara commented.

"Yeah, now it just has to be fine for next Saturday as well" I said.

"Yep. Or you'll have to move everything undercover, which will be a shame."

"It will."

We were silent for a bit and then Tara said "Well you haven't asked me about five hundred times if you're doing the right thing, so I guess maybe you must be."

"What?"

"Well, you know" she said, pulling salad dressing and tomato sauce out of the fridge, "when you got married to Bill you kept checking with me that it was the right thing to do. And you're not this time."

"No" I said. She was right. And weirdly, as worried as I was about the weather and where to put the kids for the night, whether I was doing the right thing wasn't really a worry that had crossed my mind. "Anyway" I said "You didn't tell me not to marry Bill, so maybe you weren't the best person to ask for advice."

Tara snorted. "Firstly, you wouldn't have listened to me. Secondly, it wasn't my call to make. My job was to go up to the front of the church and tell everyone you'd changed your mind, if you needed me to do that. I seem to remember telling you that you could change your mind at any time and I'd back you on that." Yeah she had, but I secretly also suspected she would have loved it if I had sent her up to tell Bill I wasn't coming. Tara loved drama, but only the vicarious kind. Most of the time she lived her own life like the sensible mother-of-two from Remuera that she was.

"Mmm" I said. "Yeah, you did say that. But you also kept telling me how happy I looked that day, like you really, really thought it was the most fantastic thing I was doing."

Tara just shook her head. "Well, you did look happy. And anyway, I was only the matron of honour. You'd already bitten my head off when you discovered I'd worn my watch in some of the photos. You really think I wasn't going to just tell you that you were the most beautiful bride in the world? I'm not that brave."

I looked over at Tara and we both burst out laughing. Yeah, brides had a lot to answer for sometimes. Tara hadn't been any better when she married JB. I was adamant I was not going to be like that next Saturday. No way at all.

We took a load of food out to the table outside and then walked back to the kitchen. Tara was shaking her head. "Honestly, four men and one barbecue. You notice none of them are in here."

"Yep" I agreed.

We carried on getting things ready. Tara buttered some rolls and I sliced a couple of tomatoes. "Judith looks fed up and Halleigh looks like shit" Tara said. "I'm so glad my baby-making days are over."

"Are you?" I asked. "You don't ever think that you might like another one?" Tara had married JB relatively young and her kids were now 9 and 6 so despite the fact we'd been so close growing up, we were always at different places in our lives as mothers. Still her kids had been my practice babies, as neither of us had had much to do with kids before Tara had Charlotte. So Tara going first had done me some good.

"Nope, I definitely don't want any more kids." Tara sounded adamant. "In fact I think I've finally talked JB into getting snipped in the New Year. It just doesn't seem right for me to spend all these years worrying about the pill. And I had to have the kids, so it's his turn. He'd have more of course, in a flash. But I like the fact that we can go away now without taking half the house, that the kids can amuse themselves, that I don't have to immediately jump out of bed as soon as they get up in the morning. I don't want to go back to swollen feet and sleepless nights."

"Yeah…" I said, contemplating what that would be like, to have kids that weren't so dependant on you. It might be nice. But babies were nice too.

"What about you? I guess you and Eric will try for another baby?" Tara asked.

"Yeah, I guess. But I just can't imagine it right now" I said. "Right now, I just want to get through next weekend. And then, well, we'll worry about the future when we get to it."

"Sounds sensible. He's a good dad, though, isn't he? Eric? For someone who wasn't used to kids."

"He's a great dad" I said. For someone who had such a shitty one.

"So maybe another one wouldn't be so bad. And Felicia's still little so there won't be a huge gap." Tara glanced at me, watching for my reaction.

I wasn't sure what to give away. I wasn't even really sure what I thought about the subject. It was still all kind of muddled up in my head. In the end all I did was go "Mmm" and walk outside with some more of the food.

Because of all the kids that were there the barbecue didn't go too far into the night. Most people also had work the next morning. It wasn't the flashest party ever, but it was what I wanted. Just a little celebration with the people I liked.

We put our two tired little people to bed, and hoped that being as worn out as she was would stop Felicia running around in the night. Eric looked at me like I was talking complete nonsense when I said that, but I could hope. Half of being a mother was hoping that your kids did what you wanted them to.

The other half was cleaning up the results when they didn't.

I followed Eric into the bedroom, and we both sat down on the bed. "I'm a bit shattered too" I commented. "That early start this morning made the day seem super-long, even though it's only about ten o'clock now. Thank God this wasn't a proper going-out-and-getting-drunk type hen's party. I would have been asleep in some bar about now."

Eric laughed. "Yeah, I'm beat too. But it was a good night. Even if that fucker Calvin let Judith talk him into shaving."

I laughed as well. "You realise it's really Lorena who's behind that, don't you? I guess she doesn't care enough about what you look like to moan to me. But Calvin's the son-in-law and can't be seen to look like a beach-bum."

"Yeah. Thank fuck she doesn't care." Eric looked like he wanted to say something else, but he didn't. He went a bit quiet.

I decided to fill the silence. "And thank goodness no one made sit through another dodgy strip routine" I said. Eric looked at me "A stripper?" he asked.

"Oh, well yeah. Um. I had one…before…and, oh, there was one at Judith's hen's party. He was really…yucky. I wouldn't have gone near him if you paid me. I hid in the kitchen."

Eric was looking at me, but I wasn't sure what he was thinking. "You hid from the stripper?" he asked.

"Yeah. They're gross. I guess you don't hide from the stripper at stag do's then?"

"Um. No. Although Calvin didn't have one. But Judith did?"

"Yeah, Caroline arranged it for her. That's normally what happens at these things. Someone books a stripper thinking it will be a laugh and really, it's just uncomfortable. I always feel a bit sorry for them."

Eric laughed. "What?" I asked grumpily.

"Oh Sookie. I don't think you have to be sorry for the strippers."

"Well I am. I wouldn't want to do it."

"Oh, but you're so good at it" Eric said running a hand up my leg.

"Well that was once. And for an audience of one. I wasn't exactly going to take it up as a part-time job."

"No. No, that wouldn't be a great idea at all" Eric said, looking thoughtful. "Still" he continued, "In a way it seems a shame that you missed out today."

"Missed out on what?" I asked.

"A stripper."

"No. No, it's really not. Like I said, I don't like them and…ohhh" realisation dawned on me. Well, I thought I understood what Eric was getting at. He was offering to strip for me…possibly.

I looked at Eric, and he grinned back, looking pretty pleased with himself. "You want to strip, for me?" I asked.

Eric shrugged. "I could. If you wanted. If you didn't think it would be too…dodgy, or whatever."

"Um" I said. "Um, I'm not sure I could keep a straight face. Would that dent your ego too much?" I wasn't sure about this, and I didn't really want to offend Eric.

"Nope. I don't care if you laugh. As long as you still pay me at the end of it…"

"Eric! I'm not giving you any money!"

"Who said anything about money?" Eric asked, leaning in so he was speaking directly into my ear. Oh.

"OK. Go on then" I agreed.

Eric stood up beside the bed. "Do you want music?" I asked. He reached over and switched on the radio in the alarm clock. He obviously wasn't that fussed with the music because he just left it on whatever random song was playing.

"OK, off you go then" I said, settling back against the pillows.

Eric grabbed the hem of his t-shirt and made a great show of lifting it slowly up over his head and tossing it over to the other side of the room. Then he stopped and just stood there.

"Um" he said. "I feel like I need some moral support. Maybe you should take your t-shirt off too."

I didn't say anything; I just gave him a look. Of course he needed moral support. I pulled my t-shirt off. "I'm keeping the bra on, though" I said. "Or you'll get distracted."

Eric looked sad, but I just poked my tongue out at him. Then I cupped my hands around my mouth and called out "Come on! Get it off! Show us your bits!" Then I collapsed sideways giggling.

Eric just looked at me. "Really, Sookie? Bits? That's what you'd yell at a stripper?"

"Well, not me" I said, sitting upright again. "But, you know, the other women do. They're dreadful."

Eric looked like he didn't really believe me, but started undoing the fly on his jeans. When he had completely undone he turned around and made a great show of wiggling his backside at me, before he pulled them down.

"Woo hoo!" I yelled enthusiastically.

"Shhh!" Eric said. "For fuck's sake don't wake Felicia up!"

"Yeah. Oops" I said giggling. This was entertaining, but I couldn't stop giggling. Still it didn't seem to bother Eric.

"Now you" Eric said.

"What? Oh, my jeans? Jeez, the guys at hen's nights don't do this" I struggled out of my jeans; it wasn't easy when I was sitting down and they stuck on my thighs.

"No, well half the women in bachelorette parties wear next to nothing so they wouldn't have to." OK, I decided, I wasn't going to ask Eric what made him the expert on bachelorette parties or hen's nights or whatever you wanted to call them.

Keeping his back to me, Eric pulled down his underpants while I clapped enthusiastically. It seemed mean not to. Maybe it would make up for the giggling. Then Eric sat on the bed and pulled me over so I was straddling his lap. "How does this work?" I asked. "I thought you were the stripper?"

"I don't really think you want me to sit on you, Sookie" Eric said, nuzzling my neck and undoing my bra at the same time.

"Yeah, I guess. You realise though you don't have to take my clothes off as well as yours, though, don't you?" I asked. I'd lost my bra and Eric had his hands in the waistband of my knickers, probably waiting for me to lift up so he could pull them down.

"I've moved on" Eric said, as I did stand up so I could get rid of my underwear. "Now I'm claiming my payment."

"If I really enjoyed it, do I have to tip you as well?" I asked, resuming my place on Eric's lap and putting my hands around his neck.

"Yep" Eric said, as he lay back on the bed, taking me with him.

"I don't know. You Americans have odd ideas, don't you?" I said, but Eric didn't reply as his mouth was very busy elsewhere. Oh well, I thought, maybe this once I'd go with the tipping thing.

**Thanks for reading!**


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N It's quite late at night here, so I hope this all makes sense!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Kids, even quite little ones, who are, say, only 21 months old, can be quite smart at times. Felicia, for instance, worked out pretty quickly that if you arrive in your parent's bedroom in the middle of the night do not, under any circumstances, go to Mummy's side of the bed.

Mummy is a firm believer in the practice of 'return to bed' and two year's previously spent three night's using it to break your older sister when she moved into a big bed.

Daddy, on the other hand, is a much better choice. Daddy is much keener on actually remaining in bed himself and therefore less interested in returning anyone else to their own bed. If you play your cards right he'll let you stay and bounce all over the bed. Until you wake Mummy up.

"Felicia" I said, trying to remain calm. "You just landed on my head."

"Sowwy." Felicia kept bouncing.

"Eric, why is she on the bed?

"Ungh?"

"Didn't you think to put her back into her own bed?"

"It doesn't work. She doesn't stay there."

"Yeah, but that's not the point." I sat up in bed to survey the situation. Felicia immediately sat down really close to Eric, sensing there might be trouble brewing. Eric just lay there, with his eyes closed. Probably hoping the pair of us would go away and leave him in peace.

"We have to be consistent about this" I continued. "If she thinks it's OK to get up in the night, she'll keep getting up."

"Sookie, she'll get up anyway. Short of nailing a cover to the top of the crib I'm not sure what we can do." Eric at least opened his eyes, but he stayed glued to his pillow.

"That still doesn't mean you give up. Come on Felicia, it's time to go back to your own bed."

"Nooooo!" she cried, looking desperately at Eric.

I got out my side of the bed and walked around to Eric's, then leant over him to try to grab Felicia who scooted sideways to try to evade me. "Felicia!" I warned. "Come here."

"Nooooo!" she said again, moving further over to my side of the bed with Sockie clutched in her hand.

"Eric" I said, feeling a bit exasperated. "If you could actually help here, I would really, really appreciate it." The words sounded fairly polite, but I was talking through gritted teeth in my effort to remain nice to everyone. I am not naturally a morning person, and that includes the early hours of the morning.

"If we'd just left her in the first place, we could have gone back to sleep" Eric said, sitting up, slowly.

"How is that a solution? She jumped on me. And if we let her get away with it tonight, she'll come and jump on me again tomorrow night. You complain about Bob, but he's no problem compared to this. He just curls up and goes to sleep, without sticking a chewed sock anywhere near my face. But Felicia wants to hang out with you. So will the pair of you please, PLEASE go and hang out somewhere else and let me go to sleep now, because this is a busy week and I have stuff to do tomorrow and I don't want to be awake now. I want to be asleep too. But I'm a responsible person who isn't going to let my child wander around at night. So I'm up. I'm up and you're not and it's not fair." I ran out of steam and I stopped, managing to suppress the urge I had to stamp my foot into the bargain.

"Um, you woke up cranky…" Eric said.

"You make me cranky!" I hissed at him.

"'rankee?" Felicia said from the spot where she'd been watching me, far on the other side of the bed.

"Yeah…Mummy's a bit stressed" Eric told her.

"Mummy's a bit awake, when she shouldn't be." I glared at Eric and he got the hint and grabbed Felicia before she moved again and disappeared off to her room with her.

I got back into bed. A minute or so later Amelia appeared. "I got woken up" she announced.

"Join the club" I muttered.

"Where's everyone" she asked, climbing into bed next to me.

"Eric's with Felicia."

"Oh."

We were silent for a bit then Eric appeared back in the bedroom. "Not you too?" he asked Amelia.

"It was noisy. I thought it might be morning."

"It's not. You can go back to bed."

"Can I read books?"

"No!" I said "It's only 3am. You have to go back to sleep."

Amelia sighed. "Fine! I was just asking. But if you say no then I guess I won't. Although I don't see how I can go back to sleep _now_. I'm really awake." Amelia got off the bed and stomped off.

Eric slid under the covers and propped himself up on one elbow looking at me. "Are you still shitty with me?" he asked.

"I haven't decided" I admitted. I was stressed, I was grumpy and I really just wanted to go back to sleep. I looked over at Eric. He was being all annoyingly nice now that he was properly awake.

This probably meant he knew he was in the wrong in the first place I decided.

"She can't wander around every night" I said.

"Yeah, I know. But she's, um, stubbornly persistent about getting up."

"Mmm-hmm. She is. We'll have to think of something."

"Yeah, we will."

"And we'll have to stick to it. Both of us."

"Yeah, I know" Eric sighed. "It's just…well…" he trailed off.

"You like being the fun parent" I said.

"Um…it's more that I don't like to stop her being her."

"Trust me. She'll still be Felicia even if she's the version who stays in the cot all night. We'll just be nicer parents for having had more sleep."

"I guess."

"And she'll still love you just the same."

"I know."

"But I might love you more if I don't have to yell at you in the middle of the night."

Eric snorted. "You don't _have_ to yell at me at all Sookie."

"No, I think you'll find I'm hard-wired to yell when I'm woken up unexpectedly."

"OK, well then I'm hard-wired to do this if I'm woken up in the middle of the night" Eric rolled on top of me, pinning me to the bed.

"Um. Not sure this is really going to help me get back to sleep" I said as Eric nuzzled my neck. "And ow, that's still scratchy!"

"Well, it's going to help me sleep. I'm really awake now."

"OK, well if you're really awake go and check that your little mate is really asleep and then I might consider it."

Eric stopped and looked at me. "I mean it" I said. "I'm not starting anything that might be stopped by a small intruder in the bedroom."

Eric sighed and rolled out of bed. I heard him padding down the hallway. I heard him talking to Felicia in hushed tones trying to persuade her that sleep was the best option now. And then I didn't hear anything else until morning because I fell asleep.

EPOV

Sookie was stressed. Really fucking stressed. I hadn't figured out completely why. I mean, we were doing the simplest ceremony possible, well, I thought so. Everything seemed to be figured out. But yet, Sookie was fucking grumpy. And there were lists everywhere.

I just tried to stay out of her way, so that when she started up again about how she wasn't going to get all carried away and turn into a Bridezilla, I didn't feel the need to contradict her.

The worst fucking bit was the looks I was getting because I hadn't shaved. I wanted to shave. Especially now that Calvin had fucking given up because the chain of command down from Lorena had decided he looked too fucking scruffy to be in a delivery room. But at the same time, I didn't exactly want to give in, or something.

Although I wasn't really sure what I was giving in to.

So I just kept quiet, did the things Sookie asked me to do, tried not do anything that was going to piss her off, and waited for Saturday to finally get here.

SPOV

The ceremony was on everyone's mind this week. Amelia's included it seemed. She came to talk to me while I was making dinner.

"I'm getting married" she announced. "To Fergus."

"Fergus? Is he at pre-school?" I asked.

"Yep."

"Oh. Is he nice? Because you want to marry someone nice."

"He's nice. He's nicer than Tyler."

"Well that's good. Does he know you're getting married?"

Amelia looked thoughtful. "No. I'll tell him when I go back to pre-school."

"Well it might be a good idea" I said. "Just so he knows."

"Yeah. They'll probably put out a big table and a lot of food for us."

"What? At pre-school?"

"Yeah. So we can get married." And then she ran off. I went back to making lasagne until the phone rang. It was Jason. He had things on his mind too.

"So, Sook, um. I don't have to get fuckin' dressed up, eh? 'Cos it's just on Piha? "

"No, but for God's sake please don't wear anything obviously ripped or stained."

"Oh. Oh, OK then. Or what, eh? You'd get Eric to throw me out on my arse?" he asked laughingly.

"No, I'd bloody throw you out. I get to deal with my own idiot relatives."

"Yeah, ha bloody ha, Sookie. Like you even could, eh."

"Don't bloody tempt me, Jason. I swear to God now is not the time to push me."

"Shit, you sound fuckin' stressed eh? Is that 'cos of the wedding?"

"No, it's not. The wedding is fine, it's all under control." Well, mostly, I thought. "The only thing stressing me out is you. That and the fact Felicia keeps getting up at night."

"Yeah. Fuckin' Wayne used to do that. Vaseline'll fix it, eh?"

"Vaseline?" I was curious as to how that solved anything.

"Yeah. Vaseline the door handle in her room. She won't be able to turn it and it'll be sweet. Sometimes you find them asleep on the floor by the door, eh? It makes it a bit fuckin' hard to get it open though, when they do that. But at least you don't have to get up in the night."

"OK. I'll bear that in mind." Jason had a solution for everything, but I just wasn't sure that I wanted to put all of them into practice. "So did you need to know anything else?"

"Oh, just, um. Well am I giving you away? 'Cos I did last time, eh?"

Oh, right. How did I tell him nicely that he wasn't really required. I was a big girl and didn't need my big brother pretending to be my dad. "Um, no. It's OK, Jase. You don't have to do anything, other than just enjoy yourself."

"Choice. 'Cos Eric's paying, eh?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Nothing, nothing. Just I'm, um, really looking forward to it, eh? Anyway, I gotta go, think Crystal's got my tea 's a lamb roast. I don't want to fuckin' miss out on the meat, eh?"

"No, you wouldn't. OK, we'll see you Saturday."

"Yep, take care Sook."

And then he was gone and I could go back to trying to make dinner. Except that then Eric appeared in the kitchen, with Felicia trailing after him.

"Who was that?" he asked me as Felicia held onto his hands and tried to get him to swing her up.

"Jason. Just checking on Saturday. He was asking about the dress code. Christ knows what he thinks he's going to wear. I hope it's reasonably appropriate. Although Jason isn't always good with appropriate."

"Yeah. OK." Eric looked thoughtful. "So, um, anything I can do?"

"No. I'm all under control. Except for the fact that dinner is running a bit late because of Jason. Oh and Amelia was chatting to me earlier. She's getting married. To Fergus. From pre-school. Do you know Fergus?"

Eric shook his head. "No, not really."

"Well she said he was nice. But he just doesn't know yet they're getting married yet."

"Oh, OK." Eric looked like he wanted to say something else, but Felicia was jumping all over him and I was kind of occupied getting dinner organised so it came to nothing.

Eventually dinner made it to the table, along with everyone else. Amelia dragged her heels a bit and we started without her which made her grumpy but honestly, if we waited for her we'd wait forever.

I was a bit distracted, going over the lists of stuff in my head. It wasn't a lot. I'd had worse, but the lodge who was organising the reception had been asking a few questions today and I'd been dealing with them and I was just a bit all over the place. Probably the lack of sleep wasn't helping me either.

Eric spent the first part of dinner just watching me. It kind of made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I wasn't sure why I was so fascinating all of a sudden. He was probably waiting for my head to blow off with the pent-up stress or something. But really, I wasn't that stressed. I was sure I wasn't.

What finally broke the tension was Eric turning to Amelia and saying "So I hear you're getting married. To Fergus."

I expected Amelia to go off on one of her elaborate stories about what had happened, or was going to happen, none of which would be true but would be cobbled together from books and movies and things she'd heard me talking about. Instead she fixed Eric with a level gaze and replied coolly "Why do you want to know?"

That was obviously not the response Eric was expecting either because he looked a bit flustered. "I was just interested, is all. Mom said you had it all arranged."

"Yeah. But it's between us." Amelia took another mouthful of lasagne and acted like it was the most natural thing in the world that she had a fiancé she wasn't really prepared to talk to Eric about.

Eric just looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I tried not to laugh. God, if she was going to be like this as a teenager I was definitely leaving home. I couldn't imagine Eric letting it go quite so easily once she was over the age of about 12. He'd definitely want to know the details. Especially if she was actually getting married.

EPOV

Amelia's bizarre fucking engagement to some poor 4 year old kid who had no fucking clue what was about to hit him, was really the only thing that made Sookie smile all night. She was totally fucking off somehow, and she wouldn't talk about it.

Well, she'd tell me she was tired, because of Felicia. Or that she had a lot going on, because of Saturday, but I was pretty sure there was something else going on underneath all of that. Something she didn't want to talk about it.

And I didn't know what the fuck it was. I really fucking hoped she wasn't having doubts. Not after all this time. Not after everything we'd been through.

After dinner was cleaned up and the kids were in bed, probably temporarily in the case of Felicia, I made coffee and tried to find Sookie. She wasn't where I thought she'd be, which was in the house. Instead I found her out in the garden.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Oh. Watering the tomato plant that belongs to Amelia. I don't want it to die on her. Look, we're actually getting some tomatoes."

"Oh, OK. Cool. Well come inside."

"Yeah, I will. In a minute." She didn't move though, just stood there holding Amelia's pink watering can and staring out at the sky.

I put my hands on her shoulders. "Are you OK?" I tried asking again. I probably still wasn't going to get a straight answer, but I was starting to get a bit fucking worried.

"Yeah, I am. It's OK. I'm just stressed about Saturday. You know, they keep ringing me about stupid things, like what particular type of roses do I want on the cake and I have to keep saying 'I don't care' because I don't. I'm not doing that sort of thing again, I don't want to be all stressed about the tiny little details. But then…well…" she just trailed off. "I should go inside" she said before turning and heading back into the house, placing Amelia's watering can on the deck on her way in.

I was still wasn't any closer to figuring out what on earth was going on, but I really didn't fucking want to be standing out here by myself so I followed Sookie inside. She was in the kitchen, with a list in her hand when I got there.

"Thanks for the coffee" she said, taking a sip and leaning against the kitchen counter.

"Yeah, that's OK." I wasn't sure what to do. I just shut the fuck up and waited to see what happened next.

Nothing much did for a while. Sookie went through her usual nightly routine, she was quiet though. It always made me a bit fucking nervous when she was quiet. I liked it when she talked on and on about really stupid shit that I didn't usually give a fuck about. That was sure sign she was happy. This was just, well, depressing.

She went into the bathroom to get ready for bed and I resolved that I was going to have to try asking her again. I was starting to think that maybe she didn't want to go through with it. Maybe all this stress was because the whole thing was a bad idea to her and she wanted to run screaming for the hills. I tried to think of a subtle way of checking that that wasn't really her plan.

As she walked back into the bedroom she still looked distracted. "Sookie" I said, trying to get her attention.

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to call it off?" I hadn't come up with anything less blunt and I was sick of the bullshit quite frankly. If she wanted to run away, I wanted to know now.

She frowned. "No. What gave you that idea?"

I sighed. "Because you've been acting fucking weird since Sunday. It's, what, two days until the wedding…or whatever, and I need to know."

"Oh" she said, sitting down on the bed. "Oh. No, I don't want to call it off at all."

"So what the fuck is going on then? Because it's something. And it's not just tiredness or stress, I've seen you tired and stressed and this is…well, it's fucking something else." I waited to see what reaction that got.

Sookie sat there for a bit, chewing her lip. Then she sighed. Then she finally turned and looked at me. "I feel…guilty" she said in a small voice.

"Guilty? What the fuck about?" That wasn't what I was expecting to hear. What the fuck had she done to feel guilty about.

"Yeah. That…well that I don't care about the tiny details…"

"Oh, well I don't think the caterers really care all that much that you're not bossing them around" I interjected. This seemed a really fucking crazy thing to feel guilty about.

"Shut up for a minute Eric" Sookie said gently. "Just, let me explain myself or we'll be here until Felicia gets up. Which is probably in about two hour's time."

I did as I was told and just waited.

"So anyway" Sookie continued, "I feel guilty because they ask me about something minor, and I say 'I don't care' and then I think that…well, I think that I should care. I should care…because…because you haven't done this before, and I should be trying to make it all perfect. For you." She looked at me and her eyes were glistening as though she was about to start crying any second. For the life of me I was struggling to figure out what the problem was.

"So, you think I care about the flowers on the cake? Because I really fucking don't. I didn't even know there were going to be flowers on the cake. I'm sure they'll look nice, but really. The cake's probably OK as just cake."

Sookie sighed in a way that told me I hadn't really grasped the problem. I'd tried but we were having a major communication problem here, obviously. "No, Eric" she said. "I know you don't, but the point is that well, first time round, I was all over the minor details. I knew exactly what was happening. I picked the silverware they laid out for the reception for God's sake. I spent ages debating flowers versus candelabra. I spent a morning at the Bridal fair researching different kinds of favours we could put out. This time I'm just…well I haven't been doing that. I feel like I should, but it just…well it doesn't feel important. Then I feel guilty. I don't know what it means that it doesn't feel important. Is it better, or worse? I don't know! And it's killing me that I don't." She looked at me imploringly, as if I knew the answer.

I was starting to wish I'd never opened this can of worms.

"Um" I said, "Um, I don't know either. I mean. Shit, does any of that stuff really make a difference to you actually wanting to get married?"

Sookie shook her head. "No, I mean, I would have held it here and done the food myself, but it would have been a bit full-on."

"So, then, what's the problem?" I was trying to figure out how her brain was working through all of this and I sure as fuck had no idea how she was making all these connections. To me, it just didn't make sense.

"I feel like I'm…like I'm letting you down or something. That I should be making more of an effort, because this could be it for you. The only one you'll get."

I put my arm around her and pulled her in. "Sookie, I don't think you have to worry quite so much about making it perfect for me. Just fucking show up, that'll make it perfect" I paused, then I thought of something. "_Could_ be the only one?" I asked.

"Yeah" she said, resting her head on my shoulder. "I might die, and then you'll have to re-marry. But you know, same thing I said to Amelia, please pick someone nice."

"OK. Well, let's not think about that right now anyway."

"Yeah. But you know, I changed my will and you're adopting the kids, so if I go you're responsible for their step-mother. Or step-mom I guess, if you take them back to the States. Don't let them forget where they came from though. And don't let them get any weird hybrid American-Kiwi accents, because then they won't fit in anywhere."

"Fuck, Sookie, you're just going totally off-topic here. I can see where Amelia gets her randomness from."

Sookie turned her head to look at me, and then she laughed. A proper laugh, thank fuck. She seemed to be over her mood, whatever the hell it had been about.

"Yeah, but at least I didn't tell you to keep them away from the dragons or anything. God, she's entertaining. But she does ramble on and on sometimes. I just hope Fergus knows what he's in for. Poor kid." And then she started giggling again. Yeah, poor fucking Fergus. I kind of sympathised with him. I suspected that if Amelia wanted to marry him, then there was no hope for him.

Sookie stopped laughing and wiped her eyes. "So you're not mad?" she asked.

"What? About Amelia getting married? I kind of hoped she'd be older" I said.

"No. About me letting the minor stuff slide this time."

"Sookie, I said before, just fucking show up. That's all I want. I really just want to marry you. I don't give a shit about the rest of it."

"Yeah, but Jason thinks we're feeding him now, so I guess we'll have to put something on."

"Well that's fine, but I really wouldn't care if we just gave them all sandwiches on a picnic rug."

"Fair enough." Sookie took a deep breath. "You know" she said, "I do feel better now I've got that off my chest."

"Yeah, I can't say that I'm fond of things on your chest, either" I said, slipping my hand into her tank top and grabbing her boob. She obligingly pushed her chest into my hand. I took that as an invitation to kiss her and try to push the tank top strap down. But it didn't really go very far.

"It'll have to come off" she said, pulling away from me.

"Great" I said, "Let's just get everything off your chest tonight." Sookie sat up a bit and pulled it over her head and then lay back.

"You know" she said, as I latched onto a nipple, "I would have thought you'd be over my boobs by now."

"Why the fuck would I be?" I asked.

"Because. You know. They're just there. All the time."

"And that's what I like about them, now shut up, because I can't talk and do this." I ran my tongue around her nipple, teasing it, and then did the same to the other one. Sookie laughed, but the laughs turned to moans and, thankfully, no complaints about the scratchy beard.

"We might have to be quick" she said, after a while. "In case Felicia breaks out."

"I locked the door" I said.

"Yeah, but that could be worse. She'll just run around the house."

"Stop talking Sookie."

"Fine."

To make sure she did I moved back up the bed and kissed her, while trying to pull her pyjama bottoms off at the same time. I got them down to her thighs and then she kicked them off the rest of the way, opening her legs so I could put my hand on her clit and make her squirm rather pleasingly. That was always fucking fantastic to watch.

I took off my boxers and rubbed my cock against her leg to get some friction. Her skin was so soft and warm. She felt amazing. When she was wet and bucking against my hand I moved over her and pushed in. I loved that feeling. Every fucking time.

I couldn't believe that Sookie had been so worried about a few fucking minor details. I didn't fucking care. These were the details I did care about. The way she felt when she was underneath me, the way she tasted, the way she looked when she came, the way it felt to be inside her. I just fucking loved her so much, and that was all she needed to give me, just her. Not the perfect fucking wedding. Just her.

And then she moved her hips up to just the right angle and I fucking gave up thinking for a while.

**Thanks for reading!**


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N So here is the Civil Union. Well, the first part anyway. I really struggled writing it, so I hope you all like it. I'll stick some links on my profile for some of the things mentioned, for those interested.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

After I finally figured out what the problem was, that I was feeling guilty about the perfect wedding that I wasn't giving Eric, which he didn't seem to care about anyway, things started to go a bit better, and certainly a lot quicker. I got through everything on my lists, I stopped feeling quite so out of control, and I even got a bit more sleep as Felicia was sleeping a little bit better. She was still getting up, but she wasn't bouncing around our bed at least. Although Eric was stuck spending a fair amount of the night sitting with her to persuade her to go to sleep.

So Saturday morning we were all up early, mainly because I got woken up by Amelia telling Felicia off in the hallway for getting out of bed. Why Amelia was out of bed and able to catch Felicia out in the first place was a question I probably wasn't going to get a straight answer to, but at least it got me out of bed and moving.

I sent Felicia in to get Eric out of bed and could hear her yelling "Up, Daddy! Up!" enthusiastically, while scrambling onto the bed. If the noise and movement didn't wake him up, then the smell would. Her nappy was in dire need of changing.

I just hoped she didn't do that during the ceremony, it wouldn't be a good look.

Amelia trotted after me into the kitchen. "Today" she announced "I get to be a princess. I'm really looking forward to it."

"Yep" I agreed. "You do." I wondered if that made me queen for a day or something.

"So I want toast and jam, Mummy. Can you make it quickly?"

Yeah, I guessed it didn't. I was still just plain old Mummy in her dressing gown making toast.

After a while Eric appeared with Felicia. "That was disgusting" he said, wrinkling his nose.

"What was?" I asked, going for innocent.

Eric just looked at me. "You knew, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about" I said, trying to keep a straight face. "I've been busy making madam's toast."

"Yeah, I believe you. You never noticed the smell wafting around Felicia at all."

"No, I must be used to it after all these years."

Eric looked at me. "You're a terrible liar, Sookie" he said.

I was going to say something smart back, but I couldn't think of anything. Instead, I pretended to get something out of the pantry so Eric couldn't see me trying to hold in my giggles.

Eric moved so he was standing behind me and pulled me against him. "So you really want to start married life with a lie?" he asked me.

"No, but I didn't really want to start it up to my elbows in a pooey nappy, either" I said, turning around to face him. "I figured maybe I could be a princess. For about two minutes, anyway."

Eric kissed my forehead and looked like he was going to say something else, but then Amelia stomped over and said "Where's my toast?" and I had to go and sort that out.

It took us most of the morning to get ourselves all packed up and in the car. Amelia decided the morning was all about her and refused to help at all with gathering stuff up. And there seemed to be a lot of stuff. There were bags for all of us for overnight, plus clothes for the actual ceremony and things like emergency food and colouring-in supplies. It only just fit.

But we managed to hit the road at the right time and we were off to Piha. This was it. It was really happening today.

EPOV

It seemed weird that the morning started just the same as any other Saturday. Somehow I felt like there should be more to it, that it should be obvious that today was special. But it wasn't. Sookie ditched Felicia with me so I got to deal with the disgusting diaper and Amelia was wandering around thinking the world revolved around her.

It felt as though there should be…more. Or something. But I didn't really know what. Sookie didn't seem to mind. She was busy packing every bag we owned and ticking things off her lists. I made sure I had what I wanted and left her to the rest.

And then we all got in the car and drove out to Piha. We were getting ready at the lodge where they were holding the reception and then heading back to Auckland in the evening when it was all finished.

By which time, finally, Sookie might fucking stop complaining every time I called her my wife.

SPOV

We got to the lodge and the owners, Katherine and Sallie, came out to meet us and take us through the preparations to date. The tables they'd set out in the garden looked beautiful. The morning had been over-cast, but it was rapidly clearing up and we shouldn't have any problem eating outside. Eric was quiet, he just nodded as they spoke to us and he answered any direct questions. I wondered what he was thinking, if he was nervous, if he wished his dad was going be here. There was probably no point asking him as I'd never find out, but it might be nice to know. Just once.

When we'd finished checking everything we retired to the rooms they were letting us use to get ready. Although of course I had two extra people to get ready as well as myself. I might not have Jason to give me away, but I did have two little princesses to get into their dresses first.

I had considered buying them something really flash to wear, like maybe going to one of those shops that sold designer children's wear. Except that then I realised they were going to spend half the afternoon on a black-sand beach, followed by a function in a garden. Expensive was a waste of money. So instead I went to Cotton On Kids, purveyor of everything cheap and cheerful and bought two pale pink ballet skirts, and two pink t-shirts with fabric roses on the front. It was probably all going to unravel in about two minutes, but frankly, Amelia didn't care. She was mostly fascinated with the fact she had sequinned ballet slippers and a tiara to wear. I'd figured there was no point arguing with a four year old about what was appropriate head-gear for a flower-girl.

Felicia just sat there picking at the layers of tulle on her skirt. "Prickly" she commented. "Like Daddy."

"Yeah" I agreed. He'd still been prickly when I'd sent him off to get ready. I'd given up hoping for that to change anytime soon and resigned myself to the fact he was going to look like a total beach-bum later on.

Amelia wandered over and frowned at Felicia, who had pulled her tiara off and was banging it on the ground. "You're a sucky princess" she said.

"Amelia!" I warned. Where had she learnt that word, I thought. But Felicia had misheard.

"Sockie?" she asked, plaintively. "Sockie?" Oh crap, I thought. I had been trying to keep her away from Sockie so she wouldn't want to carry it to the ceremony with her. But now she'd remembered it there was no dissuading her. "Sockie!" she cried, rifling through my bag.

"Hang on" I said, grabbing Sockie for her. Maybe if she gave him a quick cuddle now she'd be prepared to part with him later I thought. Probably not.

I decided if I ever actually wanted to get ready it was probably best to just let the kids sort themselves out and worry about myself.

EPOV

It was kind of lonely getting ready by myself. I wasn't really used to having this much privacy anymore. Felicia liked to follow me everywhere. Even into the bathroom. She didn't really do boundaries.

She even liked to come and watch me shave, although I hadn't been doing that recently of course. I looked in the mirror. Yeah, I thought, the beard has probably got to go.

SPOV

By the time I was ready Felicia had already taken her skirt off once and had to be coaxed back into it. She really wasn't buying the whole princess thing.

I might not have felt quite like a princess, but I felt pretty good about myself. I really loved my dress, although I'd had to negotiate about the amount of roses they'd wanted to stitch onto the neckline. I wasn't sure I needed too much extra embellishment in that area. It was pale pink, which I hoped would look good against the black sand, and it was really pretty.

I'd done my own hair and makeup. I'd put my hair up with a few sparkly clips in it. I figured I was past the tiara stage. As was Felicia without ever having started it, she really didn't want to keep hers on at all.

But she wasn't giving up Sockie anytime soon.

I slipped on some flat gold sandals. That was the only downside of getting married on sand; I wouldn't get to wear any shoes with height. Even if Eric wasn't wearing shoes I was still going to look pretty short next to him. There was no getting around that. Maybe we could take a few photos where I stood on a rock or something.

There was a knock at the door and Sallie stuck her head around it. "They're ready when you are" she said.

So this was it.

I hustled Amelia and Felicia ahead of me and we walked through the garden and down to the beach. I could see everyone there waiting for me. It was only a small group, Andy and Halleigh, JB and Tara, Jason and Crystal, Hadley and Tony, Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev and Judith and Calvin. Thankfully someone had found Judith a chair as she looked really uncomfortable. There were various kids running around the outside of the group and you couldn't blame them for not standing still on a beach.

And then of course there was Eric, standing there, waiting for me. He'd been ecstatic about not getting dressed up so he was wearing a simple white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and pale khakis that he'd rolled up as well. And no shoes. I guess the black sand wasn't too hot today then.

I smiled at him, and he smiled at me. And it took me a minute to realise, but he'd shaved. Thank fuck for that I thought.

The plan had been for the kids to walk slowly down the makeshift aisle first. That didn't happen. Felicia took one look at Eric, yelled "Daddy!" like she hadn't seen him in a week and ran off towards him, falling over on the sand once, before picking herself back up and carrying on. By the time she got to Eric her tiara was on an angle and her skirt was half hiked-up, but she didn't seem to care. She bounced around holding onto Eric's leg and waving Sockie which I hadn't been able to persuade her to leave in my bag.

Amelia just sighed at Felicia's display, and started making her way slowly towards Eric and Octavia. Only she was going really slowly. Incredibly slowly. She was determined to milk this moment for all it was worth. I was half-expecting her to start waving serenely, just like the Queen, at any moment.

There wasn't much I could do, short of yelling 'Hurry up!' at her. So I just had to wait. And wait.

Eventually Eric cracked and said "Amelia, you can just come here now."

She stopped dead in her tracks. "What?" she asked.

"Just come here. Let your mum have her turn."

She turned and looked at me, as though she'd completely forgotten I was there at all. "Oh, OK" she said, and then she headed off to stand next to Eric.

And finally, I got to walk towards Eric. I tried to keep my pace somewhere between Felicia's and Amelia's. But it was probably closer to Felicia's. She was now sitting down covering Eric's feet with sand, while Amelia was standing at the front, next to Octavia, as though she was in charge of the ceremony as well.

When I reached Eric he was still just smiling at me. I smiled back. I handed the roses I was carrying to Tara so my hands were free. And then Octavia started speaking.

"Welcome everyone. We are gathered here today to join Eric and Sookie in celebrating one of life's great moments. To recognise their commitment to one another, and to their children, Amelia and Felicia, and to add our best wishes as they join together in a civil union."

Octavia turned to look at each of us in turn. "Eric and Sookie, I ask that you both remember to treat yourself and each other with respect, and remind yourself often of what brought you together today. Always give priority to the gentleness, tenderness and kindness that your partnership deserves. When you are faced with the difficulties that confront every relationship from time to time, remember what still seems right between you, rather than focussing on what seems wrong. So as we remember that the sun is still there, even when it is hidden by dark clouds, you will remember the depth of your feelings and the strength of your union, even when it is beset with troubles. And if each of you takes responsibility for the quality of your life together then it will be filled with all the love and light that you deserve."

Octavia paused and looked at both of us. "Eric and Sookie would like to take this opportunity to speak from the heart about their feelings for each other."

And I got to go first. I turned to face Eric and we just stood there, holding hands. I took a deep breath. "Eric" I started, then I took a breath, trying to focus on just saying the words and not on the fact everyone was looking at me, or that Eric was looking at me and I might cry. I really didn't want to cry. I couldn't remember if I'd used water-proof mascara. "Eric, I choose you to be my partner in life, my love and the father to my children. I promise to always respect you, to cherish you and be true to you, no matter what happens. Forever and for always."

I let my breath out. OK, I felt good now I'd done the hard bit. It was Eric's turn now. "Sookie" he said, and I really thought I was going to cry. Bum. "I choose you to be my partner in life, my love and the mother to my children. I promise to always respect you, to cherish you and be true to you, no matter what happens. Forever and for always."

Eric relaxed a bit when that was over too. And I'd managed to hold off the tears. Now it was just the ring exchange. That wasn't too bad because Octavia told us what to say for that bit. But I had something after that which I'd planned without Eric's knowledge and I needed Amelia to do her part. She was still standing next to Octavia, so I caught her eye and pointed to the basket she was carrying, then to several of the guests. "What?" Amelia asked loudly.

I bent down to whisper to her "Go and hand the things out" I said.

"What things?" asked Amelia.

"In the basket. Remember?" I hissed.

"What? Oh yeah. OK." Amelia skipped off and I stood up. "Sorry" I said. I guess that was the trouble with kids in weddings, they were a bit random. Felicia was still happy with the pile of sand that was slowly covering Eric. In fact when he tried to move now he was going to have to practically dig himself out first.

Octavia smoothly picked up where she'd left off. "Do you have the rings?" she asked. We nodded and I fished Eric's ring out of my bra. "What?" I asked when he looked at me. The dress hadn't come with pockets and I wasn't stupid enough to give it to one of the kids. God knows it would have been buried in a pile of sand by now.

Eric just shook his head and chuckled. It's probably a good thing that he didn't know it was in there or he might have offered to get it out himself.

"Sookie" Octavia said "Repeat after me. I, Sookie, take thee, Eric to be my life-partner. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, in joy and sorrow and I promise my love to you."

I repeated the words, and Octavia said "With this ring, I take you as my life-partner, for as long as we both shall live."

I repeated that part too and then slipped the ring on Eric's finger. He'd chosen one with a Koru design inlaid in a contrasting gold, in reference to the fact he was getting a Kiwi wife. It looked nice, although I struggled a bit getting it on over his knuckle. I guessed it wasn't coming off again in a hurry.

Then Eric had his turn, and he slipped the wedding ring that was designed to nestle in against my engagement ring onto my finger. I'd remembered to switch the engagement ring to the other hand ahead of time at least. That was something I'd learned from last time around.

"Eric and Sookie" Octavia said, "in so much as the two of you have agreed to live together in your civil union, have promised your love for each other by these vows, the joining of your hands and the giving of these rings, I now declare you to be life-partners. Congratulations to both of you. And now" she continued "You may seal your union with a kiss."

Eric grabbed me before I could think and I forgot about everyone watching us for a moment. All too soon he pulled back. I was vaguely aware that people were clapping and someone, probably Jason, was wolf-whistling, but I was only really looking at Eric.

I reached up and stroked his cheek. "You shaved" I said.

"Yeah" he said. "Well I thought that if you were going to be a princess today, I couldn't very well look like a pauper, could I?"

I giggled. "Well, I feel kind of like a princess" I admitted. And then a bubble floated past me. I looked around and there were bubbles everywhere. Eric looked confused. He looked around and then realised that the bubbles were due to the fact that our guests all had small bottles of bubble mix and were blowing for all they were worth.

"Bubbles?" he asked me.

"Yeah. I thought it was appropriate" I said. We watched as some of the bubbles floated out to sea, carried on the wind. I looked around at the guests, all laughing as they competed to see who could blow the biggest bubble. Felicia had abandoned her sand-sculpture to chase some of them down, and the other small kids were doing the same. Except for Amelia, who had decided to interrogate Octavia about how you 'got to be in charge of weddings'. Yeah, I thought. She'd be good at that.

I looked back at Eric who was just staring down at me. And it was a long way down given my flat shoes. I felt as light as one of those bubbles. I felt happy. I felt whole.

I felt really, truly married to Eric.

"And now" he said in my ear "I get to celebrate with my wife."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the correct term was life-partner, and hadn't he been listening to Octavia at all, but I didn't. I just squeezed his hand and said "Yeah, celebrating seems like a really good idea about now."

**Thanks for reading!**


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N Hello! I'm back, after a rather busy weekend that involved throwing the baby a first birthday party and the first of many kid's Christmas parties we're going to. It's the joys of a summer Christmas, every organisation puts something on for the kids.**

**A few reviewers last time said they were sad this was coming to the end. Don't worry, it's not. I'm going to keep on going past the Civil Union to what's next. Christmas is coming after all!**

**Discliamer: Not mine.**

EPOV

The ceremony felt like it was over in about five minutes. I heard Octavia speaking. I'm pretty sure I said something. At a couple of points Sookie was talking, but I wasn't really listening. Mostly I was just watching Sookie. Occasionally her lip would wobble a bit and I was worried that she might cry, but she didn't.

And then at the end of it, Sookie was mine. It had only taken me a year. A year of not going, and then going and coming back. Of figuring out how not to fuck everything up every time I got scared. Of trying to work out how I fitted into Amelia and Felicia's lives. Of learning about Sookie and all her various moods and quirks; her bizarre desire to buy everything on sale, her inability to admit that she's just as stubborn as Amelia, the way she talks incessantly when she's happy, but hides in the bathroom when she isn't. The way she looks after Bob as if he's really a member of the family. The way she's always looked after me.

It's been so fucking long since I had anything that resembled a family, and I'm not even really sure that I ever did. It's been a steep learning curve. But it's been so fucking worth it.

Because I had Sookie.

However, I also had a small mountain of sand over my feet and I was trying to figure out how to dig myself out of Felicia's construction when I noticed all the bubbles drifting past. "Bubbles?" I asked Sookie. I didn't remember this being part of the plan, but it was entirely possible I hadn't been paying attention somewhere along the line.

She shrugged and smiled really broadly. "I thought it was appropriate" she said, and then she turned to watch some of the bubbles drift out towards the surf. I remembered the afternoon I'd asked her, over the paddling pool in the back yard, if she'd marry me. It was after the bubbles. I'd wondered if the whole thing had been so off-hand that she hadn't really noticed. But somewhere in there she'd been paying attention.

"And now" I said "I get to celebrate with my wife." I looked at Sookie, and I could almost hear her start to tell me that wasn't what she was, but in the end she bit her lip, narrowed her eyes and let me have it for today.

I managed to get my feet free of the sand and we signed the register Octavia had set out. People started drifting over to congratulate us. Sookie got cornered by Judith, who was complaining about a whole bunch of stuff I really didn't want to hear, and Calvin shook my hand. "Congrats" he said. "Well done. That's the hard bit done now, anyway." He laughed.

"Yeah" I agreed, although it hadn't seemed that hard at the time. Calvin, though, had taken it upon himself to see me through the day, even though I really didn't really feel the need for that much moral support. The company had been kind of nice though, while I was waiting for Sookie earlier. I hadn't paid a lot of attention to what Calvin was saying to me, but I had picked up on the subtext, which was that he wished he'd brought his surfboard and not his heavily pregnant wife. I could kind of understand where he was coming from, even if my one attempt at going surfing with him had resulted in me spending a lot of time in the water. I'd told Sookie I'd enjoyed it though. But I wasn't going back in a hurry.

I looked over at Sookie who was still stuck talking to Judith. I just hoped that Sookie was better at pregnancy than Judith seemed to be.

Eventually Calvin and Judith moved on and everyone else started to drift over to say congratulations to us. Sookie's Aunt Linda was particular effusive and seemed very keen on hugging me as well as Sookie. We only got rid of her after she decided she was desperate for a cigarette.

The rest of the guests drifted through and then Sallie, one of the owners of the lodge where we were having the reception, came to tell us it was time for photos. She was doubling as the photographer for the day and Sookie had said she 'didn't want a lot of really formal photos'. I didn't really have an opinion on that subject so I'd just kept quiet.

Sookie turned to me after Sallie told us to meet her over by the sand-dunes. "We should probably do photos with the girls before they end up as sandy messes. Um, you get Felicia I'll try and pry Amelia away from her new best friend Octavia" she said.

"OK" I agreed, heading off to find Felicia. It was a bit too late on the sandy mess front. "Felicia, is it really a good idea to use your shoe as a shovel?" I asked her. She was sitting building a sandcastle again, but had obviously decided that she needed better tools than just her hands. And she was ignoring me, engrossed as she was in her task.

"Leesha, we need to go for some photos now" I said, and she looked up at me.

"Wha'?" she asked.

"Just, um, come with me now." Felicia stood up and I realised that she wasn't actually wearing her skirt anymore, but instead had been sitting on it. It was half-covered in black sand. Fuck, I didn't think Sookie was exactly going to be thrilled at that.

I picked the skirt up and gave it a shake. The sand seemed to be determined to stick to the weird netting stuff that the skirt was made of. I brushed it off and decided we'd just have to live with it. Felicia wasn't keen on putting it back on though. "Nooo Daddy! Prickly!" she yelled when I tried to get her to step into it.

"Come on, it's just for a little while" I said, as I held her with one arm while trying to pull the skirt on with the other. Felicia took the opportunity to grab my face. "Not prickly" she said.

"Nope, not any more" I agreed. I picked up her shoes and shook them out too. "Shoes on" I said.

"Nooo!" Felicia stepped back.

"Come on, you need your shoes on"

"No shoes!" she said, pointing to my feet. Oh, yeah. I figured she had a point so I gave up on the shoes, and just picked her up to carry her back to Sookie for the photos. "Not prickly" she said again, stroking my cheek.

"Is it better?" I asked her.

She looked at me and nodded. "Not prickly."

We found Sookie, Amelia and Sallie who were all waiting for us to get started. "So, Octavia says that when I'm bigger, I could be in charge of weddings too. You get to stand at the front and everyone has to listen to you." Amelia was saying as we approached.

Sookie gave Felicia a critical look over and stopped at her feet. "Where are her shoes?" she asked me.

"Oh, um. They're around but she was using one as a shovel, so it's pretty sandy."

"No shoes!" Felicia re-iterated for her mother's benefit.

"Yeah, fine, OK. No shoes then" Sookie agreed, although she reached over and had another try at brushing all the sand off Felicia, before Sallie took over and told us how to pose.

We did some shots with the kids standing, then I picked up Amelia and Sookie held Felicia. That lasted for a minute or two before Felicia threw herself forwards and tried to get to me, and Sookie nearly dropped her in the process. "Daddy!" Felicia cried.

Sookie put her down and we did a couple of photos with me holding both of them, and then Amelia wanted Sookie to hold her. To her credit Sookie managed a few minutes holding Amelia before she had to put her down. I put Felicia down too, and the pair of them ran off to join the other kids.

Sookie stretched her arms out and looked at me. "Yeah" she said, "I'm obviously not as strong as I thought I was."

I kissed her on the head. "You're the strongest person I know" I said to her.

Sookie looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything. "What are you thinking?" I asked.

"Oh. I'm just letting you off because it's your wedding day" she said. "I'm just not even going to comment on the mushy stuff."

"You love the mushy stuff" I told her.

"Well I love you, anyway." Sookie reached up and kissed me again, and I was vaguely aware that the flash from the camera went off again.

When we broke apart, Sookie moved so she was standing further up the sand-dune. I just watched her. "I don't want to look like a complete short-arse" she muttered, rearranging her dress when she felt she was high enough. I just chuckled and we went back to posing for photos. Sallie snapped a few shots with Sookie in her newly elevated position, and then I put my arms behind her and scooped her up in my arms. "Ooh, warn me when you're going to do that!" Sookie said.

I kissed her on the forehead. "Well, if you wanted to be higher up, I thought I'd help."

"Yeah. OK. I trust you" she said, looking down, as though she was worried she was going to hit the sand any moment.

"Of course you do."

SPOV

I was glad when the photos were over. It's not really me, all that standing around and smiling. And no matter how much I liked my dress I was still always going to feel a bit like Mrs Blackbird standing next to Eric. Mrs Blackbird, who doesn't even get to be black but is stuck being boring old brown. Yeah, that was me.

Eric liked my dress too though, it appeared. When the photos were finally over, after we'd had some taken in the garden of the lodge as well as on the beach, and we were walking over to join the rest of the party, he stopped and pulled me to him, fingering one of the roses that decorated the neckline. "I like the dress" he murmured. "You look…lovely."

"Thank you" I said. "You look lovely too." I didn't mention the shaving again. He'd done it; we'd leave it at that. And look forward to next Movember, I guessed.

His hand though started to wander down from the rose until he was cupping my boob. "Really, Eric?" I asked him. "A boob-grab?"

"Mmm" he said. "I think it's allowed. I'm sure it was in the fine-print of that stuff we signed that I'm allowed to do that. Or encouraged. Or something." I just rolled my eyes. "You're wearing a lot of fabric though" he said, frowning.

"Yeah, well. There's a bra under there too. You'll have to wait until later to see that."

"You're no fun" Eric huffed.

"Nope. I don't have to be fun now. We're married."

Eric let out an exaggerated sigh. "Fuck, they warned me about this, but I didn't think you'd be one of those women."

I laughed. "Yep, I've got you now, you know. Trapped you forever. Stink for you." I patted Eric on the arm. "But now, we'd better go and find out what the guests are up to.

"Yeah, I guess" Eric said. "I'm sure all the other guys will commiserate with me."

"Yep. Except for Jason. He'll just laugh his arse off thinking he's escaped and you've been had. I think he doesn't realise that he's pretty settled now with Crystal."

We walked over to where the tables had been set up in the garden. The guests were standing around chatting and eating the hors d'oeuvres. Aunty Linda and Hadley were off on their own creating a little cloud of smoke. Lovely, I thought, they couldn't even make it through one night without their smokes. They waved me over.

"Lovely ceremony, love" Aunty Linda said.

"Yeah, it was nice. Although I didn't really get it" Hadley said. I refrained from rolling my eyes. There was a lot of stuff that Hadley didn't get. "Why did she keep saying civil union?"

"Because that's what it was. A civil union" I said, wondering if Hadley had even looked at the invitation.

"Isn't that for the gays?" Hadley asked, dropping her voice to a whisper as though gay was a dirty word.

"Not exclusively" I said. "Anyone can do it. And I didn't want to be, um, married again."

"Too bloody right" Aunty Linda agreed. "I never wanted to get married again after Had's father bloody left me. Arsehole. But Trev was OK with that, weren't you love?" The last bit was shouted at Uncle Trev who turned to us, looking confused.

"Eh?" he yelled back.

"Never mind" Aunty Linda shouted at him. "But marriage is a crock of shit if you ask me."

"I'd just like to be fuckin' married once, eh?" Hadley grumbled, looking at me with what I figured was a bit of envy. I guessed it was hard. Four kids to two dads and neither of them had exactly raced to marry her.

"Um, well, maybe you should ask Tony?" I asked her.

"Yeah, his Mum doesn't like me at all. Because I'm not Tongan and a good church-going girl. So he won't do anything to upset her." Oh. I didn't really know what to say to that. How did you stay with someone who was happy to father your kids but wouldn't marry you because his mum would be upset. I guessed she must really love him. Or something.

"Well, maybe one day…" I said, a bit vaguely, hoping to get off the subject. "Anyway, I should go and mingle."

"Yeah, you go love. When's the food coming out?" Aunty Linda asked.

"Soon I think. So the kids don't get too ratty" I replied, watching the kids racing around in the distance. Felicia had lost her skirt again. I was going to have to go and find her some leggings out of her bag before she got cold legs.

I drifted off to see who else I could talk to. Jason and Crystal came over. "Beautiful ceremony" Crystal said, kissing my cheek.

"Yeah, fuck Sookie. It was a bit fuckin' weird though, eh?" Jason said. "All that partners for life, shit."

"OK, thanks Jase" I said, a bit shortly.

"Oh yeah, sorry, eh?" Jason said, as Crystal glared at him. "I just meant, well. It's not like a normal marriage, eh?"

"It's completely normal, Jason, you're just an unsophisticated moron sometimes."

Jason face shifted between angry and thoughtful, and Crystal looked like she was struggling not to laugh.

"Anyway" Jason continued in the end. "I'm glad Eric made an honest woman of you and I didn't have to fuckin' beat him up or anything, eh?"

Crystal gave up and burst out laughing. "What?" Jason asked her.

"Yeah, like you fuckin' could Jason" Crystal said. "Fuck, Wayne bloody took you down the other day, eh? And he's 10."

"Fuck off" Jason replied. "We were just messing around, playing rugby and I let him have the advantage. Poor kid, if I don't let him have his chance he'd just get discouraged."

"Where are the kids anyway?" I asked, trying to stop this going too far. Jason wouldn't want his pride dented any further and was likely to get a bit snippy. And possibly want to demonstrate just how tough he was.

"Oh, it was a bit too far to bring them, eh?" Crystal said. "And Jase gets all bent out of shape if they make a mess in his precious fuckin' ute."

"They talk like there's no bloody tomorrow" Jason added. "But you'll see them at Christmas."

"Christmas?" this was new to me.

"Yeah, well Crystal's got family in Houhora, so we're going camping up there."

"Wow. That's like 6 hours from here, it will be a huge drive from your place" I said, starting to see where this was going.

"Yeah, so we thought we'd break it up."

"No worries, you can stay with us" I said.

"You've got room to put the tent up, eh?" Jason asked.

"Yeah, we could put it out the front, so the backyard is still free for the kids" I said, thinking on the fly. "Is it still the same tent?"

"Mum and Dad's old one? Fuck yeah. That tent is a fuckin' classic." Crystal rolled her eyes at that statement. I kind of believed her. She'd obviously stayed in it a lot more recently than I had. It had to be about 20 years old now. At least.

"Great, thanks Sook. It'll be great to have a family Christmas again." Oh, I thought. What? I hadn't realised they were going to be there for Christmas day.

"Oh yeah, no problem. It will be great." I was sure I could cope with Jason and Crystal and three kids. It would be easy.

"Fuckin' fantastic. Right, I'm going to go and get some grub, eh?" Jason said, wandering off with Crystal in tow. I could hear her saying "You said you'd asked Sookie and it was OK. Fuck, Jase, don't spring stuff like that on her. On her wedding day. I'm glad you're not my brother!"

Oh well, I thought, luckily I was used to him. I'd long lost Eric, although I could see him standing over talking to Andy. Probably moaning that I was no fun anymore. I went off to find Felicia some replacement clothes before the food got served.

EPOV

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves which I guess is what you want at these things. It was kind of weird to have people coming up and congratulating me all the time. It wasn't like I'd really done a lot, other than show up. Thank fuck Sookie had as well. I hadn't really doubted her, but still. I felt a lot fucking better now that it was signed and sealed. Even if she had decided she didn't have to be fun anymore.

I suspected I could still persuade her to fun occasionally though.

I ended up talking to Andy. He was holding Ruby, who promptly burst into tears when I tried to say hello to her.

"Clingy stage?" I asked.

"Yep. It's a nightmare. She even cries when she sees her grandmother. It gets Halleigh down a bit."

"Yeah, they get through it though" I glanced over at Felicia who was now sporting some rather jaunty striped leggings. I guessed Sookie had re-dressed her at some point.

Ruby still looked small to me, although she was the same age Felicia was when I first moved in. It still fucking amazed me that it had only taken a year to get from a baby who didn't move and who cried at strangers to the small person currently chasing her sister and some other kids around in a garden. She was fantastic, when she wasn't running around at night. But still.

I kind of liked the baby bit. And I kind of wanted to do it again. From the start. I wondered how long before I could bring it up again, or whether I had to wait for Sookie this time. Surely if we were 'life-partners' or whatever the fuck Octavia had pronounced us, I got a say too?

It looked as though Judith was moaning to Sookie again. Fuck, I thought, she'll put Sookie off completely soon. The sooner she gave birth the better.

Halleigh came over and fussed over Ruby and I left them to it. I went to grab a drink and ran into Jason.

"Hey, Eric mate!" he said, slapping my shoulder. "Fuck, eh? She got you and now you're fuckin' stuck here…or…" Jason frowned. "You're not fuckin' going to take Sookie back to the States are you?" He looked a bit worried.

I shook my head. "No. No, we're staying here. I've just resigned myself to the fact that none of my kids will ever say fish and chips correctly." I smiled at Jason, but he still looked a bit worried.

"Oh right. I was just a bit worried about Sookie, you know? 'Cos, fuck. From what I've seen on the telly, she'd hate the fuckin' States eh? Too many plastic people and shit like that."

I didn't want to tell him that he couldn't exactly believe everything he saw on TV. So I just said "No, definitely not going back. Everything I love is here."

"Cool. That's, um, fuckin' great, eh?" Jason looked relieved. Maybe he cared more about Sookie than he wanted to admit. "And you've got us coming for Christmas, so we'll be able to show you how Kiwis fuckin' celebrate, eh? It'll be choice." And maybe, I thought, he just wanted Sookie to be there to give him Christmas lunch.

"Yeah, it'll be great."

"Right, better get Crystal her drink before she fuckin' starts moaning. And she isn't even my fuckin' wife." He winked at me, and then he was off.

Calvin turned up again, to get another soda water for Judith. "She's not enjoying it today" he commented. "I hope the baby comes soon or else we might be getting divorced."

"Mmm" I said, not really wanting to talk about divorce today.

"Sookie happy you shaved?" he asked me.

"Oh. Yeah, I think so. She hadn't said she hated it, but it was pretty obvious. Leesh hated it too."

"Yeah, Jessie wasn't keen at all, either. None of them bloody were. Although I'm not sure Jude really cared. It was mainly her mum. She has…ideas. It's a bloody pain. But you feel a bit sorry for the old bat. It can't be easy to lose a kid like that…" He stopped and looked at the ground, realising, I guess, that I maybe didn't need to hear about Bill today. I didn't really care. His role as Lorena's son really meant fuck all to me. I didn't want to stop her being sad about it and if that was going to translate to her deciding how Calvin was going to look, then that was his fucking problem. As long as she didn't upset Sookie, or my kids, she could do what she wanted.

I just hoped she was OK with them tonight. Because as much as I loved them, I really wanted Sookie all to myself. We had a hotel room booked and it was going to be fucking fantastic. And we could have some fun. Probably a lot of fun.

And then they asked us all to sit down for dinner and I left Calvin and went to rejoin my wife.

**A/N Houhora is pronounced Ho-hor-rar.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N Thanks for all the reviews! Glad you're all enjoying the Civil Union.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

We all sat down for dinner. Well, everyone except most of the kids who resisted all attempts to get them to sit down. Felicia was probably the worst of the bunch, and after a couple of tries at grabbing her while she squealed "Noooo, Daddy!" at me and kept running, I gave up. She probably wasn't going to starve.

Amelia was enjoying her place next to Sookie though, and I suspect that she really thought the whole thing was for her. She wasn't really keen on the food though, despite the fact that I told her that was definitely going to enjoy it. Part of the problem was just that she was just talking far too much. More than anyone else at the table. Jason tried to tell Crystal that Sookie was exactly the same as a kid, which just earned him a glare from Sookie.

I was inclined to believe him, but I wasn't stupid enough to admit that openly. Not today.

Between courses Jason took it upon himself to offer a toast to us. He thanked me for taking Sookie off his hands and told me he didn't want her back because she was too stroppy. I was worried that he was in danger of Sookie showing him just how stroppy she could be, but she just smiled and laughed. Fuck, she must be in a really good mood.

After dinner was over we cut the cake. Sookie just rolled her eyes when I said "Hey, it's got roses on top of it!", and just told me to hurry up and grab the knife with her.

There was a bit of dancing afterwards, and then it all started to finish up. Most of the guests had kids they needed to get home. Andy and Halleigh left, as did Calvin and Judith, with Judith still muttering about how she was sure it was going to happen 'any minute now'. After we'd said goodbye to them, Sookie turned to me and said "I hope she doesn't go into labour tonight. We're supposed to have Jessica for them, and I doubt Lorena could cope with all three girls."

"Uh, yeah. But it won't really happen, will it? I mean, she's not due yet?"

Sookie shrugged. "You can't really predict babies. Jessica was really early."

"Oh, OK." Fuck I hoped we didn't have to go and collect someone else's kid tonight when we'd got rid of our own.

"Anyway, I'd better go and ring Lorena anyway, and let her know we're not too far away from being there."

"Oh, OK."

Sookie went to get her cellphone and I chatted to the rest of her family who seemed reluctant to leave anytime soon. When Sookie got back she said pointedly "I told Lorena we'd be leaving in the next half an hour."

"Oh, well we'd better head off too then, love" Linda said, as she hugged Sookie. "We'll see you at Christmas."

"Um, OK…" Sookie said. I'd thought I was the only one this was news to, but maybe not.

"Yeah" Linda continued, "Trev and I are taking the caravan up to Pakiri and we'll call in on the day. Don't worry; we won't stay for lunch or anything. We'll just have a cup of tea and see you all. I want to meet Crystal's kids. I'll bring the Christmas cake."

"You're making Gran's Christmas cake?" Sookie asked.

"Yeah, I usually do, although I can't get it how she used to make it. It's a bugger, eh?"

"It really is. I had a go last year, but it wasn't right. Was it, Eric?" Sookie looked at me. I wasn't sure what the right answer was, so I shrugged.

"Mum was the best at it" Linda continued.

"Mmm" Sookie agreed. "So, you're, um, not seeing Hadley on Christmas day?"

"No. You're going to Tony's mum, aren't you Hads?" she yelled over at Hadley, who was trying to get her sons to put their shoes on. They didn't look that old, but they were already about the same size as Hadley herself, so it didn't look like an easy task.

"Yep" Hadley called over. "Fuck, Samson, just sit still. Yeah, we're going to Church on Christmas day so we'll see you on Christmas Eve, eh Mum."

"Righto, love. So that's sorted then, yeah?" Linda asked Sookie.

"Yeah, no worries" Sookie said.

Linda, Hadley and the rest of them left and there was only Jason and Crystal left to say goodbye to. They were actually staying in the lodge for the night so they didn't have to go anywhere else. Sookie had told me that Jason had hinted about staying in our place for the night to save him the cost of accommodation, but she'd said she'd played dumb and hadn't offered. I was just surprised he hadn't asked outright, given how Jason normally acted.

"OK, we're off" Sookie said to Jason, after we'd loaded everything but the kids in the car. I was holding Felicia who had finally stood still long enough for me to grab her, and Amelia was hanging onto Sookie's leg.

"No worries, Sook. Great fuckin' day eh? And at least you didn't run off and ruin it all."

"When did I do that, Jason?"

"Aunt Claudine's wedding, remember? You were the flower-girl and you made a break for it, but Mum grabbed you."

"I was four Jason, and the page-boy put a weta on my arm."

Jason started laughing. I could guess who the page-boy had been. "Well I guess that explains it then" I said.

"Explains what?" Sookie said, turning to face me and looking annoyed.

"Um. The fear of wetas…"

"She fuckin' is, eh?" Jason added. "Completely bloody terrified."

"Can you blame her, Jase?" Crystal asked, just before Sookie added "Well, whose fault is that Jason? And anyway, I'm just cautious about things that bite."

"I looked it up" I said. "Only the male ones bite. So you're probably unlikely to be bitten by a weta anytime soon."

Both Sookie and Crystal stopped glaring at Jason and just glared at me. I shut up. Jason however, carried on. "Yeah, Eric's right. You shouldn't be fuckin' scared of them. They're probably more scared of you."

"OK Jason, well you can stay here and promote weta's rights, we're going. Say goodbye to Uncle Jase and Crystal."

The kids murmured their goodbyes and then we were off to Lorena's.

SPOV

I was glad to get going at the end. Jason had to tell that stupid story about the weta again. I hadn't ruined the wedding. I'd just interrupted it, briefly. And anyway, Mum had been livid when she'd found out what Jason had done.

I just didn't need Eric telling me I had no reason not to be scared of wetas. He would learn. And then I could lecture him for a change.

In the meantime, my most pressing problem was trying to keep the kids awake. Felicia was really close to nodding off in the back of the car and I didn't want her to just yet. I really wanted her to be nice and tired when we got to Lorena's so she'd fall asleep. And stay asleep. All night.

So we drove through to Mt Albert with me leading the kids in a sing-a-long to The Wiggles. Eric didn't join in and just adopted a rather pained expression, which just made me sing louder. Serves him bloody right for trying to tell me I shouldn't be scared of wetas.

We got to Lorena's and unloaded the kids. Felicia looked a bit confused and didn't seem keen on letting go of Eric, so he carried her up to the door.

"Oh, hello Sookie, and…um, Eric" Lorena said as she answered the door to us. I don't know why she always acted like she had no idea what Eric was called. But she was helping me out tonight so I had to be relatively nice to her.

"Hi Lorena. We have your charges for the night" I said brightly.

"Oh, well. Come on in then." She watched Eric suspiciously as he crossed the threshold, like he was crossing some invisible barrier that had, until now, kept him from being part of her life. But he was the step-dad to two of her grand-kids so basically, she was stuck with him.

We deposited the two kids. Amelia was bursting to tell Nana about everything she'd done and how great the whole day had been. Felicia was a bit clingy and could only be consoled with Sockie and the promise we'd see her tomorrow. We made them both promise to be good, and Eric told Felicia, quietly, that she had to stay in bed, and then we were off. And off-duty as parents for a bit. Just back to being Sookie and Eric.

Eric drove us into the city. He said he'd booked a hotel, but I hadn't enquired as to which one. I was a bit surprised though at the hotel he pulled up at. It was the same one he'd stayed in when he was first in Auckland.

"Um. OK" I commented, eloquently.

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm just, um, surprised is all. I would have thought you'd, um, pick somewhere…different…"

"What? Because you ran off?"

"Well, yeah. I mean. I guess it wasn't the best ending to the night."

Eric shrugged. "I just thought it might be nice to spend the whole night here, when you can't run off."

"I can't?" I asked.

"Nope. I know where you live now. There's nowhere to go."

"Yeah, you're right. I'm stuck with you." I patted his leg.

"That you are."

We got out of the car and Eric handed the keys to the guy who was obviously going to valet park the thing. This was when I could really tell the difference between me and Eric, he handled this stuff like he was born to it. Which I guessed he was. I always got flustered and couldn't figure out what I was supposed to hand over. And I worried about doing the wrong thing. I'm not sure Eric ever really worried about doing the wrong thing.

We checked in and headed up to our room, which looked pretty much exactly like the room Eric had had before. It was odd sometimes to think that was only a year ago. Back when he was scary. He was still scary sometimes, but mostly he was familiar. And I liked having him around too much to want to run away from him.

There was some champagne waiting for us in an ice bucket. I guessed Eric had ordered that ahead of time. Eric poured two glasses and handed one to me, and we clinked glasses before drinking.

"So what" I asked "do you want to do now?"

"Um, I don't know" Eric pretended to look thoughtful. "Got any suggestions?"

"Well you know, we don't have the kids..."

"Uh-huh"

"And we're here all alone…"

"Yep."

"So we could, you know…sleep for a bit. It's been a long day. I'm quite tired."

Eric came and stood directly in front of me. "Are you sure that's what you really want to do, Sookie?" he asked, looking down at me.

"Um, well. It might be a good idea."

"It might. But is it really the best idea?" Eric was standing really close to me now. So close we were almost touching.

"Probably not" I admitted. "I'm sure we could find something else to do instead."

"Well, I still haven't seen the bra that's under there" Eric said, tracing the neckline of my dress with his finger, "And you did promise me that."

"I did, but how are you with buttons?" I turned around to show Eric the back of the dress.

"Fuck. Those are tiny" Eric said. "Why would you get a dress with such tiny fucking buttons?"

I laughed. "Don't worry, they're just for decoration. There's a zip, see?"

"Thank fuck for that. Luckily, I'm great at zips."

"Yeah, you are." Eric unzipped my dress, and I carefully took it off and lay it over a chair.

"The bra's nice" he said running his hands over it.

"I thought so."

"But now I want to take that off too."

"OK." I wasn't going to fight him on that one either. The bra came off.

"It looks a bit uneven now" Eric commented.

"What does?"

"You, with the panties and no bra. I think they go need to go too."

"Well, if you think that'd be a better look for me."

"I do, I really do." Eric pulled my panties down and I stepped out of them.

"So do I get to undress you now?" I asked.

"Yep. I think it would be only fair. And after all, isn't this partnership all about equality?"

"It is" I agreed, as I unbuttoned Eric's shirt. When that was off I moved straight on to removing his pants. A fair amount of sand fell out of the cuffs and onto the floor.

"So you're not even going to ask me about the pants?" Eric said.

"Yeah, it's all about equality, remember? I figured we should be equally naked."

Eric didn't say anything to that, he just picked me up and threw me on the bed. "OK" I said, "That's kind of bouncy."

"See? If you'd just stuck around last time I could have shown you that." Eric joined me on the bed, lying next to me.

"What else would you have shown me?" I asked Eric.

"Well, I probably would have spent some time running my hands over you, just learning what you feel like. Like this." He ran his hands over my sides and hips, down my legs and arms and finally back to my breasts. "And I would have been really fucking happy to finally get a look at your boobs. I really, really wanted to get know your boobs."

I laughed. "Yeah, that feel's nice. I like that. Do I get to reciprocate?"

"Why not?" Eric said. I ran my hands over Eric's chest and side, enjoying the smooth warm skin and the muscles underneath. I loved how different he felt from me.

"And I might have done this" Eric said, bending to take one of my nipples in his mouth.

"Mmm. You definitely would have done that" I said. It wasn't that he was predictable, but there was a pattern.

"And I might have done this too" he said, as his hand drifted between my legs. "And I would have been really fucking pleased if you'd been this wet."

"Dunno" I said, "I think you have to marry me for that effect."

"Really?" Eric asked, looking at me.

"Well, maybe not. But I'm not sure I'd be that easy."

"Not easy. Just interested. I really just wanted you to be fucking interested in me."

"Or just interested in fucking you?"

"Yeah. Same thing."

"Kind-of" I amended.

Eric didn't say anything. His mouth was busy again. As were his fingers. I started to feel my orgasm building as I moved against his hand. And then it hit me. "Oh, that's really, really good" I said, when I could speak again.

"Mmm" Eric agreed. "Of course, in that instance you had just given me a blow-job so I might not have been feeling quite as desperate as I am now to just fuck you, but fuck, Sookie, I think it's really fucking time."

"OK" I agreed, as he moved to lie between my legs and entered me. "Yep, it's definitely time."

"Oh, fuck" Eric said, which I think was his way of agreeing. He was moving in and out of me with determination. "Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck."

I didn't bother responding, other to wrap my legs around his waist and enjoy where this was going. And it was going there pretty soon for me. Eric finished just afterwards, I could see the muscles in his neck straining as he tensed and then he collapsed down, bracing himself on his arms and kissing my chest and my neck.

"I might not have run away after that" I admitted. "For one thing, my legs are a little jelly-like right now."

"Yeah" Eric said, rolling over to the side. "I think I'll quite like this whole fucking my wife thing."

"Yeah, yeah" I said. "You've been saying it for a year, anyway. What real difference did today make?"

Eric looked thoughtful. "It just did" he said. He didn't seem inclined to elaborate so I guessed there was something else going on there. Something else that had to do with Eric worrying that I might run off on him. And I supposed that now he figured we'd consummated the union so he was safe.

Eric sat up and wandered off somewhere and came back with a box of chocolates, offering it to me. "Oooh" I said "Nice. Where did my bubbly go anyway?"

Eric got up again and retrieved our glasses and we sat in the big bed for a bit and enjoyed our late night snack. It was nice, just the two of us, with no one else wandering around interrupting or needing us to do anything. Or bringing us dead offerings. It wasn't often we got to do stuff like that this.

It had only taken getting married to get one night alone. I wondered what we'd need to do for the next night off.

After a while I turned to Eric. "So I guess when you stayed here last time you were probably more likely to be sitting around watching the dirty movies? Is that why they were so pleased to have you back?" They'd greeted us at the front desk with a 'Welcome back, Mr Northman' and I wasn't sure if that was standard for everyone or not.

"Um" Eric said, looking a bit shifty. "Well you know…its kind of boring here by yourself."

"Yeah, yeah. 'Course it is."

"And I was really frustrated because this woman I was working with was ruining all my plans to fuck her."

"What? Sophie-Anne?" I asked, laughing.

"Ugh. Don't even mention her name."

"Yeah. She was awful. But even with all the loneliness and, um, sexual frustration surely the porn was a bit much after a while?"

Eric shrugged, but didn't say anything to agree or disagree with me.

"I mean, I can't see the point of watching other people have sex. I saw a live sex show once in Amsterdam and it was just weird…" I trailed off, realising that Eric was just staring at me.

"A live sex show? People having sex on stage?"

"Well. Yeah. It wasn't really my choice to go. It was the last night of a Contiki trip through Europe, you know, one of those bus trips for 18-35 year olds, and it was an organised outing. You could opt not to go, but who's going to pike and look like a prude?"

"So hang on" Eric said, "You went to a club, or, whatever, and watched people having sex?"

"Yeah. It was yucky. They said they were all couples in real life, but even so. And I got stuck in the front row!"

I looked at Eric, expecting sympathy, but he was just staring at me. "I knew you were a bit of a freak, what with the exhibitionist tendencies…" I rolled my eyes at that, I'm pretty sure sex on the deck was all Eric, "But, fuck Sookie. I married a freak!"

"No you didn't!"

"Yes, I did. You watched other people having sex. _Live_ people. Not films. That's just…that's…fucking freaky."

I just huffed and crossed my arms over my chest. "It is not" I complained.

"But I like that you're freaky" Eric said, leaning over and nuzzling my neck.

"But I'm not."

"Yeah, you are. You mean it didn't turn you on?" Eric pulled back to look at my face.

"Nope. Not at all. It was gross."

"Not even just a little bit?"

"NO!"

"Bet it fucking did" Eric started nuzzling again, and he started running a thumb across my nipple.

"No it fucking didn't. And, anyway, it wouldn't matter if it had. I couldn't do anything about it."

I'd gone on the Contiki with a girl I worked with. Kylie from Australia, who hated her name for obvious reasons. Her friend had pulled out of the trip and Bill hadn't wanted to go anyway, so I'd gone. I didn't realise I'd have three weeks of watching Kylie chase all the men on the bus. And bring some of them into the room we shared. I had the bottom bunk. It wasn't a great experience, but I'd hidden most of that from Bill when I got back to London. I'd liked the sight-seeing, but I'd realised that maybe coach holidays with a bunch of single people weren't for me. And that was before I ever got to the live sex show, which was now fascinating Eric so much.

Eric looked at me. "Would you have wanted to do something about it? Maybe, you know, if I'd been there?" He looked at me hopefully. I tried to imagine Eric spending three weeks travelling on a bus, even a fairly luxurious one, and staying in cabins. It didn't seem like his kind of holiday. But I could play along.

"Um, well I guess. Maybe if you were there, it might have been different…"

"So what would have happened?" Eric asked eagerly.

"What, you want me to tell you a story?"

"Yeah, go on. I told you what would have happened if you hadn't run off. If I'd been on the bus with you, what would have happened?"

"You would have been really cramped for three weeks sitting on a bus."

"OK, but more about how, you know, um you get so carried away by the sex show you seduce me?"

I looked at Eric. "Hang on here; if I'm 25 how old are you?" I tried to do the math myself.

"19" Eric answered, before I'd got there.

"Well at least you're legal, I guess" I said.

"Yep. And really fucking happy I've scored an older woman, but maybe a bit nervous I won't live up to expectations."

"Eric, I don't think you need to worry about that" I said.

"Well, one look at your boobs and I might have got a bit, um, you know. Ahead of myself." He was lying on his side running his hand over my breasts as he said this.

"Um, well we'd already been to Greece and the South of France, so, you know, you'd seen me in a bikini and everything…"

"Did you lose your top?"

"What? In real life?"

"Maybe in this story you could have lost your top somewhere. And I'd seen. That would have given me something to fantasise about for a while."

"And by fantasise, you mean…?"

"Yeah. Jerk-off to."

"Boy, glad I wasn't staying in your cabin then."

"So, we're staying in cabins?"

"Yeah, two or four to a room. In bunks."

"And you would have had to smuggle me into your bunk, when you got so carried away?" Eric's hand was moving down so it was between my legs. I was still a little sensitive from the last time and I gasped. Eric just smirked.

"I don't think I could have exactly hidden you in my sleeping bag" I said to Eric, when I'd recovered a bit. "You're usually pretty obvious."

"But you would have tried?" He was now rubbing his erection against my hip, in time to the movements of his hand.

"I might have tried. It would have annoyed my bunk-mate though. But she was annoying. And such a slapper anyway. Yeah, fine. I would have let you share my sleeping bag."

"Good, I'm glad. I would have hated to spend all that time on the bus for nothing."

"You're there just for me?"

"Of course I am Sookie. I'm there just for you. For when you get horny."

"Cool, well I'm horny now."

Eric sat up and sat back on his heels. "Jump on then" he said, holding out his hand to me.

I straddled his legs and lowered myself down. "That feels good" I said. "See we couldn't have done this in a sleeping bag." I started to move against Eric.

He grinned at me. "No, we would have had to sneak off somewhere private. Or maybe not private. Depends what you'd prefer?"

"I like private." Well, mostly, I thought. But I wasn't going to say it out loud.

"So you can scream my name?"

"Yeah."

"Well. Go on then" Eric said, holding my hips and starting to thrust up into me.

And in a little while, I did.

Later on, we lay in bed curled against each other. I was feeling exhausted. It had been a long day. But a good one. A very good one.

"You know you were wrong, earlier" Eric said, in a voice which was starting to sound a bit thickened by sleep.

"What about?" I asked.

"You're still fun. I like your bedtime stories. You can tell me some more sometimes. The stories of how Sookie seduced Eric."

I laughed. "Yeah, well. They sound like pretty good fairy-tales."

"Oh no, they're totally fact-based. You just don't realise it. You're pretty irresistible, you know." He kissed the top of my head.

"So are you."

"That's why we work. "Night, Sookie. Love you." Eric shifted his weight, and moved me with him, before throwing a leg over mine.

"Yeah, 'night. Love you too. Hubby."

**Thanks for reading!**


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N Nothing new to say, other than thank-you for sticking with this! I really appreciate it that people are still happy to read about these two.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

The really large bed in the hotel room had been quite useful when we'd had sex in it. It might have even been great if we'd had small children here who wanted to share it. But when it was just Sookie and I sleeping in it, it was simply too fucking big. I woke up and somehow Sookie had managed to move over to the other side and there was a big gap between us.

I shuffled over so I was lying against her back again. That felt a lot better. Except that I didn't really want to sleep anymore. I lifted up and looked at the clock on Sookie's side of the bed. It said 6am.

Sookie had probably had enough sleep.

I nudged her slightly with my hip to see if she'd do anything. She sighed, and then tried to curl in on herself a bit.

Mostly she was fun, but sometimes…well, sometimes she was asleep.

Admittedly, the day before had been busy. And we'd been up late. But, and it was a really important but, we were alone in a hotel room. In a bed. Naked. The naked part was particularly important because it meant that parts of me were touching parts of her. Specifically, my cock was rubbing against her butt which was quite enjoyable. And being inside her would be even better.

I lent forward to whisper in her ear "Soookie".

"What?" she said, waking up and snorting slightly.

"Oh, good. You're awake."

"Why is that good?" she asked, half-rolling over and blinking a few times.

"Because now it's not weird if I do this" I grabbed the boob that was furthest away from me, rolling the nipple in my fingers. Then I bent my head to take the other nipple in my mouth.

"I'm just surprised that you don't have some rule about how we're married now so you're allowed to molest me while I sleep" Sookie grumbled.

"No" I said, releasing her nipple from my mouth, "I think we still work to the Sookie Stackhouse 'you can have me if you wake me up properly' rules of engagement."

"Oh, OK" Sookie said, getting more comfortable on the pillow, and pushing her boobs up towards me in the process. "But I'm not really awake."

"Really, Sookie?"

"Yeah. I'm just sleep-talking, I think. You might have to do more to wake me up." She closed her eyes again and waited.

"You sure you don't want to sleep in? Given, you know, that you're already asleep anyway?"

"Umm" she said, without opening her eyes. "Ummm, no. It's OK, you can wake me up. I would feel bad, you know, if you missed out on your wedding night."

"But it's morning."

"Well, wedding morning then…or something. I don't know. I'm asleep anyway."

"You still believe that then?"

"It's my story and I'm sticking to it."

"OK, well then, tell me when you're awake."

"Well you'll know when I am, because I'll be able to hold a conversation."

"That's not really necessary for sex, you know?"

"Let's file that under a nice to have then."

"Yeah, let's do that." I turned my attention back to her breasts, taking the other one in my mouth. Sookie moved underneath me, before bringing her hands up to my head. I heard her mutter "Bugger, I'm still asleep" and the hands disappeared as she dropped them back onto the mattress.

I moved my mouth lower, kissing across her stomach and down to her hip bones. Sookie was starting to move quite a lot now, rubbing her legs together. I couldn't really blame her. I was rubbing my cock against her thigh, happy to have the friction.

I put my hands on her thighs and pushed slightly so she'd open them. She sighed gently, but didn't resist in any way. Because of course, she was really asleep.

I moved so I was lying between her legs and ran my hands up and down her thighs a few times. Sookie still didn't open her eyes, but she started to moan slightly.

I kissed her clit gently, and she moaned again. "Awake yet?" I asked.

"No, not at all" Sookie said, quite clearly.

"Right, OK." I gave her clit another kiss before sucking on it gently and then licking her slit a couple of times.

"Getting there" Sookie murmured. I wasn't sure whether she meant she was close to waking up or coming, but I figured I just keep going anyway. A few more minutes and she was starting to move underneath me and her hands drifted into my hair again. She bent her knees up and arched her back as her orgasm hit.

I lifted up "So are you awake now?" I asked.

"Yeah, I am" Sookie said, opening her eyes and looking at me. "That worked."

"Fucking fantastic" I said. I sat back on my heels and grabbed both her ankles, bringing her legs together. Sookie frowned a bit, but didn't say anything. I lifted her legs up, still holding them together and then I pushed into her, resting her legs against my chest.

"Oh" Sookie said, her eyes going wide. "Oh, God. That's, um, different."

"Oh yes" I replied. "Fuck, that's really fucking tight."

Sookie didn't say anything as I started to move, but she bit her lip and pushed out her chest. It was really different like this. Although I really wanted to touch her boobs, and it was kind of awkward. Sookie was obviously thinking the same thing because she started to play with her own nipples. Fuck, that was hot to watch.

And then she orgasmed again, suddenly, and I had to stop moving before I ended up coming as well. I looked down at Sookie.

"I'm really awake now" she said.

"Yeah. Morning." I started moving again.

"This is, um, really different" Sookie continued, "but I kind of miss touching you. You're awfully far away up there, and my legs are kind of in the way."

"OK then" I said, releasing her legs and leaning over her.

"That's better" Sookie said, putting her feet flat on the mattress. "Much better."

"So" I said, as I started to move in and out again. "Was it a good way to wake up?"

"Yeah, pretty good."

"Only pretty good?"

"Very good then. The best."

"It is, isn't it? It fucking is. Oh fuck." I was really, really close. I could feel the tension building.

Sookie reached up and pulled me down to her. She kissed the side of my face and then she whispered "God, Eric. I love it when you come." And then, with a cry of "Oh, fuck Sookie" I did.

I collapsed on top of Sookie, slightly out of breath. "So, is it breakfast now?" she asked.

"What? You don't want to go back to sleep?"

"Nope. I'm awake now. And I'm hungry. I'm surprised you haven't run out of energy by now."

I rolled off Sookie and lay next to her. "I had a big dinner last night. The food was pretty good."

"See, I didn't. I was too busy with Amelia and stuff. I'm really, really hungry. So let's order room service."

Sookie was really awake now and bounced out of bed, throwing on a robe, before she located the menu and started looking at it. I would have been really happy to have taken a nap but food sounded good too.

Sookie brought the menu back to bed and we made our choices before she rang and placed the order. She bustled around opening the curtains and commenting on the weather and talking about what time we should be at Lorena's to get the girls. I was mostly listening to her.

After a while she noticed I wasn't saying anything. "What?" she asked.

"You're happy" I said. It wasn't really a question. I could tell. But it was nice to see. It wasn't that I thought she'd have second thoughts, or that she'd run off in the night, or anything like that. But she'd fought me on so many aspects of getting married, been so adamant about it being a civil union, that there was a part of me that was always going to wonder whether she'd really, really wanted it as much as I did.

"Yep. I am. I'm in a hotel and someone is bringing me breakfast, what's not to be happy about?"

"Oh" I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

Sookie came and sat back on the bed next to me. "You know I'm teasing, right?" she asked. "I'm happy because we…well, got married. We are aren't we?" she looked thoughtful. "We're married."

"Yeah."

Sookie looked at me and then she burst out laughing. "What?" I asked.

"Well, just, you know. We're married, like, you and me. I mean, who'd have thought?"

"What do you mean?" I wasn't really sure what she was trying to say. She was laughing, but something wasn't quite right.

"Well, you know. You're you…" she waved a hand at me, "and I'm me. And I'm not sure I would have picked us as a couple."

"I think we make a lovely couple" I said, a bit defensively and also aware that the statement made me sound a bit like a maiden aunt.

"Yeah, well you're lovely. I'm kind of ordinary really."

I stroked the side of Sookie's face. "No, you're not. Not to me" I said gently. I really fucking hated it when she didn't see that.

Sookie made a phfft noise. "Yeah, I am. I'm just like a hundred thousand other women really."

"Nope not at all. Sookie, it's me. Do you really think I would have married you if you were ordinary?" I just wasn't sure where she was getting this from. Not this morning.

"Ordinary's not bad, it's just…ordinary" Sookie said. Now she was defensive.

"No, but, I mean come on. You're fucking fantastic. You're like the best person I know. You're…you're one of a kind. I don't think that's ordinary at all. That's, um, well that's just you. I mean…I married you, I want you. However that comes."

Sookie stopped looking at me and just stared at the wall ahead of her. "Sometimes" she said. "Sometimes I worry you'll get bored of me…"

"Fuck no! You surprise me every day."

Sookie snorted. "What? When you find out I've been to a live sex show?"

"No, just. In everything. I just…fuck, Sookie. I just like being around you. I really want to be around you. Forever. I said that, didn't I? In the vows?" I was pretty sure something like that had been in there. "Please don't do this" I asked. Well, pleaded really. I just wanted us to be happy.

Sookie sighed. "OK" she said. "I believe you. I mean, it's weird when I stand back and look at us and think about it. But I do believe you. Because you're you. And I trust you."

She looked back at me and I put my hand behind her head. "I'll always be here" I promised her. Sookie just nodded and I pulled her towards me. As our lips met, there was a knock at the door.

"Breakfast!" Sookie said, cheerfully, while blinking a few times.

"Yep, food would be good about now."

Sookie opened the door and they brought the food in and placed it on the table. Sookie didn't tip the guy who brought it in, but he didn't seem to notice. He was far too busy trying to stare down the neckline of her robe. Sookie brought the food over the bed and sat back down next to me. "You have to be naked" I said. "If you get back into bed, you have to be naked as well."

"Oh, OK then" Sookie said, shucking off the robe. She still seemed a bit distant.

She picked at her bacon, muttering something about how she never got it crispy enough when she ate out. I wanted to do something, anything, to get her over this stupid fucking idea that I was going to leave her because she was boring. I didn't know what else I could. We were married, I was adopting the kids. Fuck, I thought, maybe if we had a baby together she'd realise that I wasn't going anywhere, that this was it, this was my home and my family and she was the centre of all of that?

But I didn't want to risk bringing up the baby thing again. In the end I just waited for her to finish her breakfast and then I carried her off to the shower. I was always better at showing her how I felt.

SPOV

We checked out of the hotel and they brought Eric's car around so he could smoothly tip the valet, who probably lived for times like this when he had American guests with their hands in their pockets, and then we drove to Lorena's.

The morning had started great. We'd had sex and it had been fun, like it always was. And then I'd had to go and spoil it with the whole 'but I'm just ordinary' speech. God, I just wished I had shut up for once. I wasn't sure what I was expecting from Eric. I mean, he probably knew I was ordinary, but he was just too polite to agree with me. I wasn't sure what I really wanted from him. He'd promised to stay with me forever the day before. What did I really want him to do today? Say that actually, forever meant 5 years, or 10 years or some other pre-determined term? So that I could prepare myself for him to get bored and bugger off?

None of that would have been ideal. And I'd just made Eric look so very sad. I hated that. He didn't really know what to do. In the end we'd had a shower together and just tried to re-connect. I'd tried to make him feel better by giving him a blow-job. It made Eric look a bit happier, but I wasn't sure it really made up for basically trying to make him admit he wanted to leave me at some point.

I guess only time was going to do that.

We got to Lorena's just before lunchtime. I stopped worrying about Eric and started worrying about what Felicia had been up to. God, I hoped she hadn't been wandering around all night.

"Um" I said, turning to Eric when he stopped the car. "I'll just run in and get them, if you like. You stay here." I felt inclined to spare Eric from Lorena's dirty looks about now.

"OK" he said. "If you'll be OK? Otherwise I could come?"

"No, I'll be fine. I'm used to her." I got out of the car and climbed the steps, before knocking on the door.

"Sookie" Lorena said, opening it. I looked her over. She seemed OK. Didn't look like she'd been up all night or been talked half to death.

"Hi, Lorena" I said. "Everything go OK?" I stepped inside.

"Fine. They were very good. Although Felicia seems inappropriately attached to that sock. It can't be hygienic."

"Oh, well it's a clean sock. And there's two Sockies, of course, so it gets washed every couple of days."

"Mmm" Lorena pursed her lips to show she didn't see how it could possibly be anything but a stinky old sock. Just then Amelia rushed over. "Mummy!" she cried. "You're here! Nana made us French toast. I LOVE French toast. Can you make French toast?"

"Um, I guess so."

"Cool. Can I have it tomorrow?"

"Um. We'll see. Go and get your stuff for me will you."

"Yeah."

I turned back to Lorena. "So other than that, no problems? Um, Felicia stayed in bed OK? It's just…um, she's not used to a bed…" I had a feeling I might have lied about that to Lorena. Oops.

"She was no problem at all" Lorena said. "Oh great" I said, but Lorena continued on "Of course she did get up the once. I found her standing in the doorway to the living room when I was watching TV, poor little love." Oh crap, I thought. "But that's fine. I'm used to it. We watched a bit of TV and I put her back in bed when she was sleepy. I had a couple that used to do that. Judith was one, she was dreadful. Even got out of the cot and the playpen, you couldn't leave her anywhere. And, um, oh. Well Bill was up a lot at night. It was…nice to have the company when I was looking after the girls. Malcolm was away a lot, of course. For his work. So I had Bill. He'd have a cup of tea with me and then go back to bed. He was always such a little grown-up and such a help."

Oh, I thought. Well no wonder she's used to it. And maybe Felicia was more of a Compton than I thought. Although perhaps I wouldn't share that point with Eric.

I walked into Lorena's spare room to start gathering up the girl's belongings. "Daddy?" Felicia asked worriedly, when she saw me. "He's in the car" I replied. I was used to not being the person she most wanted to see.

When we had everything I walked back to the front door. "Thanks again, Lorena" I said. "And, um, sorry about Felicia. Although I guess I know where she gets it from, it's the Compton side." I laughed. Lorena just narrowed her eyes.

"Even if her last name is Northman" Lorena said. Ah, bugger. I looked at Felicia's backpack I was holding. It was the one she took to daycare. With her nametag on it. The one that read Felicia Northman.

"Yeah, Eric's adopting her. Well, adopting them both. As he's their step-father, of course." I paused, but Lorena didn't exactly step in to agree with me. "So it seemed fitting…I mean, he's the only dad she'll ever know." I stopped again. That may have been twisting the knife a bit and I really wasn't trying to hurt Lorena, but I was feeling a bit defensive.

She didn't actually look that upset though. "And Amelia?" she asked.

"She didn't want to change her name. I think she likes to be different. Plus she can spell it now…so, she'll stay a Compton." For now, I thought. She might change her mind later on.

"It makes…sense" Lorena said. "You know I realised how out of touch I was when Felicia kept asking where her daddy was and I tried to tell her he was in heaven. Amelia told me I was wrong." Yeah, I thought, Amelia would have. "I guess he was never Felicia's dad, was he? Bill?"

"No, he never had the chance."

"And now she has another one."

"She does."

"And a new name. You're not changing your name this time?" she asked. This time? I thought. I wondered why she'd still sent me a Christmas card to Mrs S Compton then last year if she knew I hadn't changed my name. I guess she'd been making a point because Eric had just arrived.

Bill had hated that I hadn't changed my name. But I liked my surname. And it connected me to the parents I'd lost. So I'd kept it. Eric didn't really seem to care.

"No, I'm still not changing my name."

"I sometimes wish I'd kept mine. Compton doesn't mean much to me. But then, no one could ever spell my maiden name." She laughed. Yeah, I remembered Bill hated those times he had to provide his mother's maiden name as a security question. It always ended up being confusing for both parties involved.

I laughed too, but I didn't really feel like laughing. Lorena looked so sad. So sad and old and broken and it was horrible.

And I couldn't do anything to make it better.

We said goodbye. Both girls hugged Nana and said thank-you for having them. Lorena held onto Felicia for longer than suited Felicia. She really wanted to go and find Eric.

I could understand that.

I got them into the car and they were full of chatter and excitement, filling Eric in on what had happened. Amelia was still stuck on the French toast. Felicia was just happy to see Eric and said "Daddy!" a lot.

I managed to get enough words in to give Eric a very brief version of Felicia's night-time wanderings.

We pulled up at home and got everyone in the house. Bob was sitting right by the front-door, He'd missed dinner and breakfast so was obviously feeling a bit desperate. Eric kept telling him to move, but he wasn't taking the hint.

Not much had changed in the one day we'd been gone, of course. I went to feed Bob and Eric sorted out some lunch for the girls. He had a hard job persuading Amelia she couldn't have French toast for every meal. She had obviously really enjoyed that. And I could bet that if I attempted it I wouldn't make it like Nana had.

We did the usual kind of Sunday things for the rest of the day. Felicia napped OK, so she was tired for once. Amelia kept telling the story of when she was a princess. Eric was still a bit wary of me after the whole this morning.

I was just feeling a bit bad for Lorena. And a bit…thankful, for myself. For what Eric had saved me from. Those endless years of being alone. Of having nothing but my memories. Of watching my kids grow up and leave and just being stuck there, in a small flat with only Bob's eventual replacement for company.

It didn't sound appealing.

Of course it could still happen. There were no guarantees in life. For anything. But I'd taken a risk on Eric before. And I was willing to do it again.

Getting Felicia to bed was a bit of a battle. She had overnight developed a taste for a real bed. "Noooo" she cried, when Eric tried to put her into the cot. "Noooo, not going. Want a bed." She struggled so much that Eric put her on the ground and she raced off to the study, to where the old lumpy bed that had been in Lorena's house was, still half-covered in the junk Eric hadn't taken to his office.

"My bed" she said, climbing on it. "MY BED!"

"Um" Eric said, looking at me. "Um, if we let you sleep in a bed, Leesh, you have to stay in it all night."

"Uh-huh" she said.

"All night long. No getting up. No running round. If you do that, you go back in the crib."

"Bed! Bed! Bed!" she yelled.

So Eric and I set about moving the bed into Felicia's room and then carrying the cot into the study. It was sad to be moving the cot out. That was the end of Felicia's babyhood, I thought.

When I finally had the bed made up, and I only hoped that Amelia didn't decide to claim these sheets back in the morning, we put Felicia in. It was later than her normal bedtime now, so she was very sleepy and she snuggled down. She looked tiny in that bed.

""Night Leesh" Eric said.

"Night, sweetheart" I said.

""Night" she said sleepily.

I followed Eric into our room. "Hey" I said, touching his arm.

"What?" he asked, turning around.

"Just, um, I've been thinking. Since this morning. About the whole…well, just thank-you."

"For what?"

"Just for being here. And being you" Eric smirked, but he didn't say anything. "And I, well I think it's us. I think maybe you stop me being too…ordinary, or whatever. And I'm really glad of that. And I do trust you…that you'll stay. I mean, you haven't gone yet…"

Eric took me in his arms. "And I'll never go."

"I know."

"Time for bed?" Eric asked after a minute.

"Yep, I'm exhausted. Had not planned on moving furniture tonight."

Eric laughed and released me so I could go and brush my teeth.

I'd been asleep for exactly three hours when the phone rang.

**Thanks for reading!**


	17. Chapter 17

**A/N Hello from a rather hot and humid Auckland! It now feels like it's officially summer because I had my first swim today. I could do with another one about now though!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

I was vaguely aware of the phone ringing, but it felt as though it was part of my dream and I couldn't figure out how to actually do anything about it. So I didn't. What did wake me up was someone leaning heavily on me while muttering "For God's sake, Eric, you're closer." Then I heard Sookie say hello to someone, and I figured out what was going on. Plus, she was still draped across me, with her boobs pushing into my chest, so that was kind of nice.

"Well, do you need Eric to come there?" I could hear Sookie say. Where? I thought. What the fuck was I being volunteered for?

She said a few more things and then finally finished up by saying "We'll see you soon, then" before hanging up, and turning to look at me. "Oh. You're awake now I see" she said.

"Um, not really. What the fuck's going on?" I was still feeling a bit confused about the whole thing.

Sookie sat up. "Judith" she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. "She's in labour, well has been since about three yesterday afternoon, apparently. So they're on their way with Jessica."

I sat up too and rubbed my eyes. "Since yesterday afternoon? Couldn't they have dropped her off a bit earlier then?"

"Well I don't suppose they exactly knew when they were going to hospital, did they? Calvin said they thought she might go over-night at home, but her waters broke a while back and the mid-wife wants to check her out." Sookie was still looking at me like I was an idiot. I fucking had no clue how this baby thing worked. I thought if it started, you went to hospital, end of fucking story. I would have been much, much happier if Jessica had arrived several hours earlier.

I decided that there wasn't much I could do so I lay back down. "You know" Sookie said, getting out of bed and heading to the closet, "it never ceases to amaze me how you can wake me up at all hours for sex and you manage to sleep through everything else that goes on."

"Yep" I agreed, trying to get comfortable again. I could hear Sookie getting her robe and moving around. All of a sudden she stopped and said "Shit" really loudly.

"What?" I mumbled, in case she wanted a response.

"You gave away the spare bed."

I sighed and sat up again. "What? What did I do?" I couldn't remember giving anything anyway but it was the middle of the fucking night and who the fuck knew?

"The spare bed" Sookie said, really slowly, like that would help me catch up. "Is now in Felicia's room. With Felicia in it."

"Oh. Yeah."

"Because you said she could have it."

"Well…I thought it might help her. She's still in there. I guess…" I didn't know, but I hadn't seen her so it was a safe bet she wasn't running around the house.

"That doesn't help the Jessica problem though."

"Um…she could sleep in the crib then? That's in the spare room just sitting there."

Sookie looked at me and it was pretty clear I was back to being an idiot again. "No, Eric! You can't put a nearly 3 year old that's been in a bed for like, 8 months now, back into a cot. She'll think she's being punished."

"It's a place to sleep…"

"It's where babies sleep. Even Felicia didn't want to sleep in it. The cot is absolutely no use to us tonight." Sookie sighed. "They'll have to top and tail."

"Who will?"

"Jessica and Felicia. Come on, we'll need to move the drawers around to make a headboard so Jessica doesn't keep losing her pillow or anything."

"Oh. OK." I figured there was fuck all chance of me getting back to sleep anytime soon and it was better to just go and help Sookie with her plans. We crept into Felicia's room to find that she was, indeed, still asleep. But most of her was hanging over the edge of the bed. I pushed her back in and then, following Sookie's frantic pointing and whispering, moved the chest of drawers around so they were against the end of the bed. Sookie turned the covers down at that end, added a pillow, and we tip-toed out.

"Do you think they'll be alright, in there together?" I asked.

"Yeah. I used to top and tail with Jason. If I can survive having his feet in my face they'll be fine."

We heard a car pulling into the driveway and Sookie opened the front door. Calvin walked up carrying Jessica, who was fast asleep and leaning on his shoulder. "Hey" he said quietly. "Where do you want her?"

Sookie led the way into Felicia's room, where Calvin tucked her into the bottom of the bed, while I attempted to push Felicia back in again. For someone so little she seemed to be all limbs tonight. And all of those limbs just wanted to escape the confines of the bedcovers.

We crept out into the hall and I found that Sookie had gone out to the car to get Jessica's bag and talk to Judith. I followed Calvin out to the car as well. Judith didn't look that great. She was a bit sweaty and pale. And she looked fucking annoyed as well. "Come ON!" she said to Calvin, "I just want to fucking get there. And get my epidural. I REALLY want that epidural."

"Yeah, OK. Well, thanks guys, we better go" Calvin said, as he got back into the driver's seat.

"Good luck!" Sookie said brightly. Judith didn't say anything she just went a really funny colour. Calvin glanced over at her, and she muttered "Just go" between clenched teeth. Calvin started the car and reversed down the driveway and they were off. I took Jessica's bag off Sookie and we walked into the house.

"Poor Judith" Sookie said as we closed the door. "She's having a hard time, I think. She didn't have a great experience having Jessica."

"Oh." I really had nothing to add to that. I tried to remember if I'd ever known anyone who'd had a baby. Possibly some people I worked with. But no one who was going to share the gory details with me.

We checked on Felicia and Jessica again. Both of them needed pushing back into the bed, but they were at least asleep. That was pretty much what I wanted to be too, about now.

I got into bed and tried to just cuddle Sookie, but, apparently, she wanted to talk. "I hope Judith's OK" she said.

"She'll be fine."

"Yeah. And that Jessica's OK in the morning too. I don't think she even really registered she arrived here."

"She'll figure it out pretty quick."

"It's bad enough that her mum's gone off to have a baby, but it can't be nice to be dumped in the middle of the night."

"It was more of a careful placement than a dumping. Go to sleep."

"I can't. I'm kind of keyed up now. I hope the baby doesn't take too long to come."

"Yeah, I'm sure it won't. But the sooner you go to sleep the sooner it'll be here."

"That's Santa, Eric. Not a baby. Babies come when they come. It could be hours. Poor Judith." Sookie sighed again.

"Sookie, we've done this part of the conversation already. Please, please go to sleep."

"I'll try."

"Good. So now just lie really still and quiet while you're trying so I can go to sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

"And maybe there'll be a baby."

"Well, maybe. Go to sleep."

"Yeah. OK. I'll shut up now." And she must have, because that was the last thing I remembered until Amelia came stomping in the next morning.

"Felicia has a bed" Amelia announced. "A big bed. And Jessica's in it too. Why?"

Sookie sat up and yawned. "Felicia doesn't use the cot anymore" she said. "And Jessica's here because Aunty Jude went into hospital to have the baby."

"Oh. So where is it then?"

"Well it takes a while. Don't you remember when I had Felicia?" Amelia frowned, and then shook her head. "No. Don't remember. But is Felicia old enough for a big bed? She might fall out?"

"She'll be fine" I said, feeling awake enough to join the conversation.

"I don't think so" Amelia said. "She'll fall out, and bump her head and DIE."

"She's OK, Amelia" I re-iterated, but Amelia didn't look like she was buying it. Obviously there was some kind of entrance exam to having a big bed that Felicia hadn't passed. Just then there was a shout of "Mummy!" which sounded like Jessica and Sookie jumped out of bed to go and comfort her.

SPOV

Getting up in the middle of the night made me feel a bit groggy the next morning. Not the best state to be dealing with three little girls, one of whom was upset because she couldn't remember being left here during the night. And one of whom was upset because her sister had a bed and she didn't think that was right.

And one of whom was just really, really pleased that someone had put a big trampoline right in her bedroom.

I was sitting on Felicia's new bed, well the old bed that was now hers, with Jessica on my lap while Felicia bounced next to me. "Bed! Bed!" Felicia chanted.

"Felicia don't do that" I told her, but she completely ignored me. Jessica just sat there sucking her thumb with a couple of tears rolling down her cheeks. Poor kid was just confused about the whole thing. And her day wasn't probably going to get much better from here on in.

Amelia came wandering in. "See?" she said. "Felicia doesn't know that you don't jump on beds. She'll just jump right off. And then she'll die. And you'll feel bad!"

"Amelia, stop going on about Felicia dying. Felicia, stop jumping like that, or else you will fall off. Jessica, sweetheart. It's OK. Mummy's gone to hospital to have the baby but you'll see her later on." It was like being trapped in a room with my own mini-versions of the seven dwarfs. It was just that I had Stompy, Sniffly and Bouncy.

Eric arrived and fixed the Felicia problem by picking her up off the bed and swinging her upside down while she giggled. He was good at distracting her, but maybe not so good at teaching her that the house wasn't one big playground.

"If you drop her then she'll…well, you'll feel BAD!" Amelia warned him.

"I think we'll be OK. I haven't dropped anyone yet" Eric said, giving her another swing.

Jessica lifted her head off my shoulder and watched Eric and Felicia for a moment. "My turn" she announced. I guessed she was used to this sort of thing with Calvin.

"Oh, OK" Eric said, lying Felicia down on the bed, where she pouted a bit. "Stand up then." Jessica climbed off my lap and stood on the bed, so Eric could pick her up and swing her. She giggled.

"I'm next!" Amelia yelled. Yep, a year later and he still hadn't really learnt that lesson. You start something and they form a queue pretty quickly.

When everyone had had a turn, Eric changed Felicia's nappy, which was easier said than done. I took Jessica to the toilet, while Amelia supervised, and then we all congregated in the kitchen. "What do you want for breakfast?" I asked the seeming horde of small people. I was used to two kids, but three suddenly seemed to fill the kitchen to capacity. Bob was eating his biscuits and watching them all warily. He'd met Jessica before and I think he remembered the cuddles.

"You said you'd make French toast" Amelia announced.

"What? When? I meant I'd do it sometime" I said.

"No. You said you'd do it TODAY. You did." I half-expected Amelia to pull out some kind of contract that I'd signed in blood.

"French toast? I like French toast" Jessica said conversationally. Yeah, I guess she'd stayed with Nana too.

"'enck toast!" Felicia added.

"Fine!" I said, feeling somewhat backed into a corner. "I'll make some. You guys go and play or something and I'll let you know when it's ready."

They ran off and Eric turned around from making coffee. "I like French toast too" he said.

"Yeah, whatever. " I reached up and got the Edmond's cookbook off the shelf.

"So no word from Calvin?" Eric asked.

I put the book down and checked my cellphone, which had been sitting on the kitchen bench. "Nope" I said. "But it could be ages yet, I guess."

"Really? When she's been going for this long?"

"Yeah. Has no one ever told you the story of their 24-hour labour or anything?"

"No. Really, though? 24 hours?"

"Yeah, sometimes."

"How long did you take?" he asked.

"Oh, um. With Amelia it was about 8 hours, and with Felicia, just a bit longer. It might have been shorter, but I, um…well I got a bit stressed in the middle and they thought it slowed things down."

"Oh. See to me even 8 hours seems a long time to wait."

"Yeah, it's a long time to be in labour, let alone just sit there waiting! But it's not bad for a first labour."

Eric didn't say anything else, but he noticed me pick the cookbook back up and start flicking through it. "Why have you got that?" he asked.

"I'm trying to find a recipe for French toast. It's bound to be in here. I haven't made it in years. And I think I've only ever made it about once."

"You need a recipe?"

"Well I just need an idea of the quantities…" I said, continuing to flick through it.

"I can make it" Eric said confidently.

"Really?" I asked. I didn't mean to sound like I doubted him, but it wasn't something he'd pulled out of his hat before.

"Yep. No problem. And I don't need a cookbook" he said, taking the book out of my hands and putting it back on the shelf.

"You sure?" I asked.

"Yes, Sookie. I will be fine. It's only French toast" Eric looked a bit exasperated. I was quite keen on the idea of handing the project over. I knew that no matter how I made it, it wasn't going to live up to Nana's version.

"Um, OK then. I'll just help. So what do you want me to do?"

"Oh…um…" Eric looked a bit thoughtful. Then there was a shout of "NO Jessica! That is NOT OK!" from Amelia and someone else, either Jessica or Felicia roared in anger. "How about" Eric said "You go and sort them out and I'll do breakfast."

"Yeah, thanks" I said, heading off into the warzone.

By the time I figured out what had happened, made Amelia promise to share her toys with Jessica, cuddled Jessica a bit, as she was feeling totally un-loved again, and told Felicia that it wasn't OK to jump on Amelia's bed either, I got back to the kitchen to find Eric seemed to be under control.

"If you want to find some bacon we could have that with ours" he said. I opened up the freezer above the fridge and a lump of frozen chicken breast slid out and landed on my foot. "Ow, ow, ow!" I said, hopping a bit.

"You alright?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, I'll live. But this freezer is a bit of a nightmare. It's packed to capacity and badly needs defrosting. God knows how we'll get on when Jason's lot descend on us."

"Um, yeah. Bacon?"

"Alright. I'm getting there, it's somewhere near the back." I rummaged around finally found it and got it defrosted and eventually we got everything served. It took a few attempts to get the kids to the table but Eric rounded them up and they seemed happy with their French toast, although all of them thought it was really odd that Eric wanted to put syrup on his when obviously it was much better with jam.

When I was clearing away the plates I noticed that Eric's phone was sitting on the bench, next to the stove. It was only by chance I noticed what was on the screen still. Yeah, he'd looked up a recipe for French toast. Of course he had. He Googled everything. But as tempted as I was to call him out on it, I thought I'd let him have that one. Maybe it was because I still felt a bit bad about the whole baby thing. I could feel how interested he was in the details of having a baby, but it was almost like he was scared to ask me anything now. And he actually looked…well, kind of excited about the fact that Calvin and Judith's baby was arriving. I just wasn't sure how to say to him 'not now, but soon' without really just opening up the old wounds again.

So I'd let him be the French toast expert in this house. At least none of the girls had told him that it was yucky which would have been par for the course if I'd attempted it.

Eric decided he might stay home to help me with the girls. And I think to be there when I found out the news. So once everyone was fed and dressed and Jessica had stopped asking to go and see her mum every five minutes, we got them all in the car, which first required jamming one of the car seats from my car into Eric's car. It was a bit crowded in there with three of them. You could start to understand why people bought those ugly people-mover things.

But so we weren't all hanging around the house all day we'd decided to go to St Luke's and let Felicia buy a new duvet cover. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

EPOV

Sookie was adamant that having three kids in the house was going to just cause a lot of fights, so we were, apparently, going to the mall. It seemed like a really dumb reason to have to try to fit three car seats in my car, because that was never an easy fucking task.

But Sookie was in a good mood and I'd managed to produce French toast for breakfast, despite the fact I'd never made it before in my life, so the morning was going OK, apart from the odd territory war between the girls. And we were fairly used to that after the last time Jessica stayed with us.

I hadn't realised the difference between two kids and three kids until we'd had her for a week. And then it suddenly became really clear that things were quite different when you were out-numbered by the kids. And the mall was usually the place that this became abundantly clear, really fucking fast. One always went missing. Usually Jessica. Because the other thing I hadn't appreciated was the fact that even when Amelia was out of sight, she was very rarely out of ear-shot, and Felicia was stuck in the stroller. Jessica seemed to like running as much as her father did, and she just took off. Repeatedly.

But maybe she would have changed in the months since she's stayed. I could only hope. As it was a Monday morning there weren't too many people there. "Ooh, look, there's a parent's park!" Sookie yelled, pointing at one of the spots by the door.

I pulled into the spot as directed. I couldn't quite figure out why Sookie was so happy about getting it, but she was saying something about how she felt really justified about parking here now that she had three kids in the car. I just nodded a lot.

Sookie got Amelia and Jessica out and I got the stroller. That bit was fairly easy. Putting Felicia into it wasn't though. She did that fucking annoying thing where she turned into a plank. "Noooo, Daddy!" she said.

"No, come on" I tried. "Just sit down and we can go."

"Nooo!"

"What's the problem?" Sookie asked, from the other side of the car where she was delivering her 'this is a carpark and there are cars that might run you over' speech.

"Felicia won't sit in the stroller" I said, trying to figure out how to get her to bend without hurting her. She'd thrown her arms around my neck and was just clinging on for dear life.

"Well, we won't be long. Maybe we could try without it?" Sookie called back.

"Are you sure?" I asked, feeling that this wasn't a good idea.

"Yeah, how bad can it be?"

Well it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. Felicia got totally confused at the concept of choosing a cover for the comforter she'd inherited with the bed, and just kept sitting and pulling the pillowcases off the shelves, while Amelia held up a cover she wanted and repeatedly asked Sookie if she could get it because she'd been a good girl.

Jessica just kept running off to the toy section and I had to keep retrieving her. I knew that Calvin and Judith were getting a new kid today, but at the same time I didn't think they really wanted to lose their existing one.

Eventually we got to the checkout with a Dora the Explorer cover for Felicia, which Amelia had picked for her, and a rather elaborate butterfly and flower one for Amelia, which Sookie had caved on. And then I discovered they put the little packets of M&Ms really fucking low beside the checkouts at Kmart. That shouldn't fucking be allowed.

That errand done Sookie dragged us into a few other shops, which meant I was left with three bored kids. And Felicia decided that Jessica made a good point about the running off. It was OK until they went in different directions and I had to make a decision about which one to get first. The idea of tying the pair of them together was starting to seem tempting.

To entertain us while we waited for Sookie to buy 'a few groceries' Amelia told us a story. "Once upon a time, there were lots of dinosaurs. Like, um, T-rex's, and um…"

"Triceratops" I supplied.

"Yeah. And all the dinosaurs were happy until something happened and they were all covered in ice and couldn't get out…" I thought that maybe this story was going quite well and actually might have a point. For one thing it seemed to be fact based. But I might have been a bit premature thinking that.

"So they weren't happy in all that ice" Amelia continued "and a mean witch had trapped them in the ice. The only thing that could get them out was the dancing princesses. But they couldn't get a message to the dancing princesses…"

I missed the next bit of the story while I was retrieving Jessica and Felicia from where they'd gone to stand in front of the shopping trolleys and basically block anyone from taking one. When I got back it was apparently wrapping up "And the dancing princesses got rid of the mean witch and the dinosaurs got out and they were soooo happy!" Amelia looked at me expectantly.

"Great story" I said, watching Sookie slowly head towards the checkout.

After that Sookie suggested lunch at the food court, which of course meant McDonalds. As soon as we got there I offered to go and order and just headed towards the counter. I was fucking glad I made that move as soon as I heard Jessica say "Auntie Sookie, I need poos."

Over lunch I asked Sookie if there'd been any word from Calvin, but she checked her phone and there was nothing. "I hope Judith's OK" she said.

"Yeah. I just can't believe it takes this long."

"Well, that's real life, not the movies. Or a half-hour sitcom."

"Yeah. But, do you think something's wrong?"

"Nope. She's fine. She's just working through it."

"Oh." It still didn't seem right. But then from what Sookie had said earlier she didn't seem to take this long so, shit, maybe Judith wasn't that great at it. Although I guess I wasn't going to find out about Sookie anytime soon, and to be honest, after this morning, I was kind of glad. Three kids was a fucking handful.

SPOV

Eric really seemed surprised about the fact Judith was still in labour. It was like he kind of thought she wasn't doing it right. I guess he just had no clue about this stuff. I hoped he didn't have weird expectations about how I'd handle giving birth.

On the way home from St Luke's I finally got the phone call from Calvin to say the baby was here. Everything had gone OK, in the end, but it sounded as though the epidural had slowed Judith's progression down in the early hours of the morning. She was exhausted, understandably, so I was going to take Jessica in when they moved to Birthcare later in the afternoon.

I hung up the phone. "It's a boy" I said to Eric. "Thomas David, um, 7 pounds 12."

"Oh. Is that big?"

I shrugged. "I've had bigger." I turned to the back seat. "Jessica, sweetheart" I said. "Mummy's had the baby and we'll go and see her later on, OK?"

"My mummy?" she asked me.

"Yeah. Your mummy. She's OK and you'll get to meet your little brother."

"Jessica got a brother?" Amelia asked. "I don't have a brother."

"No" I said. "You've got Felicia."

"She's a sister."

"Yeah. Trust me, brothers aren't that great all the time" I said.

Amelia didn't reply but just humphed at me. She felt like I'd short-changed her somewhere and there wasn't much I could do about it at this point in time.

So late in the afternoon I packed Jessica into my car and we drove through the traffic into Parnell to get to Birthcare. If Judith was here it can't have gone too badly, otherwise she'd still be in the hospital.

Calvin met us by the lifts as we arrived at reception. "Daddy!" Jessica cried, jumping into Calvin's arms. Poor Calvin, he looked exhausted and he had to take the two year old home with him tonight. You never realised how good you had it when you had that first baby.

We walked into Judith's room and Jessica wanted to get into bed and snuggle with Judith, which was understandable. They did the obligatory handing over of the present that was nominally from Thomas. I'd given them the idea of making it a Baby Alive as that's what Felicia had given Amelia. I didn't tell them it doesn't have quite the desired effect of getting the toddler to poke the doll and not the real baby.

Jessica didn't seem at all interested in the contents of the little wooden bassinet next to her mother's bed, but I went to have a good look. He was really tiny. Tiny and squashed and he looked like every other newborn I'd ever seen. He was gorgeous.

I felt all sort of warm when I looked at him. And really sorry for Judith when I listened to her tale of not dilating, contractions almost stopping, gel being inserted and how many stitches she'd ended up with. She looked happy though. Tired and happy.

There was also another feeling I had floating around. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Calvin asked if I wanted to hold him, and while I didn't want to wake him up, I couldn't resist the chance of a cuddle when I didn't have my kids here. No doubt Amelia would insist she was big enough to hold him on her own, and Felicia would want to figure out how he was constructed.

So I held him in my arms and marvelled at how light he felt after holding my kids. I couldn't believe I'd ever had a baby this small, it just didn't seem possible. I lent down and breathed in his scent.

And then it was time for me to go and look after my family. Reluctantly I handed Thomas back to Judith who was muttering about giving him a feed. Jessica finally showed a bit of interest in her brother. "My baby" she said. Felicia had been Amelia's baby, as well as mine. Now she was no one's baby, but a little girl with a rapidly-developing personality.

As I walked out the door to the room, I looked back to say one last goodbye, and I realised what that other feeling was. The one I couldn't identify earlier. I was jealous.

I really, really wanted a baby.

**So, here's the scoop on having a baby in NZ. We work on a Lead Maternity Carer system, so you choose who you want to look after you through the pregnancy and birth. You either pick a midwife, a general practitioner, or an obstetrician. It's free if you have a midwife, or a GP (although very few of them deliver babies these days), but you pay to see an obstetrician privately. If you're being looked after by a midwife and you need medical intervention, like a caesarean, then you get the hospital obstetrician and it's still free. If you have a private obstetrician then it's all included in the fee, whatever they need to do. **

**If you live in the Auckland City district health board area then you normally have your baby at National Women's hospital (which is part of the main Auckland Hospital). If you have a straightforward birth, then you don't stay there more than a few hours afterwards (long enough for a shower, something to eat and for them to check the baby over and monitor you). They send you to Birthcare, which is a private birthing facility about 5 minutes drive away, and they're paid by the health board to take their patients. If you share a room there it's free, if you want a private room it's the cost of a nice hotel. But because they don't have any doctors on staff there you wouldn't normally go there if you have a caesarean or any other type of surgery or complications during birth. They do have a rather lovely staff of midwives though who are on-call to you all the time and are really good with stupid questions from first-time mothers.**

**If you want to know anything else about the system here, just let me know!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	18. Chapter 18

**A/N Hello from Auckland, where the humidity is currently about 83% and I am just a little melting blob! It's not nice. But what is nice are all the lovely reviews you guys have been giving me for this story. They mean a lot to me, and I really look forward to finding out what everyone thinks!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I walked out of the lift and into the carpark underneath the building that housed Birthcare. I wasn't really sure what to do with this new desire for a baby. I mean, it was only a couple of months earlier that Eric and I had nearly split up because he wanted a baby and I didn't think it was the right time.

And probably I was right; it still wasn't the right time.

But the annoying little voice in my head (which sounded suspiciously like Tara, because this used to be her reasoning for having her kids) said that no time was ever going to be the perfect time, so I might as well just get on and do it.

I wasn't getting anywhere fast going round and round in circles like this, so I decided to just let it go for tonight.

When I got home Eric was trying to make pasta for dinner while simultaneously entertaining Felicia and being entertained by Amelia. It was quite crowded in the kitchen and I could understand why Bob had decided to station himself by the front door to wait for me.

"Frow me, Daddy! Frow me!" Felicia yelled at Eric.

"Um, I can't Leesh, I'm a bit busy."

"So then what happened was…" Amelia added.

"Hi" I called out.

"Oh, hi" Eric said, trying to step around Felicia who was doing her very best to attach herself to at least one of Eric's legs. "How were they?"

"Good. Judith was tired though. And quite sore I think. Calvin looked very tired. He didn't get a lot of rest last night and now he has to cope with Jessica tonight. Thomas looked, well, he was kind of small and squished. Still not sure about the name though, do you think it sounds a bit odd with Norris as a last name?"

Eric shrugged. I guessed he wasn't thinking that deeply about what other people were naming their kids. I wondered if he'd put more thought into naming any kids we had together, and then I realised that I really had to shut that kind of thinking down or I'd just drive myself mad.

I got some stuff out of the fridge and started to make a salad.

"Where's the baby? Jessie's brother?" Amelia asked me.

"Um, with Aunty Jude, we don't get to have him."

"Oh. Can I see him though?"

"Well, maybe tomorrow. Right now, I think its dinnertime, isn't it Eric?" He nodded at me from where he was draining the pasta.

Amelia wandered off still looking as though I'd maybe short-changed her somewhere.

We got through dinner, although no one was particularly hungry after eating a big lunch. Felicia seemed to mainly eat carrot, but at least that would cancel out the McDonalds she'd had for lunch. Well, I thought it would, anyway.

And then after dinner, and baths and bedtime, which now involved trying to get Felicia to stop jumping on her bed by reminding her much Sockie really, really wanted to lie down and be cuddled to sleep, it was just Eric and I again.

And I kind of felt like something might be missing. Something small and snugly and needy.

Maybe we should just get a kitten I thought. After all, it was kitten season and the SPCA was no doubt inundated. But then I thought about how that kitten would no doubt be loved to pieces by Amelia and Felicia and hated on sight by Bob and decided that wasn't going to work either.

I was busy wondering whether I should mention it to Eric so that we could laugh about how silly it was that one cuddle with a baby turned me into a big clucky idiot when he came into the living room and put a cup of coffee in front of me. "I" he said, "am hoping to have a much quieter night tonight."

"Yeah" I agreed. "At least no one should be arriving in the middle of the night."

"Mmm. And it was fucking hard work at the mall today. That trip was not a good idea" Eric said.

"Why not?"

"Oh come on, Sookie! With three kids, who all wanted to run in random circles? Well, except for Amelia who just talks and talks. I was kind of exhausted at the end of it. It's fucking hard when we're out-numbered by them. Two is much more manageable." Eric took a sip of his coffee.

"Oh" I said. "Yeah, I guess it is."

I drank some more coffee and tried to figure out what to say next. "Um, Thomas was really cute. Do you want to go and see him tomorrow?" I looked at Eric and he didn't look that enthusiastic. "Or I could take the girls by myself" I said.

Eric sighed. "No, I'll come. I just hope no one expects me to hold him. I'm no fucking use when they're that tiny. They're just too breakable."

Yeah, I thought, they are. They're so helpless. But they're also rather nice to cuddle.

Eric said something about the program we were watching and I realised he didn't really want to talk about babies anymore. I decided I really needed to stop getting myself into a stew about it.

It was probably just a reaction to being back at Birthcare today.

The last time I'd been there had been a bit stressful, as it coincided with Felicia's arrival. I'd arranged for Bill to come when I went into labour and he drove me to the hospital in his car. But then of course while I was in labour he went downhill and the last I saw of Bill he was being escorted out of the room by security. And so when I'd finally given birth, at about 2am, I was stuck with no way to get to Birthcare on my own. So I sat there and cried my eyes out, while the midwives debated what to do. In the end they relented and let me stay until a reasonable hour of the morning and Tara came and transferred me. It was just lucky I had made Bill bring the baby capsule up to the hospital room so we had a way of moving Felicia.

But sitting in Birthcare all I could do was worry about what was happening elsewhere, especially with Amelia, who was staying with Lorena. I couldn't get hold of Bill and I was worried he would turn up at his mum's and Lorena would hand her over. So I only stayed the one night in Birthcare, and got Tara to take me home the next day, via a trip to Lorena's to collect a very confused Amelia.

Poor Felicia, we'd somehow missed some bonding time during all of that drama. So it was no wonder I wanted to go back to those days. So maybe I didn't really want a new baby as much as I wanted go back and re-live some of that time. And have a few more cuddles with a tiny Felicia.

When it was bedtime Eric turned to me and said "So you realise I did all the cooking today, don't you?"

"Well, yeah, I guess."

"All three meals."

"Um. You're counting the McDonalds?"

"Well, I ordered, so I think it counts."

"Really?"

"There were 5 of us to order for, it was a big order."

"How difficult is it to order three Happy Meals?"

Eric sighed. "There are a lot of options, but I think you're kind of missing the point here, Sookie. The point is that you always say how much you love it when other people cook for you. You know, it makes you really happy."

"Well, yeah. It's nice not to be in charge of feeding everyone for a bit."

"So, I was thinking…" Eric leaned over from where he was sitting in bed and started fingering the strap of my tank top.

"You were wondering if I was grateful as well?" I asked.

"Um, I maybe wouldn't put it that bluntly, but you know. You might be in a good mood?" He looked at me expectantly. It might stop me thinking about a baby I thought.

"Ummm" I said, pretending to think. "I'm probably in a good mood."

"Well I thought you would be" Eric said, sliding his hand inside my top to cup my breast. I could feel the cool metal of his wedding ring against my skin.

"Feels odd" I commented.

"What?" Eric asked.

"The ring" I said. He removed his hand and stared at it. "Does it feel odd to you?" I asked.

"No, I'm kind of used to it" he said, sticking his hand back in my top.

If there was ever a night I really needed to go straight to sleep it would have been this one. It had been a busy few days and I had my classes to run in the morning. But I couldn't. I lay there and listened to Eric's breathing.

Nope, there was nothing I could do. I still really wanted a baby.

EPOV

Sookie was acting odd and I couldn't figure it out. She kept staring off into space and then not listening to me when I was talking. More noticeably, she also suddenly had the ability to block all the most annoying of Amelia's shouting at her. I wished I knew how she'd developed that skill.

She was adamant that we needed to take the kids in to see Judith and the new baby in hospital, which didn't sound like a great idea to me. I was worried that they would be a bit enthusiastic with the baby and we wouldn't be able to prise them off. At least Bob could run away, a newborn baby had no chance.

So on the Tuesday I left work early and headed home to meet Sookie and the girls and then take them all into the place where Judith was staying.

Amelia was excited, chattering on about seeing 'Jessie's brother', Felicia was confused about where we were going and why, and Sookie was just very, very quiet, other than when she was giving me directions.

The place they were staying in looked like any other office building. We parked and went inside and followed Sookie to the room Judith was in. It was a tiny room, and really hot. And also really crowded by the time the four of us joined Judith and the baby. Calvin was at home with Jessica and apparently Judith had 'just finally got rid of bloody Portia'. Sookie just nodded in agreement, but didn't say a lot. She was just staring at the baby. Fuck, that was a tiny bundle Judith was holding.

Amelia handed over the present we'd brought for him and Judith attempted to open it one-handed before giving up and saying to Sookie "Can you take him for a minute?" Then she looked at me, "Unless you want to, Eric?"

"Oh, um. No, I'm OK" I said, unconsciously stepping further away from the bed.

Sookie rolled her eyes and took the baby off Judith. "I'll hold him!" Amelia shouted.

Sookie directed Amelia to sit in the chair and then balanced the baby on Amelia's lap. Felicia crowded round to look at him too. I kept my distance. Newborns kind of freaked me out. They were just so fucking tiny; nothing had the right to be that small and fucking helpless.

Judith and Sookie chatted about feeding and sleeping and stuff that I couldn't really fathom. Amelia talked about herself. Felicia hung on my leg and looked a bit bored.

Most of the time we were there though, Sookie held onto that baby for dear life. She really looked as though she didn't want to give him back at the end of the visit either.

I wondered if she'd ever want to have another one because she seemed like a natural at it. She probably thought I'd be at shit at it though. And I realised that not holding the baby might be hurting my chances. So in the end I said she could pass him over for a bit.

It was fucking terrifying. I think he was even smaller than Ruby had been when I'd held her. I could almost feel all the little tiny bones under his skin.

Sookie might have been cut out for dealing with tiny little things like that, but maybe I wasn't. Maybe I should just stick with the kids we had, the ones that getting less breakable by the day, and shelve that idea, the one where I'd thought it would be fun to have a baby. It probably hadn't been one of my better plans.

"Isn't he gorgeous?" Sookie asked me.

I just nodded. I thought the kid looked like a monkey. Who'd been sat on. But as I said, I knew fuck all about new babies.

We got home and Sookie started making dinner. She was in a mood about something. The freezer bore the brunt of it. There was a loud tirade of abuse when the shelf inside it collapsed as she was trying to retrieve some ground beef.

I guess it was up to me to try to make it better for her, though. Although I hadn't realised that that part of the vows from last Saturday were going to come around quite this quickly.

SPOV

Another visit to see Thomas meant another round of feeling jealous and just, well, just a kind of longing to have one again. I even thought it might be nice to be pregnant and after having two kids those kinds of thoughts are just plain stupid.

So I was annoyed with myself when we got home. And also kind of annoyed at Eric, although it wasn't his fault. I'd half-hoped that when he saw Thomas he'd be so overcome with the same kind of feelings I had that he'd ask me to have a baby again. And then I could graciously say 'OK' and that would be it. Sorted. Without me having to reach out and bridge the big gap I'd created when I'd said no way to one before.

Instead, of course, he spent the time trying not to listen to what Judith and I were talking about and downright reluctant to hold Thomas. It was hopeless. I really had to get over this whole thing. And soon.

So I rang Tara after dinner. They'd disappeared early from the reception on Saturday night and I said as much to her.

"Well, you know" she said. "Once JB's mum took the kids we were realised we were going to have the bach to ourselves for the night, so we took off up there."

"That sounds nice. It being just the two of you…" I was trying to say something that wasn't going to come out laden with too much innuendo.

"Yeah. It was. Until the next morning and I remembered that I forgot my pill. So I had to go and get the morning after one."

"Again?" I asked. It wasn't the first time. Tara was a bit hopeless. It was probably only due to the fact that she found it hard to get pregnant that she hadn't ended up with more kids.

"Yeah. Once upon a time I would have risked it, but not now. On the plus side, after seeing me feeling so sick after taking that damn thing JB is feeling a lot happier to have that vasectomy now. I can't wait for that day!" she said brightly.

"Um, yeah" I wasn't sure what to say to that. "So Judith had her baby on Monday. Thomas. She was in labour for a long time though, and they had to try to re-start the labour after the epidural slowed it down, so that wasn't great."

"How big was he?" Tara was competitive about baby sizes.

"Um, 7 pounds 12."

"Phfft. That's nothing. She should throw him back!" Tara laughed, and I joined in, half-heartedly. Very few babies were as big as Charlotte had been so I didn't win that game either.

"He looks OK though" I said. "Very cute."

"Yeah" Tara sighed. "They are. It's just such a pain having them. Glad I'm not doing that again. You should though, you're great at it!" Tara had had a long, painful labour followed by an emergency c-section with Charlotte. Then she'd had Lachie as an elective c-section. Somehow she thought my shorter labours which didn't result in medical intervention didn't really count as tough.

They'd seemed pretty tough to me.

"Yeah, maybe" I said. "One day." I really wanted to ask someone, anyone for their opinion on whether that day should be now, but it wasn't really fair on Tara. And I couldn't guarantee I'd like her answer anyway. Her choices weren't mine.

So we chatted for a bit, I told her about the guests I was getting for Christmas and she was torn between being sympathetic and laughing at me. In the end the laughing at me won.

When I hung up I still wasn't any clearer on what I should do. Damn.

I got home with the kids on Thursday to find Eric was already there, and he looked excited. "I've got a surprise" he said. "Something you've been really wanting. You're going to love it."

"What?" I asked. I couldn't guess for the life of me. He was unlikely to have bought me a baby from somewhere, but then it was hard to tell with Eric. He sometimes managed to produce the right thing at the right time.

"It's in the shed" he said. "Follow me."

I followed him. "It's a garage, though. Remember?"

"Yeah, I don't think so. You couldn't fit a car in there."

"You could! Not your car. And probably not my car. But _a_ car would fit in there."

"And the vibrations from driving it in there would cause the walls to collapse. But let's not argue about it anymore."

It was funny, I thought, that he always said that just after he'd made his point, not before.

I followed Eric into the garage and I was faced with the biggest chest freezer I'd ever seen in my life. "That's, um, humungous Eric" I said, a bit lost for words.

"Yep."

"You could fit a body in there. Maybe even yours."

"Shit, if I'd known it would give you stupid ideas, I wouldn't have bought it."

"But…why?"

"Well you said the other one was shit. And too full. So I thought this would help. You know, with Christmas." He looked really pleased with himself.

"Well, it will. Especially if Jason brings me a whole lamb…"

Eric looked a bit horrified. "He wouldn't."

"Yeah, he was talking about it. Or a pig. Or both maybe."

"Um, OK. But this will hold the turkey anyway."

"I'm not doing turkey, but nice try."

"OK, well chicken then. Or whatever. So do you like it?" He looked at me and grinned. "You'll thank me the next time there's a good special on frozen peas!"

I reached up and kissed him. "I do like it. It's very thoughtful. Although I don't know how great it will be out here when it rains…"

Eric shrugged. "You're used to the rain" he said. OK, so he'd fixed one problem, that one was mine. I followed him out of the garage and back to the house. I guessed that freezer could be really useful when we were a family of five.

Because somehow even shiny new whiteware hadn't chased away the desire to have a baby.

And at this point, I wasn't sure anything was going to.

**SPCA is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	19. Chapter 19

**A/N So today I learnt that humidity and Christmas shopping do not mix. Not if you go to the open-air mall without air-conditioning. Stupid, stupid me! But luckily I have the knowledge you guys are reading this and the nice reviews I get to make up for it. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. Although Christmas _is_ nearly here. So you never know!**

EPOV

When Sookie said that there was a chance that Jason might bring a whole dead animal with him at Christmas, I was kind of glad that I'd bought the largest fucking freezer I could find. But it hadn't brought Sookie out of the bubble she was in. Whatever was worrying her was obviously pretty big too.

I just couldn't figure out what the fuck I'd done.

When we were going to bed I decided I would just ask her. "Are you OK?"

"Fine" she said, in the way that means she probably isn't. She got into bed and just sat, staring into space.

"You don't seem fine."

Sookie turned to look at me. "No, I am. It's just…well it's been a really busy week. I mean, this time last week we were rushing around doing all the last minute stuff for the ceremony. And now, well. Thomas is here and life goes on. Christmas is just around the corner and I need to get organised for that next."

"So…" I reached over to take her hand and tried to get a read on her face. "So you're not having second thoughts or anything?"

"About what?" she asked, sharply, whipping her head around to look at me.

I frowned. "About getting married. You're not wishing you, you know…hadn't?"

"What? Married you? No. No I'm not thinking about that. At all really." Sookie frowned a bit. "Is it odd do you think that life has just sort of carried on around us despite the fact that we had, um, a civil union?

"Um. Probably not. As long as you don't want to back out of it or anything, I think it's totally fine."

Sookie reached over and stroked my face. "I definitely don't regret it. At all. Stop worrying, it's not like you."

"Well, you're kind of worrying me. You're a bit weird."

"I'm not, I'm just a bit…tired and stressed. Like I said. I'll be fine after Christmas."

"There are still a few weeks until Christmas though. Could you be fine before then do you think?"

Sookie sighed. "I'll try."

"Maybe I could help you?" I said, moving my hand to her breast and my face to the crook of her neck. She smelt fantastic.

"Could you? Maybe you could think of something for Tara and JB, because I'm stumped as to what to buy them? Also, do you think we should send your dad a calendar? You know, one of those ones of scenic pictures of New Zealand?"

I looked up. "That wasn't um…quite what I was thinking…" I started nuzzling her neck again.

"I know" she said, laughing. That was a nice sound. "But it's fun to play with you a bit."

"You can play with me a lot if you want."

And when I was inside her, it felt so good, like it always did. When she was focussing on me, and only me, and not on some worry that was rattling around in her head it was so much better. I loved it when I was inside her. I just wished she'd let me inside her head. Just a little bit.

SPOV

I was completely stumped as to what to do about the baby thing. Eric had picked up that something wasn't quite right. He kept asking me if I was OK. He even asked if I had second thoughts about marrying him. Really, that was the last thing I was thinking.

But it did remind me that we hadn't even been married, or joined in a civil union, for even a week yet. It was really not the time to go rushing into having more kids.

No matter how much I wanted a baby.

So on Friday morning I got up and resolved to just put it all behind me and move on. Christmas, I thought. I should focus on Christmas. And Jason coming. Yeah, because that was going to be…interesting.

I hoped Crystal's kids were OK. And didn't think I was lame and that it was boring here. I wasn't really sure what they were used to, having grown up in the country.

And I could start buying stuff to fill up the freezer. Eric no doubt thought he was really funny with that crack about the frozen peas, but actually I was going to be feeding four adults and five kids for a couple of days, with Christmas lunch thrown into the mix, plus I needed to have enough extras for snacks for various drop-ins (Aunty Linda and Uncle Trevor being the notable mentions) so yeah, I needed a fair amount of food at the ready.

Just before he left for the office on Friday morning Eric looked at me carefully. "You seem…better?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, I am. Maybe you cured me of my worrying? You know, last night?" I did my best attempt at a saucy wink, but I wasn't convinced I didn't just look like I had a twitch in my eye.

Eric just looked at me for a bit. "I'm good" he said, "But I'm not convinced I'm that good. I'm not sure anything is going to cure you of worrying completely."

"Well, maybe just of the current worries then."

"OK, well maybe that. I'm off though. I'll see you tonight." He kissed me lightly. "See you guys!" he called out.

"Bye!" Amelia yelled back. Then there was the sound of small feet running down the hall "Daddy! Bye!" Felicia called, and then she leapt at Eric, not giving him much time to put his laptop bag down and get into position to catch her. She was brimming with the confidence of the very young that daddy would always be there to catch her.

And I was back to the baby thing. Shit. It was a good hour or so while I wasn't thinking about it.

Eric left, after finally prising Felicia off his leg, and she and Amelia immediately lost all ability to entertain themselves. Amelia, who had been so engrossed in laying out every Polly Pocket she owned on her bedroom floor, now demanded that I 'do something' with her.

So we made blueberry muffins. All three of us. I was actually surprised any of the mixture made it as far as the muffin pans after Felicia discovered how great uncooked muffin mix tasted. And she was completely oblivious when Amelia told her not to eat any.

When they were in the oven, and the argument between the two of them had reduced to being just over how to divide up licking the bowl, I gave Judith and Calvin a quick ring. She was now back home and I thought it might be nice to take her a few of the muffins.

So I piled the kids and some muffins in the car and drove the ten minutes to Judith and Calvin's house. Amelia was chattering all the way and Felicia just kept asking if daddy would be there.

Judith still looked tired, which was understandable, but Calvin was looking a bit better now. He said hello to everyone and then went off to get drinks to have with the muffins. Judith was nursing Thomas and Jessica was watching warily. It wasn't nice sharing your mum. Amelia would agree with that.

However, Amelia was surveying the situation in Judith's living room. "Aunty Jude" she said. "You've got really big boobies."

"They're for my baby" Jessica said.

"Yep, so I can feed him" Judith added.

"Boobies!" Felicia shouted.

Amelia wrinkled up her nose. "I don't think that's right" she said, watching Judith and Thomas intently.

"You didn't used to complain" I muttered.

Calvin arrived back in the living room with tea for Judith and me, and some glasses of water for the small girls. Then we broke out the muffins. Thomas finished his feed and Judith held him up so he could burp, which he did. Loudly. Felicia and Amelia rolled around laughing. Jessica was torn between joining in with her cousins and pretending her baby brother didn't exist.

Judith fixed her bra and her top and then looked a bit lost. "Here you go" she said, holding Thomas out. "You can go to Aunty Sookie while I run to the loo."

I took Thomas off her, slightly reluctantly. Given the stupid ideas I'd been having maybe holding him wasn't the best idea. But I wanted to help Judith out. And that's what aunts are for, after all.

It was funny how I'd always be an aunt to any kids that Judith and Calvin had, even though I was no longer her sister-in-law. My connection to Bill had been slowly fading away in the time since he'd left me, and now it was completely erased and replaced by the new connection I had to Eric. But somehow, I still had a relationship to Judith.

And it was a relationship that had changed a lot over the years. When I'd first met her she'd been a stroppy 12 year old who was fond of yelling at Bill and calling him a dick when Lorena wasn't around, and who used to bang on Bill's bedroom door when I was in there. We'd hear her and sometimes Sarah, giggling like loons in the hallway. I guess they thought they'd interrupt us making out.

Sometimes they did.

It was hard to connect that annoying 12 year old with the wife and mother of two Judith was today. She'd come a long way. We both had. And in that time the age difference between us had somehow melted away.

Plus, of course, these days I was married to someone who was the same age she was. Which was a sobering thought. I idly wondered what Eric would be have been like at 12, while I cuddled Thomas and watched the three girls pull everything out of Jessica's toybox in the corner.

For all that Eric thought that I was concerned that he might be too young to have kids, he never asked me if I had the same thoughts about Judith. And I didn't, most of the time. When I stopped thinking about her as a 12 year old girl.

Judith came back into the room. "That feels better" she said. "He'd been asleep on me for a while and I was busting." She didn't seem inclined to take Thomas back and I didn't offer him.

Felicia eyed me holding him a couple of times and then trotted over. "Bubba?" she asked. I held him away from me so she could look. "He's very tiny" I said. "You used to be that small."

Felicia gave me a look that said she thought I was talking nonsense and wandered off again. Jessica and Amelia had finally settled on a game and she needed to walk through the middle of it so they'd have someone to yell at. She was good at uniting them like that.

The rest of the visit was fine. I cuddled Thomas, hoping that if I held him enough it would chase away all the longing I felt. But of course as soon as I handed him back at the end of the time I was hit with it again. A huge, huge, wave of longing. I'd given Thomas to Calvin and watching him smile at his son just made me want to see Eric with a baby.

I was still so screwed.

In the hope it would distract me I made a bacon and egg pie when we got home and later in the day I packed a picnic. Eric came home and went through the usual routine of being jumped all over by Felicia and listening to Amelia's long drawn-out version of what had happened to her during the day. Then I said we were going to Cornwall Park for a picnic dinner and started to get everyone ready.

Eric changed his clothes, and changed Felicia's t-shirt so she was no longer covered in bits of rice cracker and muffin mix. I tried to encourage Amelia not to get changed. She wasn't wearing food and didn't need an entirely new set of clothes just to go to a park.

Felicia came running into Amelia's room and grabbed one of the baby dolls that were lying in the toy cot. "Bubba!" she announced, handing it to me.

"Oh, no thanks, Felicia" I said, trying to give it back to her.

"Mummy's bubba" she said, refusing to take it back.

"No! It's mine!" Amelia interjected.

"Of course it is" I agreed, putting it back.

Felicia frowned at me "Mummy have bubba" she stated, as though I was meant to take the doll with us.

"If you want to take a doll Felicia, you can take one of yours" I said. Felicia wasn't the biggest fan of dolls at the moment, only really showing any interest in order to join in with Amelia occasionally. And that was only if Eric wasn't around to provide a better form of entertainment.

"What's happening?" Eric asked, walking into the room.

"Felicia took my doll!" Amelia complained.

"She kept giving it to me" I added. "I think because we went to see Thomas again today and she saw me cuddling him she thought…well, I don't know. It's hard to tell. She thinks I need a doll though."

"Bubba" Felicia added.

"How were they?" Eric asked me.

"Good. I think Judith is finding it's not such a steep learning curve the second time around. And Calvin's very taken with his son, of course."

"Mmm" Eric said nodding, and looking thoughtful. "OK, well let's get in the car then."

We drove the short distance to Cornwall Park and spread out the picnic blanket in a spot a short walk from the carpark and a long walk from any of the sheep. Eric tried to interest the girls in kicking the ball around, but they had their own ideas, most of which involved jumping all over Eric.

Felicia did a rather lovely face-plant at one point, but seemed unharmed. "FarFarkSwayke!" she yelled as she stood up. Oooh, I thought, that is getting a lot closer to what she's trying to say. I'll really have to get Eric to try and put a lid on the swearing or else she'll be in more trouble at daycare.

By the time we sat down to eat Felicia had fallen over a bunch of times but it didn't seem to bother her. Her t-shirt however, was now covered in dirt. As was her face, which I attempted to clean up with a wet-wipe while Felicia tried to squirm away. The t-shirt would have to wait for the washing machine. It was a rather apt t-shirt too; it was navy and said 'Daddy's Troublemaker' on it. Eric and Felicia had picked it when we'd been in K-mart once and Amelia and I were arguing over pyjamas versus nighties.

Eric liked the t-shirt. Felicia seemed OK with it. I hadn't had the heart to tell them they'd been shopping in the boys' department and had just taken it to the check-out. If Amelia was anything to go by it was probably unlikely we'd get away with putting her in boys' clothes for much longer anyway.

After we'd eaten the kids went back to running around. Well, after they'd picked at a few things they went back to running around. Eric was still eating. He still really liked bacon and egg pie. But he was always a bit annoyed when he realised he hadn't left himself any leftovers. I should really get in the habit of making two, I thought, as I popped a cherry tomato in my mouth.

We watched Felicia run at Amelia and attempt to push her over. "Ow! No Felicia! Not nice!" Amelia yelled, while pushing at Felicia's head.

"Play nicely!" I yelled out.

"I am!" Amelia insisted, giggling as she side-stepped another attempt from Felicia to topple her over. But she'd under-estimated Felicia's speed and Felicia whirled around and caught up with her again before knocking her onto her bottom. "Ow!" Amelia called out loudly.

"You're fine Ames" Eric yelled, in between bites of pie.

She humphed, but she got up and eyed Felicia. "No pushing, Leesha" she said, before she tried to grab Felicia and knock her down. Felicia was too quick though, and took off giggling.

"Felicia's better at this than she used to be" Eric said.

"Yeah, you've taught her well. Plus, of course, she's older. That helps."

"Yeah it does. It's funny to think about what she used to be like. When she didn't move at all."

"I know! I remember all the disapproving looks from Lorena who was convinced she was defective or something." I paused while Felicia zoomed past the picnic rug. "And now you can't tell she wasn't the earliest walker or anything."

"I guess it's always that way…is it?" Eric asked me. "Is it always this fast?"

"Well yeah, it is. I mean Amelia's not even 5 yet, and she seems to have been a walking, talking, bossy little person for years and years. I have to look at the photos to remember what she was like as a baby. It's just so quick. A year is huge for them, but nothing for us. I mean, this time next year Thomas could be running around with them all."

"Yeah…" Eric said thoughtfully. "I guess I'll get to see it all…with him. From the start."

"Yeah, although it's different when it's not your own. I mean, I was used to Tara's kids, and Sarah and Portia's kids, but they were all different to having Amelia."

Eric didn't say anything else; he just looked around for something else to eat, finally settling on a banana. I watched him peel it and take a bite.

Oh, fuck it, I thought. I might as well just get this over with.

"So I was thinking" I said.

"Mmm?" Eric said, with his mouth full of banana.

"Well, you know. Maybe we should just do it. Have a baby."

Eric swallowed. "OK" he agreed, before taking another bite of his banana.

"Yeah, so…that's OK then?" I asked, not sure what to make of his off-hand reaction.

"Yep, fine. I wanted to before. So, like…now?" He turned to look at me.

"Well, not right this minute. It takes a bit of planning. I'll finish up the month of pills and then I guess it will be about two weeks after my period starts that we'll get the right time so…right after Christmas, I think."

"Right after Christmas?"

"Yeah, I think that's when the next 'best time' will be."

Eric looked thoughtful. "I didn't know there was a best time. I thought you just did it. You were the one who said babies don't work on timetables."

I glanced over at Amelia and Felicia and judged that the squeals I could hear weren't the result of anything life-threatening going on. "Yeah, there's a best time. Trust me on this." I laughed and patted his thigh. "After all, I'm the one who's done this three times before." Shit, I thought. I realised what I'd said. That had let the cat out of the bag.

I turned to look at Eric who was obviously rapidly trying to work that one out. He looked over at Amelia and Felicia as though he expected another kid to magically appear alongside them. "I lost one" I said.

That didn't seem to help Eric work it out, and I almost expected him to start looking around for where I might have put it. I sighed. I didn't really like talking about it. Not because I was sad still, but just…because. It was part of the past. "I had a miscarriage" I said in the end. "Between Amelia and Felicia."

"Oh. That's um…that's horrible…" Eric looked uncomfortable, and I don't think he knew what to say. But having got this far into the conversation, I was going to lay it all out for him.

"Yeah, I got pregnant, but then just before I was due to go for my first scan, I started bleeding. When they checked me out, it was pretty clear I'd lost the baby several weeks earlier and it just took a while for anything to, um, happen. So they, um…well, I had some surgery and then it was over. I got pregnant with Felicia before I even had another period. And she was fine."

Eric put his arm around me and pulled me close to him. I didn't want to be sad about it now, I really didn't. But just sometimes…well, sometimes you wonder. But I had Felicia and I didn't want to not have her, so there was no point wishing things had been different.

"That's just…that's just awful, Sookie" Eric said. "I'm so sorry you had to go through that."

I shrugged, well, as best I could while Eric was holding me against him. "Lot's of people do" I said. "Tara had two miscarriages between her kids. And Aunty Linda, well, she never had another baby after Hadley because she had a few. I think she had one baby that was basically stillborn. That would be devastating. That's like my worst nightmare. So really, what I went through, it's nothing. Not in the grand scheme of things. I got through it. And I got Felicia."

On cue Felicia arrived and pointed at the banana skin next to Eric. "'Nana!" she demanded.

"OK" Eric said, moving his arm from around me and grabbing another banana. He peeled the top half of it and handed it to Felicia who started to walk off "You have to sit down to eat it, though" he said, and she immediately sat on her bottom.

"And what do you say?" I asked her.

"'Tanks Daddy!" she said, grinning with her mouth full of half-chewed banana.

"See" I said to Eric. "So it all worked out in the end for me. It's just life. You just roll with the punches."

"Yeah" Eric agreed. "I guess you do."

Amelia ran over. "Are there strawberries?" she asked, sitting down.

"Yep" I said reaching into the chilly bin and grabbing some out for her.

"Strawbelly!" Felicia demanded, holding out the hand that wasn't holding her banana. She took a bite of the strawberry and grinned at Eric again, her mouth now a mess of red.

"You're not very polite" Amelia observed, looking over at Felicia.

"No, but we like her anyway" Eric said, stroking the side of Felicia's face.

"And me! We like me too!" Amelia said.

"Yep, we do" he agreed. Then he put his arm around my shoulder again and put his mouth against my ear "And we'll like the next one too" he said, before kissing the side of my head.

**Thanks for reading!**


	20. Chapter 20

**A/N I have to say that I want to feel sorry for all of you in the Northern Hemisphere who are currently freezing, I really do. But here, the air is like soup still, and it's hard to imagine the cold!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

It suddenly all clicked into place when Sookie said that she thought we should have a baby. That's what she'd been quietly stressing about all week. I wasn't sure how much of a reaction I should have to that statement; I didn't want to spook her. And I was scared of saying anything that might make her suddenly change her mind. She'd been so adamant before that it wasn't the right time. I couldn't figure out what had changed.

Maybe she'd just wanted to be married first? I was probably stupid to bring it up ahead of the wedding.

Or maybe it was Calvin and Judith's baby that made her want one? If anything he kind of put me off the idea, there was something just fucking scary about a tiny little scrap of bones and skin like that. The idea of being in charge of one of them just frightened the fuck out of me. But maybe it would work differently with Sookie. After all, she'd had two kids already and had obviously managed not to do anything stupid to them.

And then she said something about having planned for a baby three times. I was still trying to work out how the whole planning thing worked. Obviously I knew fucking nothing because I thought you just had sex and it happened. Apparently it didn't work that way.

And apparently Sookie knew because she'd done all this planning three times before.

I didn't know what to say to that. I think Sookie thought I didn't really know what she was talking about, because she was trying to explain it all to me, but really, I knew exactly what she'd been talking about.

And it was just too sad to think about. I didn't want to picture her going through that. And I didn't want to worry that it was going to happen again. Sookie had lost so much and I couldn't do anything about any of it. And that really fucked me off.

But if I'd learnt anything about Sookie, it was how strong she was. In the end she just kept saying that was OK, because she got Felicia instead. And I had to agree, it wouldn't be the same without Felicia, even if she was currently crushing a strawberry against the leg of my shorts.

When everyone had finished their fruit I helped Sookie pack up the food and the picnic rug and we took the two tired, sticky kids home. Felicia especially was looking exhausted, which I hoped would be a good sign for the night. She'd been better since she'd had her own bed, but a couple of times we'd hear her get up in the middle of the night and run round a bit. She wasn't always convinced that 3am wasn't a suitable time for getting up watching TV.

She was probably good practice for a new baby. Apparently they didn't know night and day either.

And the reason I knew that was that I'd been reading stuff on the internet. Not a lot, not so much that it was weird or anything. But I was curious…really curious. And I hadn't been sure how much I could ask Sookie without her getting defensive and telling me that no way was she having a baby.

However, now that she'd started the conversation I figured it was OK. "So" I said, as we were having coffee after the kids were in bed "we're really going to do this trying for a baby thing?"

"Yep. I said so. After Christmas."

"Because that's the 'best time'?"

"Yeah. You know, ovulation and all of that."

"Oh. OK." I didn't really want to think too hard about that. I guessed I should but it made Sookie seem like a science experiment and not a person.

"So…how long does it take?" I asked.

"What? Pregnancy?"

"No, I do know that much Sookie. How long before, you know, you get pregnant?" Some of the stuff I'd read said it took a long time, which was totally different to what they'd told you at school, all that it only takes one time shit.

Sookie shrugged. "No way to predict really. Could be any length of time. You just have to keep trying."

"I guess so. Do we get to practice though?"

"Well we had Jessica the other day, that was kind of like practice for having three kids." Sookie giggled, which kind of gave away the fact she was trying to tease me.

"Ha ha. I think you know what I meant."

"Yep, I can read you like a book Eric. And it's actually a really dirty book."

"What? Like one of your porn books?" I moved closer to her on the couch.

"Sometimes" she said, narrowing her eyes "I think its worse."

"Nope. Your books are pretty bad. Come on." I stood up and held out my hand to her. She took it and let me lead her towards the bedroom. "We'll get one of your books out and I'll show you how bad they are."

"Eric!" Sookie complained. "I don't really need a morals lesson."

"Well" I said, as we reached the bedroom, "Maybe we could act it out or something and you could see once and for all how bad those things are."

"Fine!" Sookie huffed. "And I suppose you have a book in mind as well?"

"Nope, but I bet you know where all the good bits are." I sat on the bed and lay back against the pillows. "So you can pick."

Sookie looked torn. I knew that she knew exactly where the 'good bits' were in some of her books. But whether she was going to admit it was a whole other matter. She sat on the bed and bit her bottom lip, and then she quickly reached over and grabbed a book off the nightstand and tossed it to me. "There" she said. "Do with it what you will." She lay down next to me.

"Well" I said, flicking through the pages. "I'd rather do something with you…"

"I don't know why I let you talk me into this stuff, Eric. I really don't."

"Oh, you know you love it. OK, are we going from page 233, where all the little sweaty fingerprints are?"

"What fingerprints?" Sookie said, making a grab for the book. I held it out of her reach.

"No, that's not how it goes, Sookie. First I think you're supposed to be…here." I grabbed her legs and pulled her further down the bed suddenly, so I could lie over her, still holding the book in one hand. Sookie squealed, but she didn't exactly put up a fight.

When I woke up the next morning I was lying half-across Sookie and Felicia was sitting on my back.

"I'm up" she said, as if I hadn't noticed.

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"Brekkie?" she asked.

"Soon. It's not really up time yet."

"Yeah. Amala's up."

"Is she?" I hadn't heard Amelia, so maybe she was getting quieter. Or maybe not, as just then she burst into the room. "Felicia!" she admonished. "Get off there, you're supposed to be in bed."

"Nah" Felicia said, not moving.

"Why are you all talking?" Sookie mumbled from somewhere underneath my shoulder. "And why am I being squished?

Amelia climbed onto the bed on Sookie's side. "You shouldn't squish people" she said, which was probably for my benefit.

"No one's being squished" I assured her.

"Me!" Sookie disagreed. She wriggled around trying to un-squish herself or something. Normally I liked the wriggling but the audience of small girls kind of put me off.

"I'm going to the bathroom" Sookie worked her way out from under the covers and headed to the ensuite, leaving me lying there with Felicia and Amelia expecting me to do something. Really, what I wanted was to go to the bathroom too. But when Sookie came back Amelia suddenly announced "Oh, I need wees!" and made a dash for the bathroom, so I lost my place in the line.

Felicia decided that everything was a bit boring and she might jump on the bed for a bit. I sat up to hold her hands and make sure she didn't bounce off, and also to try to make sure she didn't bounce on any bit of me that I was going to regret.

"I think we need a bigger bed" I said to Sookie.

"Mmm" she said. It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no. I looked around. I wasn't sure we could fit a much bigger bed in here. I'd have to measure it. If we got rid of the chest of drawers we could do it. I wondered if Calvin could fit drawers into that wardrobe he'd built in here. That might work.

And then I started to think about all the other things we should probably do if we were going to have another kid. Sookie needed a new car for one thing. Or maybe she could have my car, and I could get a new one. And I'd been going to buy a replacement spare bed for the spare room, but the cot was in there and we couldn't get rid of that. I didn't really want to give up the desk as it meant I could work at home.

But the spare bed made me think of something. "Where's Jason staying?" I asked Sookie.

"Here" she said, frowning.

"Yeah, but where. We don't have a spare bed. He can't top and tail with Felicia. Not to mention he's bringing Crystal and her kids this time."

"Oh, it's OK. They're bringing the tent."

"A tent?"

"Yep, we'll pitch it in the front garden. They can sleep in there."

"You can't have people sleeping in a tent outside." It didn't seem right somehow.

"Yep. You can. And that's what makes it Christmas."

"OK, well I'm talking your word for it then."

I finally got my turn in the bathroom. I could have used the other one, but it seemed a long way to go. However by this time everyone was wide awake, so we got up and went into the kitchen to find Bob waiting for us. I thought I saw a skink run under the fridge out of the corner of my eye, but decided not to mention it. I figured I could rely on Bob to keep his silence on the matter as well. But just in case I filled his bowl with biscuits to distract him.

"I want French toast" Amelia said, looking at me. "Daddy can make it. It's nearly as good as Nana's. Even if he didn't know about the jam."

"OK then. I'll help. What do you want me to do?" Sookie looked at me. I looked around for my phone. It was still in the bedroom. Shit.

"Um" I said, stalling. "Um. Eggs. We need eggs." I decided I'd just have to go with it. How hard could it be? And I had a pretty good memory for things. So we'd be fine.

I got part-way in under Sookie's rather watchful gaze and then I had to make a run to the bedroom to check the phone. Sookie looked at me quizzically, but didn't say anything. I managed to get the rest of the recipe without her finding out what was going on and the French toast turned out OK, if I did say so myself. The kids ate it anyway. Although Felicia ended up covered in a lot of jam. Sookie was muttering about the amount of washing Felicia was responsible for. I wondered if you could buy bigger washing machines.

SPOV

The hardest bit about Eric making French toast again was trying not to let on that I knew he was bluffing. I think he doesn't realise that I might figure out that as he bullshits people for a living he might try it on at home. The look of panic on his face when Amelia suggested it said a lot. As did the run to the bedroom under the pretence of 'I think my phone buzzed…' part-way through the process.

But I hadn't let on that I knew the other day, so I figured I'd keep up the pretence now. As hard as he made it for me. Still, I hoped that if we just kept making him make it maybe eventually he'd learn the recipe off by heart.

He was good at remembering things. Like where all the sex bits were in my books. How he had time to flick through them all I don't know.

After breakfast we went for a walk to the petshop. We had to buy new flea treatment for Bob. Not the world's most exciting task, but it was a nice day so the walk would be good.

Not sure the pets were that happy to see us. Felicia ran around and around the fish section and Amelia decided she wanted some mice. Eric tried to tell her she should just ask Bob for some but I shushed him. I did not need her getting up every morning disappointed because Bob the Santa-cat hadn't delivered.

I tried to tell her the story of the mice that Jason and I had owned, in an attempt to illustrate why they weren't a great idea but her little eyes glazed over and she moved over to look at the guinea pigs. I had even better stories about guinea pigs, but I didn't get a chance to tell them to Amelia either because then we both saw the big cage in the corner, it was full of kittens.

Amelia ran over and peered at the glass. "Look!" she cried. "They're soooo cute. Can I have a kitten?"

A shop assistant wandered over to her. "Do you want to hold one?" she asked, before she looked at me.

"Yes!" Amelia said and I nodded, so the girl opened the cage and took out a tiny tabby ball of fluff and handed it to Amelia. It was cute. "Do you want one too?" she asked me. "Um, OK" I said, as she handed me a ginger kitten who mewed piteously. It was really cute.

Eric came over with Felicia squirming in his arms. "She was trying to stick her fingers in the rat cage" he said shuddering. Then he looked at me. "No way" he said.

"No way, what?" I asked, stroking my tiny new friend. He looked like an Oliver I decided.

"No way are we getting a cat."

"Kitten" I corrected.

"Whatever. One of them." I sighed. I didn't really want a new kitten…except that when you were holding them they were nice. And Oliver was purring at me now.

"Kitty?" Felicia said.

"Can we Mum?" Amelia asked.

"Mmm, Bob wouldn't like it" I said. It's true, he wouldn't, I thought. Cats are meant to be solitary. But then again, they can cope if they have to.

"I wouldn't like it" Eric said.

"Oh, but Oliver's cute" I said, holding him out so Eric could see him. Eric shook his head. "You can't name it Sookie, you're not keeping it. And Oliver is a ridiculous name for a cat."

"I know I'm not." I said sadly, cuddling Oliver to my chest again. I'd put him back in a minute.

Eric just stood there watching me. "Tiger might suit him better" he mused.

"I liked Oliver" I said, handing him back to the shop assistant, and then taking Amelia's small charge from her and doing the same. She immediately adopted a pouty face and to cheer her up I let her go and pick a new toy for Bob. I was sure he was going to be thrilled by the pink, feathered monstrosity that she picked.

We started back home and then stopped half-way for coffee and fluffies at a café. The made great fluffies here, there were sprinkles, marshmallows and a chocolate fish.

Eric leaned over to me. "Did you really want a kitten?" he asked me.

"No" I said. "Not really. It's just…when I was holding it I remembered how cute and cuddly they are at that age and it was nice."

"Like when you were holding Thomas?"

"A bit" I agreed, taking a sip of my coffee and watching as Amelia and Felicia pulled children's books off the shelf in the corner. "But I'm over it now. I'll just give Bob extra cuddles when I get home instead."

Eric frowned and took a sip of his coffee. "So, does it go then? The feeling you have holding Thomas? Is it just…a temporary thing?"

"Oh, um. No it doesn't. No I've been feeling really…um. Well ever since I saw him there's just been this longing. It's hard to explain." It was, it was like something was missing. Or someone. I couldn't really explain it and I'd never really had it before. I mean, I loved my kids but sometimes it was like I'd had them because it was the 'next step'. With Amelia we'd decided it was a good time and I'd had her. And then there'd been discussions about suitable gaps and my work and we'd tried for Felicia. Of course first time, it didn't work out. Only then had I been really desperate to prove I could do it right and not miscarry. So really, I had never before wanted a baby just for wanting a baby.

I looked over at Eric, he was staring at his coffee. "You're really, really sure?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's not something I'd go into lightly. I mean, it's a big commitment. I think the more kids you have the more you realise it. The first time, well you think about the baby. But that's over so quickly. And now I have years and years of Amelia bossing me to look forward to!" I laughed and Eric did too. "God, I'll be in the old folks' home and she'll come in and tell me I'm playing bingo all wrong and my orthopaedic shoes are really ugly." I giggled again, imagining the scene. "And then Felicia will run in and upset Amelia by trying to make me to go to some kind of old-people's exercise class. And they can have an argument over what's best for mum in her old age."

"So where am I?" Eric asked.

"Oh, um. Well, maybe you're in the corner with the TV turned up really loudly so you can't hear any of us. Years of living with a lot of women will do that to you."

Eric laughed. "Maybe I'm just trying to be inconspicuous and hope they don't notice me."

"Yeah, you'd be good at that. Blending in. It's your specialty." I pulled a face because he so didn't blend in.

"Of course" Eric said, between sips of coffee, "if we have another kid it'll be there too."

"Yeah, I guess. Maybe it will be a boy?"

"Maybe" Eric agreed. I couldn't read if he thought that would be good or not.

"Trouble is" I continued "you can't guarantee it. So if it was another girl…that'd be OK?" I couldn't imagine having a boy after having two girls, so it felt as though that's what we'd have next time. I wondered how Eric would feel if he didn't get a son.

"It would be great Sookie" Eric said, kissing my hair. "After all, I've got the hang of girls now. Boys…I don't know. I can't imagine it." Eric looked thoughtful. I wondered if he was thinking about how crappy his dad had been with him, but I didn't feel inclined to ask him.

"Me neither."

Just then Felicia tripped over a chair leg on her way back to our table. "Farfuckswayke" she yelled, loud enough for several people in the café to turn around and look at her.

"Well if we don't have a boy" I said, "we've always got Felicia."

**Thanks for reading!**


	21. Chapter 21

**A/N Hello! Back again - phew! It's been a mission getting this done. Hope you all enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

SPOV

Christmas was getting closer and it was getting muggier by the day. We were all trapped inside by the rain. Well, I was going to Pak n Save any minute in a bid to buy more stuff for Christmas, but that left the other three trying to entertain themselves. And everyone was a little whingy.

"Remind me again" Eric said, walking into the kitchen where I was writing out my shopping list, "Why we don't have air-conditioning?" He stood there fanning the hem of his t-shirt trying to get a breeze going.

I laughed. "Eric no one has air-con here. We don't need it. Plus it's like hugely expensive. Open a window while we're in-between rain-showers."

Eric sighed. "I have opened windows. _And_ I've put the fan on. _And_ that de-humidifier is working it's ass off and is now making a funny noise. Did you realise I've emptied it already today, and it's nearly full again? But none of that shit works. It's still fucking humid."

"Well, it might be fine again…soon. The weather forecast said it was only showers tomorrow."

"It said it was only showers today and it was fucking torrential this morning. They never get it right in this fucking country." It was obviously not Eric's morning and he was in a mood. There wasn't a lot I could do about it. My ability to control the weather was pretty miniscule at best. Before I could think how to reply though, Amelia stomped into the kitchen.

"What's not right?" she asked.

"Um. The weather's lousy" I replied, trying to think of how best to phrase it.

"That is a fu...freaking understatement" Eric spat out.

"OK, well Leesha's bored, and I think you need to play with her" Amelia said to Eric, not really sympathetic to his problems with the weather.

"Where is she?" Eric asked, looking around as if he'd just noticed he didn't have his shadow.

"In the laundry. She was looking at the paint tins." Amelia had barely finished speaking before Eric was out of the kitchen and off to make sure Felicia wasn't attempting some re-decorating of her own.

We were, supposedly, re-doing the kitchen and the laundry. Eric had bizarrely got a bee in his bonnet and decided that the unfinished gib in the laundry needed to go, and we also needed to fix the bit that was leaking. So he got Calvin to come and look at it. I didn't mention Calvin had been responsible for the kind of off-hand job that had left me with the leak in the first place. He was cheap so I wasn't complaining. Although the first morning he showed up, unannounced, at 6.30am when Eric was in the shower sort of threw me for a loop. Sometimes it's nice to know these things ahead of time.

But somehow the laundry fix-up had morphed into doing the kitchen as well. And at the current point in time everything was half-done and it wasn't that long until Christmas. I was getting a bit anxious. Calvin was trying to do it in between his real job and he was fond of doing stuff like applying filler round door handles and saying to Eric "If you sand that back when it dries, I'll come back and do another coat tomorrow." This meant that Eric had had to learn how to sand stuff. Apparently it required a lot of swearing and muttering. I was a bit worried that Felicia was picking up a lot more than DIY skill by hanging around watching him.

She was fascinated by the whole process. She liked to sit and watch Uncle Calvin as well. We'd bought her a toy toolset for Christmas in the hope she'd stop wanting to play with the real things. Although from the sound of it she was currently trying to figure out how to open paint cans. Let's hope no one had left a screwdriver in there. The painters were coming next week, when, hopefully, everything else would be finished and then it would be all over. I was looking forward to having doors on the kitchen cupboards again.

Felicia probably wasn't because she'd been having a good poke around in there. I had to live with things like the cheese grater and the glasses and the glass jugs all up on the kitchen bench. It didn't leave me a lot of room to do anything.

"Are you OK?" I yelled in the general direction of the laundry, when Eric didn't come back.

"Yeah. She just wanted to stack them…ow! Watch out Leesh" Eric yelled back, partly at me, and partly at Felicia.

"OK. I'm going then. Bye!" I yelled, and then I grabbed my bag and started to walk out.

"Mum" Amelia said sadly. "Mum, can I come with you?"

"To the supermarket?" I asked. It wasn't that I didn't want to take my first-born, but well, it wasn't an easy place to entertain kids.

"Yeah. It's borin' here. There's nothing to do."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I can help you get stuff. Pleeease?" Amelia looked pitiful.

"Oh, OK then. You go and get your shoes on."

"Yay!" Amelia skipped off, no doubt to put on her sparkly ballet slippers that would be totally unsuitable in the rain, and I went to tell Eric I was taking one of his charges. He and Felicia were busy creating a pyramid out of paint cans on the laundry floor so I don't think he was too upset about being down to one kid. It was shaping up to be a very boring day at home.

Amelia actually turned out to be a big help at Pak N Save. I sometimes forgot that she was nearly five now and wasn't quite the same toddler who just wanted to run off as soon as her feet touched the ground, she'd passed that mantle on to Felicia. She certainly griped a lot less than Eric did, and she didn't expect me to buy her coffee. A lollipop, yes, but at least they were just at the checkout and didn't require a special stop somewhere else in the mall.

Getting it all packed into the boot of the car everything got kind of soaked from the rain, including me, but at least it wasn't cold. And I didn't have time to think about how wet I was anyway, because on the drive home Amelia told me another long rambling story. Actually, it was the second part of the long, rambling story that she had started when we'd first left home. When you actually sat back and listened to her you realised that she had some imagination for a kid.

We got back and I let Amelia in the house along with a couple of bags of groceries. Eric came racing out of the house to help me unload the car. Guess he was feeling a bit housebound.

"How's Felicia?" I asked, as we dashed into the garage with the bags of frozen food.

"Fine. We'd been building a block tower, so I left her to it." he said. "She kept telling me home was borin' though."

"Huh. She obviously got the borin' thing off Amelia, who will by now have taken over that block tower for her princesses." I put the bags of shopping I was carrying down and lifted up the lid of the freezer. It was a big freezer and I had to use two hands.

"Yeah. Maybe the T-rex will have eaten them though." A while back I'd mentioned to Eric how much Felicia loved the dinosaurs at Amelia's pre-school. So when he'd found himself seeing a client who happened to be near a toyshop he'd wandered in, and come out with the biggest toy Tyrannosaurus Rex I'd even seen. It was very realistic, with an articulated jaw and everything. When I'd seen the price-tag I'd nearly freaked, $60 was a lot to spend on one dinosaur. Felicia loved it to pieces though. And he had bought Amelia something too; she'd been given a set of Disney princesses the same size as all her Polly Pockets.

But she really coveted that dinosaur. And didn't quite understand why being bigger and older didn't entitle her to have all the toys in the house. The cool ones, anyway.

Eric looked sideways at me. "The wet t-shirt is a good look, although it might be better without the bra."

"Yeah. Ha ha." I said, as Eric reached over and made a grab for me. I slapped his hands away. "Hands to yourself and help me get this stuff in the freezer before it defrosts." Eric sighed and started taking stuff out of the shopping bags and putting it away. He started frowning though when he realised just how many packets of mince he was pulling out.

"Really, Sookie? There's…what?" He reached into the freezer and started counting while I made a point of ignoring him. "12 kilos of minced beef, so that's…" I continued to ignore him while he translated kilos into something he could understand. "That's something like…more than 26 pounds anyway. How in the hell are we are going to eat that much minced beef?"

I shrugged. "It's useful. You can do lots with it. And you bought the bloody freezer."

"And it was on sale?"

"Well, yeah. Of course it was. You only stock up on these things when they're on sale. Anyway, we need to get inside so I can put the milk in the fridge before that goes off. Come on." I started out the door and got ready to run through the rain. Behind me I could hear Eric mutter something that sounded suspiciously like "I knew I was right buying the biggest goddamn freezer they had" but I ignored that as well.

Sure enough when we got inside there was a small turf war going on in the family room around the blocks. Eric went to referee and I dealt to the groceries. It was going to be that kind of afternoon.

After lunch, when Felicia had reluctantly agreed to have a nap, and Amelia was playing something involving the T-rex eating the princesses, and hoping no-one had noticed that she'd co-opted her sister's prized toy into her game, I sat down to read the paper in peace.

I got about five minutes and then the phone rang. And no one else seemed inclined to answer it so I stood up and walked into the kitchen.

"Christmas is ruined!" Judith said down the phone after I'd said hello. Oh good, I thought. I don't know why she always rings me when she has three perfectly good sisters she could complain to.

"I'm fed up with bloody Portia" she wailed. OK, then, well maybe two perfectly good sisters. "She's just determined to ruin it for me. Now she's not talking to Calvin because, I don't know, something about some shelves he put up that aren't quite right. Aargh. He says he didn't realise, but he bloody did it on purpose because she pisses him off, and now I'm the one getting it in the neck all the time about when he's coming back to fix it, and now Mum's in on the act and it's all 'why is he over doing work for Sookie and her lover and not your own sister?' And I had to say 'Mum they're actually paying him, Portia won't even offer him a drink'. I think she blames Calvin for that Charles taking off back to South Africa like that was his fault. So I'm caught between all three of them. And Portia's supposed to be doing Christmas because I said to them that I wasn't doing it this year because of Thomas, and of course Sarah is buggering off to Whangarei, although that's only if she manages to stay with Matt for more than about five minutes, did you hear he took off last month?"

"Um, no…" I was probably out of the loop with a lot of the Compton gossip these days. Now Lorena wasn't ringing here at all hours of the day and night looking for Bill so he could sort out his sisters, I didn't get to hear these things as they happened.

"So anyway, he left and threatened to take the kids that were his, but he's back now. Caroline isn't coming home because work is too busy, so there won't be a Christmas. Because I'm not going to Portia's if she's going to be all shitty about everything. She and Mum can keep each other company on the day. We'll be happier by ourselves." Judith paused for breath and I guessed it was my turn to say something.

"Well, that could be nice. Just a family Christmas, with the four of you."

"Yeah, probably not. I'm kind of used to more people now. I don't know." She sighed. "It won't really feel like Christmas. Bloody Portia. She has to ruin EVERYTHING!" Judith sounded as though she was really upset. I guess all the after-pregnancy hormones were still running loose in her system. Or maybe it was just her.

"Um" I said, "Um…well, we've got Jason and Crystal coming up this year…"

"Have you?" Judith said, sniffing. "That'll be nice."

"Yeah. I guess. So I mean if you wanted…you could come here…" I trailed off. I hadn't really meant to invite her, I'd just felt put on the spot and wanted her to cheer up. Still, I thought, she'd probably say no.

"Really?" she asked. "Could we? Because that would be great. Jessie would love to come and hang out with her cousins."

"Yeah, of course you can. It'll be fine. I probably won't notice a couple more adults and a toddler. And it's not like I have to feed Thomas." That was something I thought.

"Oh, that's great. That's a weight off my mind. Now I can tell Portia where to shove her stupid Christmas lunch. As it was she expected us to hang around all morning waiting while she went to church. So you'll have to tell me what I can bring?"

"Um, yeah. I'll let you know. So how is Thomas doing?"

"Oh you know, he eats and sleeps and poos. He poos a lot. I'd forgotten what that was like. The novelty has worn off. But I like him anyway. When are you going to have another baby?"

Jeez, Judith, I thought. Way to put me on the spot. Somehow she'd decided I was family and it was fair game to ask me rather personal stuff. She liked to share as well. Bill nearly died when she confessed to having had a miscarriage with a previous boyfriend when she was about 24. He didn't like to think of his baby sister having any kind of contact with men. He'd barely tolerated Calvin.

"Um, I don't know…we haven't, um…" I wanted to say we hadn't discussed it, but I didn't feel right telling an outright lie. "Well, we just have to see what happens and stuff…"

"So you're definitely thinking of having three kids then? Because I'm wavering now. I always wanted four, but now I'm thinking three might be better."

"Oh, I haven't really given it a lot of thought…" I hadn't really. I thought that three might be quite enough kids really.

Thankfully Judith gave up trying to pin me down on how many more kids I was having and we had a chat about some other things before saying goodbye. I went to break the news about Christmas to Eric.

I found him staring at the wall in the bedroom. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"Oh. Nothing. Just thinking."

"Uh-huh. Well, anyway. That was Judith on the phone. Short version is that she's not talking to Portia because Portia's not talking to Calvin because of some shelves that went wonky, and Portia was doing Christmas for them all, which was going to be a bit tense, so Judith got upset and I said they could come here instead."

"That's the short version?" Eric asked, looking at me.

"Yeah, it is. I left out several sub-plots and digressions. So is that OK? Because I actually already invited them…"

"What? Oh yeah, that's fine. Will there be room?"

"Um. Probably as long as it doesn't rain and we can have the doors open to the deck. It's not too bad. Only another two adults and one toddler to feed." I wasn't really sure Eric was listening to me; he still seemed to be staring at the wall. He'd been looking at walls and cupboards and window frames a lot recently. I worried that one day I'd come home and find he'd asked Calvin to knock something down and I would be stuck with a tarpaulin where there should be an external wall as they'd decided to build an extra room. Or three.

Felicia wandered in, looking a bit sleepy and carrying Sockie. "Daddy" she said, wandering over to Eric. "Poos."

"What?" Eric caught a whiff of the smell. "Oh." Yeah, there were times it wasn't that great being the favoured parent. He picked Felicia up, carefully as she was only wearing a nappy, and carried her off to change her. I sat on the bed and thought that it was probably time to start toilet training and wondered where I'd stashed that potty.

EPOV

I decided that if we were going to go ahead with this baby thing then we really needed a bigger house. Well first it had started with the realisation that we needed a bigger bed. But no matter how many times I measured the bedroom I couldn't figure out how to fit a bigger bed in there. Which meant we needed a bigger room, but if we made that room bigger we had to steal the space from somewhere else. And there wasn't anywhere that could afford to be smaller. As it was, the previous round of renovations had created the world's smallest ensuite bathroom and left the laundry in what was basically a cupboard.

Add to that the fact that if we had another baby we needed a whole other bedroom and this house was going to be too small. It had to go. But I knew, from watching all those stupid house renovation programs that Sookie liked, programs I hadn't even fucking known they made before I met her, that you couldn't sell a house if it still had unfinished and unpainted drywall in the laundry, not to mention the leak by the door that appeared if the rain fell in a particular direction. And then the idea to get the laundry finished off had somehow merged into the idea of tidying up the kitchen which hadn't been touched since the previous owners had lived here.

I'd asked Calvin to start the work for us, I hadn't realised though that he'd expect me to fucking help him out with it. I knew fuck all about shit like sanding. It was so fucking boring and Sookie just laughed and told me the job was far too small to get someone in. I felt sure there'd be someone who'd be willing to do it for me, but I gritted my teeth and got it done. At least the painters were booked to arrive next week so I didn't have to face that again. I just hoped that Calvin's part of the work was going to be finished in time for them to paint. It was all a bit…stressful really. And Sookie fretting about whether it was going to be ready for Christmas didn't help.

From the sound of it Christmas was getting bigger by the minute. I hadn't told her that Calvin had been angling for an invitation for a while, he'd been muttering about what a drag it was having to spend the day with Lorena and the psychotically religious sister going at it, and how he'd much rather spend the day with friends, relaxing and having a good time.

There'd been a lot of pointed looks at me every time he said friends.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to invite him and I'd meant to ask Sookie, but it slipped my mind with all the other things I had to worry about. It sounded as though Judith had stepped in and figured it out anyway, so I was out of the loop.

Now all I needed was Calvin to finish the work, the rain to fucking stop and the humidity to disappear so I could stop emptying that noisy fucking dehumidifier. It wasn't too much to ask, surely?

About 3 o'clock the rain finally started to clear and the weather looked promising. Calvin arrive not long afterwards with the door handles he'd promised to bring for the new kitchen cupboard doors, which were currently in the shed and not in the kitchen. I think it was that which was stressing Sookie out the most. Felicia had a nasty habit of poking around in anything she could find and there'd been a few occasions where she'd been found trying to run off with a wine glass or a china eggcup.

"So I hear we're coming here for Christmas, yah?" Calvin said as he sat down his toolbox and took out the handles.

"Yeah, Sookie said something about Judith falling out with…her sister…" Fuck, I couldn't remember the names of the other ones.

"Yah, Portia's a total bitch sometimes. She's been unhappy ever since I put up those shelves in her living room. She just takes it for granted that I'll do this stuff for her because we're family." I figured I wasn't included in that statement as I was actually paying him. He screwed a handle onto the first door. "That looks OK, doesn't it?"

"Yeah" I agreed. It did look better than what had been there before.

"OK, well, if I leave you the rest to put on, then I'll come back tomorrow and hang the doors in place. I just have to get to the supermarket because I promised Judith I'd pick up some nappies for Thomas. Fuck, he poos like a trooper."

"Oh. OK." Yeah, I wasn't paying him a lot and this was why. I was the one that got stuck being his assistant.

Calvin said goodbye and headed back to his truck and I tried to figure out how to get the door handles into the correct position.

About an hour later I'd nearly finished and Sookie came to see how I was getting on.

"They look good" she said, sitting on the floor of the shed next to me.

"Yeah. Do you think that one's straight?" I'd been looking at it for a while and wasn't sure.

"Yep, I think so." She cocked her head to the side. "Yeah, definitely straight. How many more have you got to do?" she looked around.

"Just the one. I didn't realise that Calvin was going to fucking leave them all for me to do." I picked up the last doorhandle and put it in place. Sookie watched me screw it on. "All done" I said. "Thank fuck."

Sookie laughed. "Yeah, but you're probably getting the hang of by now, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I guess. But I'd rather not be."

I stood up and helped Sookie get up and we walked back inside. Everything was wet and glistening from the rain and the sun was doing it's best to come through the clouds. "How are the kids?" I asked.

"Bit stir-crazy. Felicia's been trying to go through the cupboards again."

"Well, we'll have doors soon" we walked in through the door.

"Yeah" Sookie said. "We will. Thank you for this."

Dinner was a bit chaotic, having been cooped up all day the kids were working up to being really fucking annoying and neither of them seemed inclined to just sit and eat nicely, or be nice to each other. Bathtime was even worse. There was a fuck of a lot of splashing and giggling. But at least they seemed to be friendly with each other again.

By the time they were in bed I was exhausted. I sat on the couch in the living room and rested my head against the back. The humidity had drained me off all energy and the stress of the work Calvin was doing, well, that just added to it really. I just wanted it to be done. And I just wanted it to be nice. For Sookie.

Sookie walked into the room. "Are you OK?" she asked.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Because you've been kind of off all day. First you were grumpy…now you're just, I don't know. Really quiet."

I ran my hand across my face. "I think it's the weather. It's so fucking humid. It's just not right."

Sookie frowned. "Are you sure that's all it is?" she asked.

"Yeah. I guess it's that, and the work Calvin's doing. I wish that was kind of over with. Fuck. I think I bit off more than I can chew with that."

"Nah, it'll be alright. He promised me he wouldn't leave any leaks this time."

I turned to look at Sookie "That was him?"

"Yeah, he did the laundry last time. But he's probably more scared of you than he was of me or Bill, so you know, I think we're safe!" She laughed, but I didn't. "Oh, go on!" she said. "You know it's true." I shrugged. I wasn't really intending to threaten Calvin into doing a good job. I just wanted him to do a good job first time."It's OK, Eric. It'll be fine. No one will have to get their fingers broken. Trust me."

"Yeah, I guess."

"And anyway, it's just a house. Don't stress."

"I know. It's just…well I had a plan…" I had lots of plans.

"Yeah, I suspected as much. I half-expected to come home one day and find you and Calvin building another room on somewhere."

I shook my head. "I ran the numbers. It doesn't work out adding that much capital value onto this house."

Sookie narrowed her eyes at me. "Hmm. One of these days I'd like to not be the last to know about some of this stuff. In the meantime, come and have a shower. It'll make you feel better, less sticky." She stood up and I allowed her to pull me off the couch.

She led me into the bathroom. I tried not to think about what needed doing to this room as well. The door to the cupboard was a bit wonky and the shower pressure wasn't that great. That needed a plumber though. Probably wouldn't get one this side of Christmas. Unless Calvin knew one.

Sookie peeled my t-shirt off me; it was pretty much stuck to my back. I allowed her take off the rest of my clothes and then watched her take her own off before running the shower. She stepped in first, and I followed, careful not to knock that stupid shelf on my way in. It still got me, occasionally.

"Just relax, Eric. For God's sake, just relax" Sookie said. It wasn't easy, but Sookie hands washing me helped. And then her mouth on my cock helped a fucking lot. And then I felt a whole other kind of tension, just before I came in her mouth. "Oh, fuck Sookie" I said. She ran her tongue around me a couple more times, before releasing me and standing up. "Feeling better?" she asked.

"Yeah. Yeah I am" I said. I did. It was stupid really, worrying about the house, and getting it ready for a baby that didn't even exist yet. But I just…I just wanted to show Sookie that I could do it. That I could take care of her.

Sookie turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. "I should dry myself, but honestly, I think air-drying might work better" she said holding out her arms and twirling around a bit.

I grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up from behind. "Oooh" she squealed, and then she laughed as I carried her through to the bedroom. I threw her on the bed then lay down next to her. She didn't even complain about the bed getting wet.

"You're feeling better then" she said. I wasn't sure if it was a question. She was looking at my face really closely. I was feeling better. I always did when it was just Sookie and I. Even in the tiny shower in the miniscule bathroom it was still great. She always knew how to make it OK.

"Yeah" I said. "But now I want to see how great I can make you feel."

**A/N What we call gib board is drywall (I'm pretty sure), basically the board used to create the internal walls which you then plaster and paint.**

**Thanks for reading! And Merry Christmas!**


	22. Chapter 22

**A/N So here's it is Christmas Eve and I've put off doing some of that other boring stuff, like housework and present wrapping, to finish this off. Merry Christmas everyone!**

**Disclaimer: I've been poking the presents under the tree, but it doesn't seem likely...**

SPOV

As we rolled on toward Christmas there were lots of reminders that Eric had been here a year now, because we started to find that we were doing things for the second time. Andy and Halleigh hosted another barbecue, and this time round we weren't invited at the last minute.

And comparing the two occasions made me realise just how awkward Eric had been the previous year. He'd been trying, really trying, but even so, I guess being the-guy-who-lives-at-number-16-with-his-wife-and-two-kids was preferable to being the guy-the-widow-at-number-16-brought-along-God-knows-where-she-found-him. When I watched him, wandering around Andy and Halleigh's living room, drifting out to the deck to keep an eye on the kids, chatting to Andy and that God-awful woman from across the road with the red hair who was always terribly interested in him, it was easy to see just how much more at ease he was.

Plus, he was probably getting a lot better at understanding our accent now.

We also had the annual daycare Christmas party to attend. Amelia was a bit blasé about the whole thing now, given this was her fourth year going. I don't think she quite realised though this was the last Christmas she'd be attending daycare.

Next year it would be school Christmas concerts and the like, which was a sobering thought. I wasn't really prepared for her to start school, even though it was less than four months away now.

Felicia though enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Mostly because it was always held in the pre-school side of the building so it gave her access to the 'big kids' sand-pit for the night. Eric and I sat with our fish & chip dinner, which had been Amelia's choice, as she insisted that 'everyone' was going to have them. Looking around, it did look as though the fish shop in Mt Eden had been doing a roaring trade tonight. We watched the kids lazily, Amelia was running around with the other little girls in her group, and Felicia was in the sandpit covering herself, and everything around her, in sand.

I hadn't realised how well-known Eric was until the kids started asking him to help them do stuff. You could tell the age of the kid by whether they referred to him as 'Meela's daddy' or 'Leesha's daddy'.

I talked to a few of the other parents, and managed to ignore Mickey's mum who was staring daggers at me from the other side of the playground. There'd been no more reports of any biting but I guess I was still persona non grata as far as she was concerned. There wasn't much I could do about it though.

Eventually Amelia went to join Felicia in the sandpit, concerned, no doubt, that whatever Felicia was doing she wasn't doing it correctly. Unfortunately, Mickey decided to join them as well. I watched as he promptly snatched a spade out of Felicia's hand. Felicia, who was well-trained in these sorts of exchanges by virtue of being the second kid, prepared to snatch it back, but in the process she managed to push Mickey backwards into the sand. He glowered at her and looked poised to strike at Felicia, so I moved to intervene. Amelia, however, decided to take her self-appointed role as sand-pit monitor seriously. "Felicia!" she admonished. "That's not nice. We use our words."

Felicia stopped glaring at Mickey and turned to stare at Amelia. "Words?" she asked.

"Yes. Like this." Amelia moved closer to Mickey, who'd started to think he'd got away with his manoeuvre, and looked him in the eye. "That is NOT NICE and we DO NOT LIKE IT!" she screeched at top volume. "Now GIVE IT BACK!" Amelia held out her hand for the spade, and Mickey handed it over and ran back to his mother.

"See" Amelia said, handing the spade to Felicia. "Words are better. Now what do you say, Leesha?"

"Tank you Amala" Felicia said, obediently, as she went back to her pile of sand.

I left them to it and tried to ignore Mickey's mum who was glaring at me again, over the top of Mickey's head, as he'd climbed into her lap.

I found Eric talking to Maisie's dad. "What was going on over there?" he asked me, nodding towards the sandpit.

"Oh, well. Amelia was just showing Felicia how the big kids do it. Mickey, uh, well I don't think he'll be back tonight."

"That kid again?" I nodded. "Fuck, at least she didn't bite him I guess."

"No, there was no biting. Just, um, some words…"

Eric shrugged. "Well, that's OK then."

The kids had their faces painted at the party. Amelia opted for a butterfly, which was lovely. Unfortunately when Felicia got to the front of the line there'd been a mix-up between Eric and I and she was currently unsupervised. When the face-painter asked what she wanted she just said "Scary."

She made a lovely tiger, and thoroughly enjoyed roaring at everyone, loudly. While it wasn't exactly using her words, at least she wasn't biting anyone. Amelia just loudly told her that tigers weren't scary at all and she was just being silly. That just made Felicia roar louder.

I just worried about how I was getting to get all that orange paint off her face. Or worse, whether she'd refuse to take it off and I'd have to deal with an orange pillowcase.

Eric said that at least it made up for Halloween. He'd been bummed about that. He was all set to take the kids out, and then I pointed out it just didn't happen in New Zealand. Sure, some of the shops like to put out Halloween merchandise, but I didn't know anyone who actually bought it.

I don't think Eric believed me until our only group of trick or treaters turned out to be some 8 yr old boys in super-hero masks. And that was one more lot than I'd had the previous year. Eric spent a good couple of hours marvelling that no one, _no one_ was out there when it was light until 7 o'clock as well. And not cold, surely that made it a perfect excuse to celebrate?

He then spent the rest of the night trying to tell me that I needed to dress up for him to make up for his disappointment. I managed to dodge that one, but God knows what would happen next year, he had time to plan now.

But it was Christmas that was on everyone's minds at the moment, and between Amelia's constant, tuneless, renditions of Jingle Bells and the daily fight over who got to open the advent calendar, it was starting to feel really Christmassy.

We did have one completely brand-new activity to go to. Amelia's first dance recital. Maria-Starr's dance school put on a big end of year show and Amelia's pre-school class (along with all the others that she taught) were performing.

By the time I'd taken Amelia to a photo shoot and two dress rehearsals I was a bit over it, and I had no idea how stage mothers ever did this on a regular basis, but she loved it. When the show finally arrived, we sat in a darkened theatre that belonged to one of the big high schools and watched class after class of small girls, and some big girls, dance their hearts out to every cheesy Christmas song going. Eric looked a bit bored. Felicia looked a lot bored, and tried every trick in the book to be allowed out of her seat to run riot.

And then finally, it was time for Amelia's class. To the tune of the Sleigh Ride song a group of small girls, with pigtails and pink, sequinned dresses skipped on stage behind Maria-Starr. Amelia was beaming. She loved it. The other little girls looked worried, or lost, or just plain disinterested but not Amelia. She'd finally found her place in the world.

When their song was over, and Amelia had been half-pushed off the stage by Maria-Starr because she wanted to stand and wave at her audience some more, I turned to look at Eric. "Wow" he whispered, while trying to stop a squirming Felicia from escaping. "She's really good."

I smiled back at him. "She is, isn't she?"

And then we just beamed at each other. It was nice not being the only one stupidly proud of the fact Amelia could smile and skip at the same time. And Eric was proud of her; you could see it in his face.

It was odd but I never really thought of Eric as anything but their father these days. Certainly Felicia didn't have any concept of life being any different and Amelia, well, she knew there'd been someone else but it was over two years since Bill had first left. That was nearly half her life-time.

It was nice for me having someone to share these moments with too. Someone who was prepared to take them trick or treating (well, until I'd vetoed that), or sit through stupid dance recitals, or do whatever it was we'd have to do for Felicia. Probably it would involve sitting on the side of a sports field, I thought, as I watched her attempt to climb over the back of the seat and into the row behind us while Eric held onto her waist.

I rested my head against Eric's shoulder. I was looking forward to Christmas. And I was looking forward to trying for another baby.

EPOV

Once it stopped being so fucking humid I felt a bit better about everything. Getting the doors back on the kitchen cupboards helped a lot, and Calvin even managed to get that job done without my assistance. And then the painters turned up and we finally, finally had a laundry room that actually looked like a room and a kitchen that was a rather nice shade of yellow. Sookie had picked the paint colour. Apparently she'd always wanted a yellow kitchen, and I didn't really have any opinion on the colour at all. I just wanted it all fucking finished.

It was the same painters who'd done the spare room the year before, and it was a reminder of just how long I'd been here. Last time they'd come in order to fix my total fuck-up and I'd hired them in the hope that it would stop Sookie throwing me out in the street. This year they were here because my wife and I were renovating and looking to move to a bigger house. For our family.

It had been a fucking good year.

And now that Sookie was finally able to stop muttering about whether the cupboards were going to be back on soon, and asking me whether I'd seen what Felicia had in her hand when she ran past me, I was actually looking forward to celebrating.

Although I wasn't entirely certain about having half of Sookie's family descending on us. Plus Calvin and Judith. There was going to be a fuck-load of people here. And a tent. Apparently, the tent was important.

I'd made a crack about the circus coming to town which had earned me a series of rather annoyed glares from Sookie and a lecture on how if I couldn't be nice to her family I could find somewhere else to 'bloody go and eat Christmas dinner'. At least I hadn't said anything about Jason bringing his red nose.

But I had obviously forgotten that bit of Christmas last year. It makes Sookie stressed. Very stressed. There were still a few days to go and she was practically vibrating with tension. Telling her to calm down had the completely opposite effect as that ball of tension just exploded right in front of my eyes. There'd be arm-waving, pointing, and, occasionally, stomping.

I resolved to just lay low and hope it would be all be over soon. And that no one else decided to invite themselves here for the day.

SPOV

I was trying desperately to have one last good clean before Christmas and no one else was really getting into the swing of it. Well, when I say no one else, really I mean Eric. The kids were enjoying their second to last day at daycare and, as I only ran classes during the primary school terms, I was at home.

So was Eric. I wasn't quite sure why. I had the feeling he wanted to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn't go 'overboard' as he kept saying it. But the role seemed to be purely supervisory as he was currently mooching about with a cup of coffee, a Christmas mince pie, and the newspaper.

I dragged the vacuum cleaner into the living room. "What I need you to do" I said, "is vacuum the floor, especially all the stupid Christmas tree needles. Then you can go right around the pelmet in the ceiling and vacuum up all the cobwebs."

Eric looked up from the paper and looked at me, and then he looked up at the ceiling. "Really? Cobwebs? I don't think Jason will notice." He took a bit of the mince pie and sent a shower of crumbs onto the floor.

I sighed. If I was being completely honest then Bill had been more on my wavelength with the whole idea of cleaning up for company. Although, you couldn't give him direction. And you had to put up with the fact he'd wander off and do random things that had no real benefit to presenting a clean house, like, say, cleaning the toaster out. And then I would be expected to come and admire the toaster and listen to the long story about how completely filthy it had been before he started, the implication being I was a sloppy housekeeper.

Meanwhile I could have scrubbed both toilets and no one would have given a damn.

Eric, on the other hand, could take direction but only if I could produce a valid enough argument to sell him on the whole proposal. One which promised there'd be some benefit out of the whole enterprise for him.

"You know" I said, still holding the vacuum, "If I knew that this room was really, really spotless, and cobweb free, I might be a bit less stressed…"

Eric muttered something that sounded like "I doubt it" and I kicked his foot, fairly gently. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows in a gesture which I think was meant to convey that I was just proving his point.

I sighed. "Look" I said, sitting down on the couch next to him. Eric eyed the vacuum cleaner I was still holding warily. "I just want the place to look really nice. It's the first time Crystal is going to see it, and well…first impressions count…"

Eric's eyes kind of slid sideways. "OK" I said, "Stop thinking about me under a desk and concentrate on this."

Eric sighed and looked at me. "You know, I don't know why you worry about this stuff quite so much." He put the last of the mince pie in his mouth.

"Well, I just do. I can't help it. But trust me; if you could just find it in yourself to help me out with this then, you know, I'm sure I'll be much more relaxed later on. Much more relaxed. And if I'm relaxed then, um…well I'm sure I'll be a lot more fun to hang out with. Later on. Tonight. A lot more _fun_."

I held the vacuum cleaner out to him and he took it. "Don't forget the cobwebs" I said as I stood up. "Oh, and those hanging lamps? Vacuum inside the shades too, there's all sorts of dead things in there."

I started to walk out of the room and off to my next project, which was to hang out the curtains from the girls' bedrooms which I'd just washed. The sky was darkening nicely of course because I'd been stupid enough to do that. "Sookie" Eric called out, and I turned back to him. "Yeah?" I asked.

"Are you trying to trade sex for housework?" he asked me, as he plugged the vacuum cleaner in.

"Um" I said, turning right back to face him. "Well, maybe if you get the cobwebs you'll find out. Look, there's a really big one." While Eric was busy looking in the corner I'd just pointed to I beat a hasty retreat before he decided to negotiate further and I ended up giving away free samples or anything.

I headed to the laundry as I heard the vacuum start up. I quite liked my laundry now, now that it didn't leak and look as though someone had made the walls of cardboard. The phone started ringing though, so I had to detour to the kitchen.

It was Judith. "Mum isn't speaking to Portia!" she wailed. "I don't know why, something about Glen's Christmas present I think, or maybe it was that she found out Portia had lent Charles money, or it could be the church thing again. Anyway, now Mum won't go there and have Christmas with her. She wanted to come here, but I said we were going to you guys, and she said that was OK, she'd go and see her friend Evelyn from bowls. But then she told Sarah that I'd picked 'Sookie and her lover' over my own family, and it was probably because I was married to a foreigner too. So she wanted Sarah to take her, but now that it's all back on with Matt, Sarah wants to go to his family, so they're up in Whangarei, and Mum told Sarah that she'd just have to sit at home in her flat and have Christmas all by herself for the first time in her life and that it was just wrong when she'd given birth to five children. She said she would have no more left Nanny Marija alone at Christmas than she would have left her on the side of the road."

I idly wondered if Judith actually felt the need to breathe much. "Um, that's terrible" I said. "Putting you in that position…"

"I know! And she's been telling Sarah that Caroline was going to pay to send her to Sydney to be with her, but I know that Caro never, ever said that because she's going away again, so Mum's just trying to make us all feel bad that she missed out now. And Sarah rang me to ask me to do something because she said she can't take Mum to Whangarei because they're basically staying in a shack and she doesn't think Mum'll cope with the outside toilet, and I can't ask Portia to shut her big gob and apologise because I'm not talking to her, so I don't know what to do! And it's Christmas!

I sighed. "Well…she could come here…"

"Could she? Would you mind? It would be ever so helpful, Sookie. And it's only one more person isn't it? Plus she doesn't eat much, although I think being on a diet at her age is just stupid."

"Um, well, yeah. That's fine. But just…" I struggled to find a polite way to say it. "Just, um, tell her that my Aunt Linda will be here…um, just for morning tea. So maybe yeah…just tell her that." Lorena and Linda didn't get on, so that was going to be interesting. Shit.

"Oh, yeah, I'll tell her. It'll be nice if she has another 'oldie' to talk to." A wail went up in the background. "Shit, that's Thomas. OK, I'll see you at Christmas."

"Yep. See you." I considered telling Eric the news there and then, but I didn't want to interrupt his vacuuming, so I headed to hang out my curtains instead. And fret a little bit about just how many people were coming to this thing.

EPOV

I'd stayed home from the office so that I could hang out with Sookie, and maybe get her to relax a bit. The kids were still booked into daycare, the guests weren't here, it seemed a perfect time to just sit down and spend some time together.

Sookie, however, didn't quite see it that way. And while I wasn't opposed to helping her, I maybe wasn't as on-board with the systematic eradication of all cobwebs in the house as she wanted me to be. It just seemed a bit of a waste of time. No one was going to look up and notice them. Fuck, I didn't notice them and most of the time I was the one that was actually closest to the ceiling.

But now Sookie knew they were there. And she wanted them gone. She wanted them gone so much she was practically offering me sex if I'd get rid of them.

I pretty much would have done it if she'd just look a bit happier, but I maybe didn't need to tell her that.

So I cleaned the living room as best I could and hoped it would pass inspection, and then waited until I could claim my reward. Between the fact Sookie had had her period, and the fact Sookie was fond of writing shopping lists late into the night, I felt like we'd missed a bit of…well, sex somewhere in the last week or so. And now she'd put the idea in my head I was definitely keen on it.

SPOV

After dinner I lost Eric. Well it wasn't straight after dinner, we'd put the kids to bed and then I'd gone to fold some laundry, and then I'd had another look through some cookbooks and counted the rolls of wrapping paper. And then I realised Eric wasn't around.

I found him lying naked on the bed. "Oh, you're in here" I said.

"Yes" he sighed. "I've been waiting for you, but you've been fucking ages. What have you been doing?"

"Oh, you know. Stuff."

"Well stop doing stuff and come and relax. We're relaxing now."

"OK then." I climbed onto the bed.

"But you have to be naked too" he said.

"Really? There are new rules for relaxing?"

"Look, if you get to make the rules for showers, I get to make a few too."

"I don't make rules for showers!" Eric just looked at me, expectantly. "Oh, fine!" I took off my t-shirt and shorts.

"Naked, Sookie. I said naked."

"Oh honestly, Eric!" I took of my bra and knickers. "Better?" I asked.

"Yup." He held out his arm so I could lean against his side and then he switched TV on.

"So we are just relaxing, then?" I asked.

"Mmm, let's just see how it goes." I turned my attention to the TV and watched Jamie Oliver doing interesting things with Christmas leftovers. Some of them were very interesting.

"Um, I might just need to write some of this down…" I said, trying to sit up so I could find a paper and pen.

Eric sighed and just pulled me down again. "We can Google it later" he said.

"But what if it's not on the internet?" I really liked the look of that bubble and squeak recipe.

"It will be" Eric said, not letting go of his grip on me. I gave up and tried relaxing again. When the programme finished Eric switched off the TV and rolled over onto me in one fluid motion. "Now you've had your allotted quota of stupid fucking cooking programmes, I get to have you."

"Um, OK?" I said.

"Because you know, I've been a good boy…" Eric started kissing my neck.

"Jesus, Eric. I'm not Santa."

He looked up. "No, but you promised. That was the deal with the housework."

"No, you thought that was the deal. I just promised I'd be more relaxed."

Eric propped his head on his hand and looked at me. "And yet" he said, "you're still lying there checking the corners of the room for cobwebs. I'll have to fucking blindfold you to get you to just lie here, won't I?"

"No" I said, looking at him and not at the corner of the ceiling where I thought maybe there was a shadow that might have been a cobweb. "No, I promise I'll stop looking for cobwebs."

"Good, and I will do my best to keep your mind off the housework."

He went back to kissing my neck, and then trailed his kisses down to my breasts taking one nipple in his mouth and working it with his tongue, before switching to the other side. I ran my hands up and down his shoulders and upper arms and just tried to block out all the other random thoughts that threatened to pop into my head. Eric was doing a pretty good job of keeping them away, but even so, they were there. Lurking.

Eric's mouth worked its way lower down my body, kissing down my stomach before taking my clit in his mouth. I let out a sigh that was crossed with a moan. This was lovely. I wasn't thinking at all about the stuff I needed to do. Except now I was. Shit. And as soon as I realised that I sort of lost my place with Eric.

He lifted his head "Just relax, Sookie. We got all the cobwebs. They won't be back in the next couple of days. Relax for fuck's sake."

I tried. I closed my eyes and I focussed on the sensations from Eric's mouth all over my really sensitive places. It was lovely, it really was. But I just wasn't as into it as maybe I usually was.

I guess Eric had sensed this because after a while he moved back up the bed and hovered, looking into my face. "You're…not enjoying it?" he asked, frowning.

"I am…I'm just, um. Well there's a lot going on…" I didn't want to give him a complex, I really didn't.

Eric frowned again. "I wish" he said, "I wish you'd just relax, and let me take care of you."

I reached over and stroked his face. "I'm fine, I really am. I just need to get through Christmas. I'm sorry." I was. I felt really bad about the whole thing.

Eric looked at me for a bit longer, and then something flashed across his face too fast for me to catch. "You know" he said, dropping his voice to a husky whisper and moving his mouth so it was right next to my ear. "You're so fucking sexy, Sookie that I can't help it. All I want to do is fuck you. I just want to make you come. Oh Sookie, can you feel how hard you make me?" I nodded. I could feel it; his erection was pressed hard against my hip. "So please, _please_ just let me fuck you. I just really, really want to fuck you."

Eric pulled back to look at me, and all of a sudden I did feel a lot better. And a lot less inclined to worry about the housework. And a lot more inclined to fuck Eric.

I reached down and stroked his penis a few times and he grinned and then moved his hand between my legs to return the favour. After a few minutes he pushed one, then two of his fingers inside me and I moved my hips against his hand. "Fuck, you're so fucking wet now, Sookie. I love it when you're wet for me."

"Uh-huh" I said which I hoped covered my agreement on the matter.

And when Eric entered me, I really forgot about everything else in the world completely. Jason could have turned up with all of Crystal's whanau and pitched three tents in the front garden while discussing the fact the curtains in the living room had some spots of mould on the back. I really didn't care. I was living in the moment, and it was a pretty great moment.

Eric reached over and grabbed a pillow to shove under my backside and the change of angle sent me completely over the edge. He stopped moving while I recovered and just leaned down to whisper "I love it when you come. You're so hot, and tight and, oh fuck, it feels good."

I didn't even bother replying to that. I couldn't really think of any words, and it all seemed like too much effort. I had much better things to focus on. Like Eric, and the way he was moving. I hitched my legs around him and ran my hand down his chest.

Eric's hand was doing wonderful things to my clit and then I came again, clasping at him like he might suddenly go somewhere.

"Yes. Oh fuck. Oh, Sookie" Eric said, and then he came as well, he stayed braced above me for a few seconds before he pulled us both over onto our sides.

"Feeling more relaxed?" Eric asked.

"Mmm? Yeah." I said dreamily, not really back in reality yet.

"Good" Eric said, before he pulled out and headed off to the bathroom.

Of course the problem with banishing all other thoughts for a while is sometimes you forget to mention the slightly more important ones. Later on, when we were lying in bed and Eric was curled against my back I suddenly remembered.

"Hey" I said.

"Mmm, go to sleep" Eric said.

"No, but I don't think I told you something."

"It's OK. You can thank me for fucking you in the morning. Go to sleep."

"Um, no. This is about Christmas."

"It'll wait, Sookie."

I sighed. "Judith got me to invite Lorena as well."

"Fuck, really?" Eric sounded a lot more awake now.

"Yeah, I don't know why I let her talk me into this stuff." I sighed; I really didn't know how I ended up as the house of last resort for Comptons fleeing the rest of the family.

Eric rubbed my arm comfortingly. "It'll be OK. Maybe she'll keep Jason in line. 'Night." With that Eric shifted around a bit and, a few minutes later, his breathing evened out and he'd obviously dropped off to sleep. I just lay there and worried about the possibility of Jason doing something to offend Lorena and causing a major incident at lunch. It was a high probability. Not something you'd want to bet against, anyway.

Well, I thought. I had been relaxed there. For a while, anyway.

**A/N Whangarei is pronounced Fung-a-ray**

**Whanau is pronounced far-now. It's the Maori word for family, but very widely used.**

**Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas (even if it is cold where you are - that's just plain weird)!**


	23. Chapter 23

**A/N Well I hope everyone had a very, very Merry Christmas! Things have been a bit hectic here, and I have everyone (kids, husband) home because we tend to have a big holiday break at this time of year (it being summer of course). So updates will be a bit slower. But we'll get there! **

**Disclaimer: Santa didn't come through, so no.**

SPOV

Before I knew it the 23rd of December rolled around and once again I found myself standing on the front lawn. Only this year it wasn't because Eric had had something stupid delivered. This time it was because my brother had arrived, along with the tent in which we'd spent a lot of family holidays.

I'd dropped the kids at their last day at daycare, and arrived back home to find Jason had arrived and Eric was watching him take stuff out of the back of his ute.

Jason came over and gave me a big hug "Merry Christmas, Sook" he said.

"Merry Christmas, but um, where's the rest of them?" I asked Jason.

"Oh, well, um. It's a long drive for the kids eh? So Crystal thought she'd break it up a bit and they're leaving later on and staying overnight with some friends in Matamata."

"Uh-huh" I said. "And you couldn't be arsed sitting listening to three kids talk for all that time, could you Jase?"

Jason looked a bit sheepish. "Yeah, fuck they talk a lot eh? And they want to eat shit in the back of the ute, like ice creams and stuff. I hate it when the ute gets sticky." He ran his hand down the side of the ute, lovingly. Poor Crystal, I thought, what a thing to have to compete with.

I suddenly realised though, how early Jason had arrived. "Did you drive through the night?" I asked.

"Yep. Best way, eh? No traffic."

"God, you're worse than Dad. OK, well come inside for a cup of tea and then we can pitch the tent." I noticed Eric was looking worriedly at all the stuff that had come out of the ute. I wondered if he'd ever seen a tent before.

"Yeah, I stopped for breakfast at Bombay, but it's not the same without the Georgie Pie" Jason said, as we walked into the house.

"I know!" I said. "Now it's a stupid McDonald's." I turned to Eric, who'd been silent all this time. Sometimes it was a bit disturbing the way he just observed Jason and me, like we were exhibits in a zoo. I wasn't sure whether it was Jason he was watching or the two of us together. I guess sibling behaviour wasn't high on Eric's list of stuff he knew about, but maybe we were a good study aid in case he ever had to consult on it or something. "Georgie Pie" I explained, "was a fast food restaurant, New Zealand's only home-grown one really. It sold pies." Eric gave me a look that said he could figure that one out himself.

"And they were fuckin' cheap, eh? I used to be able to eat 6 of the mince and cheese ones, so it was fuckin' lucky they were only a dollar" Jason added.

"Oh, OK" Eric said, obviously not really getting the whole nostalgia trip Jason and I were on about Georgie Pie, but it was just wrong when they were all bought up and turned into McDonald's, it really was.

We trooped inside and I headed to the kitchen to put the jug on with Eric and Jason following me. "Remember my ninth birthday party?" I asked Jason. "At the Georgie Pie in East Tamaki Road?"

"Fuck yes, there were like hundreds of you fuckin' girls. And me. It was fuckin' horrible."

"I think I invited about 5 girls, Jason. And you spent the whole time mixing all the soft-drinks, and then trying to make us drink them. Seriously, what does Coke, L&P and Fanta all mixed together taste like?"

Jason shrugged. "It was alright." He wandered over and opened the pantry door. "What are you looking for?" I called out to him.

"Got it. I knew you'd have some." He appeared with the tin that held the Christmas mince pies and proceeded to liberate three of them before passing the tin across the breakfast bar to Eric. Poor Eric, he opened the tin and I could see him scan the contents, doing a quick calculation, before he took out two and closed it. Then he just kept it sitting in front of him. I think he might have been tempted to stand over it growling, the way he was looking at Jason. Because that was all I needed, the pair of them having a stand-off over the mince pies.

I passed Jason his tea and he crammed the last of his pies in his mouth. "These are good, Sook" he said with his mouth full.

"Thanks" I said.

Then, completely oblivious to the look Eric was giving him; Jason reached for the tin and took out another. Eric's eyes shot to me as though as I could do anything. I just looked away. Technically Jason was a guest, even if he was a greedy one.

I figured I'd be making more pies later on.

Eric stood up. "I might make some more coffee" he said, moving towards the coffeemaker and taking the tin of mince pies with him so he could put it away in the pantry.

"Ooh, that would be nice!" I said to Eric, putting my arm around his waist. I was trying to let him know I was on his side, really. Eric pulled me against him briefly and then set about making the coffee. I went back to chat to Jason.

Eric appeared with my coffee when it was ready. "Thanks" I said as he put it in front of me.

"So, Eric" Jason said, "How's business?"

"Good" Eric said, taking a sip of his coffee. He didn't seem inclined to elaborate. "And your, um…cows?" he asked Jason.

Jason did seem inclined to elaborate. We heard a lot about the milking machine and the problems they'd had with it and how the new farm-hand had turned out to be a complete 'fuckin' loser shit-head' and Jason had had to let him go, but he was now training up one of Crystal's many cousins and that seemed to be going OK, and had certainly won him some favour with Crystal's dad. Eric and I mostly just nodded at the appropriate points.

When we were done with our drinks Jason straightened up from where he'd been leaning against the bench. "Right" he said, putting his cup in the sink. "Tent." He clapped his hands together and headed out the door, intent on his task. I followed him, and Eric followed me.

"OK" Jason said, as he tipped the tent poles out of their bag. "Let's get started." He raked around in the pile of poles and pulled a very battered piece of paper which held the instructions. He then folded it up and put it in the pocket of his jeans.

"I can't believe you've still got the tent" I said. And I couldn't believe I was so happy to see it. Sure, it wasn't our original tent, that one had been pretty basic. This one had been a huge step up in the world. For one thing, it was divided into rooms. And the groundsheet was attached. It wasn't, however, the caravan that Mum had dreamed of buying, I'd find her staring at the caravans in the camping ground muttering that it must be nice not have to take all your dishes to the communal cookhouse to wash them, but it was still pretty fancy for a tent.

Well, Jason and I had thought so when Dad brought it home. He was of the opinion that if you were going camping you needed a tent and that caravans never actually gave you that much space. And it wasn't like we really roughed it, we always had a powered campsite so we could run the toaster oven, and the electric frypan, and the portable TV set. We were pretty well set up.

But it still wasn't a caravan. Mum had been gutted when Aunty Linda got one and we still had a tent. But there was no telling Dad. He'd thought his sister was mad and you couldn't change his mind. Plus of course, how could you tow a caravan and a boat? Mum hadn't been keen on the boat, and I often wished Dad had listened to her on that one.

"Why wouldn't I have the tent? It's a bloody good tent" Jason said, and by God, he really did sound like Dad when he said it.

"Do you remember what their record was for putting it up?" I asked him, as I tipped out the bag of tent pegs under Eric's watchful gaze. He was just sitting on the front steps observing us, but looking a bit nervous, as though we might expect him to help out or something.

Jason looked thoughtful. "Um, dunno. I think it was about 40 minutes or something. We got pretty good at it."

"Yeah, we did." I thought for a minute. "Do you think we can beat it?"

Jason looked up from what he was doing. "Of course we fuckin' can." Yeah, Jason was always convinced he could beat anyone at anything.

"OK, so then Eric you have to time us" I said to Eric. "What?" he asked, obviously not realising that putting up a tent was a competitive sport to the Stackhouses. But then he never met Dad.

"Time us, you know, time how long it takes us to put the tent up."

"Oh, OK. Just um, tell me when to start" he stared at his watch, pensively, obviously taking this seriously. As well he should.

"Right, start…now!" I said, as I raced over to Jason to start laying out the tent itself on the lawn.

"Hang on" Jason called out to Eric. "This bit doesn't count. You don't start from when you lay the tent out, eh? You start after that."

I nodded. "Yeah, that's right. OK, Eric stop timing."

"OK" Eric called back.

Jason and I got the tent placed on the ground, and experimented with where it could fit best. Once that was done Jason looked thoughtful. "I think we have to secure it a bit before we start timing this, eh? Just get the corner pegs in."

"Yeah, you're right" I agreed.

"Do you want me to start yet?" Eric called.

"Nah, hang on mate" Jason called back. "I'll just get the mallet" he said to me, before jogging over to his ute to pull out a rubber mallet. He came back and hammered tent pegs into the four corners of the tent while Eric and I watched. "Some of these pegs are fuckin' munted" Jason commented, holding up a bent one so I could see.

"Yeah, well I guess they're quite old now" I said.

"No they're fuckin' not. We were teenagers when Dad got this tent."

"Jase, you're nearly 40 now. It was a long time ago."

"Shut up, Sook. I'm only fuckin' 38 eh?" Yeah, Jason didn't like to be reminded of his age. I didn't say anything else, but just shared a look with Eric.

"Right" Jason said, once he'd put the pegs in. "I think we can start timing now, eh?"

I nodded. "OK, go!" I said to Eric, and then I walked over to the pile of tent poles.

"Um" I said to Jason. "You know, I think we have to assemble the bits of frame first. I don't think that counts as part of the official time…does it?" I looked at Jason, he looked at me. "Yeah, you're right Sook" he said in the end. "We should do that first."

"OK, Eric stop timing" I called to Eric. I'm pretty sure he rolled his eyes. "What's happening this time?" he asked.

"We're putting the frame together first. It's a bit tricky." And it was a bit tricky. You would think they would make it so that pole A slots into pole B and so on. But no, for some reason this tent had always had a weird configuration with pole A slotting into pole Z1 and pole Q233. It made no sense. Once upon a time Mum had used nail polish marks to show which ones belonged together, but they'd all worn off over the years.

So Jason and I sat there and tried to figure it out. Eric came over and watched us. "So we're not timing this?" he asked after about 15 minutes.

"No this counts as set-up time" I muttered, trying to figure out whether pole C and pole Y7 would make the corresponding piece to the one I'd already made with pole D and pole Y8.

"Yeah, set-up time doesn't count eh? Fuck, was it always this fuckin' hard?" Jason said, surveying the poles.

"It can't be that difficult" Eric said, and I just shot him a look, and he kind of backed off.

I sighed. "Hand over the instructions" I said, holding out my hand to Jason.

"No, that's fuckin' cheating, eh?" Jason said, shaking his head.

"It's not. Unless you do this every few months you're allowed to use the instructions."

"No, you're not Sook. You just do it. Fuck, Dad always knew how they went together."

"No he didn't. He used to put the instructions on the front seat of the station wagon so we wouldn't think he was using them. Trust me, he did."

Jason still looked a bit sceptical. "You sure?" he asked me. I was pretty sure.

I nodded. "Yeah, definitely. So we're not cheating. And it'll still count if we can put it up faster."

"OK, then." Jason sat up so he could pull the instructions out of his pocket. He laid them on the ground and put a tent peg on top to stop them blowing away.

I looked at them and discovered I'd made several completely useless constructions and needed to start again. Eric sat down next to me and helped a bit, now that we actually had something to follow.

After a while we finally had all the framing completed. "OK" I said, standing up. "I think we're ready to start this."

"Yep, let's do it. Eric, you're on." Jason gathered up some poles and headed to the tent and I followed, helping him thread them through the tent and start to raise it off the ground.

Eric stood watching until we needed him to hold up one side while I held the other. "Does it count if I help?" he asked, taking the pole off Jason.

"Yes" Jason and I said at the same time. "Yeah, well Jason and I used to help" I added.

"I used to fuckin' do most of it" Jason muttered as he raised the centre of the tent roof.

We were going well for time, and that was with me tripping over a peg and falling on a tent pole. That was going to leave a bruise. I carried on though. We did have to stop for injury time though when Jason sliced his finger while pegging down one of the guy ropes. "Stop" I yelled to Eric. "We need injury time while I get a plaster for Jason."

I ran into the house and came back with two boxes of sticking plasters. "I can offer you Barbie, or…The Wiggles" I said.

Jason sighed and opted for The Wiggles as the lesser of the two evils. As I took them back into the house Eric asked me how long we were allowed for injuries. "Oh" I said, "as long as we need really." I'm not sure Eric was getting how this worked at all.

We started timing again and after that there wasn't a lot more to do. "Are we counting sweeping it out?" I asked Jason, as he was hammering in the last pegs.

"Nah. That was Mum's thing, eh? That doesn't count. OK, that's it. How long Eric?" Jason turned to Eric expectantly.

I could see Eric was trying to subtract the injury time from the time we'd been going. "Just round it down Eric" I yelled.

"OK, it was…35 minutes then."

"Yay!" I said, holding up my hand to high-five Jason. "We did it!"

"Yep, fuckin' awesome eh? I knew we could. Dad'd shit himself if he knew we could beat him."

"Yeah, poor Mum. He'd make her rush with it and she hated to rush."

"Fuck yes, that was a fuckin' disaster if he rushed her" Jason agreed. He started gathering up the tools and the empty bags that had held the parts of the tent, before taking them over to his ute.

I walked over to Eric. "We're awesome!" I said to him.

"Yeah" Eric agreed slowly. "I guess. But um, is this really a competitive thing?"

"Oh yeah. Well, it was to us. Dad used to be really pissed off if we got to Cooper's Beach and the people in the site next door already had their tent up. What were their names?" I asked Jason, who was now walking past us towards the house.

"The Becks?" he said turning to me.

"Yeah, that's right. Anyway, it was important to get our tent up first. Don't know why. And to get it up quickly."

Eric frowned. "But…didn't you just make all those rules up?"

"Oh, no. Those are the official rules. Aren't they Jase?"

"Huh?" Jason looked at me.

"The rules, for putting up the tent. They're official Stackhouse rules."

"Yep, they fuckin' are."

"So what else have you guys got rules for?" Eric asked.

"Um, well Monopoly, but we had to stop that because the borrowing system got too complicated and we used to bankrupt the bank all the time. What else, Jase?"

"Um, fuck. It was a long time ago, eh? Oh there was the thing in Scrabble."

"Oh yeah" I said giggling.

"What thing?" Eric asked, looking a bit worried.

"Don't worry" I said, "It's different to my rules with you, we just used to give extra points for swear words. And I think you got something like 100 points if you could spell fuck."

"Oh fuck, yeah. Mum went fuckin' ballistic when she saw us playing that way, she yelled at me something chronic." Jason added. "But it was your fuckin' fault" he said, pointing at me, "You came up with that rule."

"Well I had to make you play with me somehow! You sucked at it otherwise and didn't want to play because you couldn't win."

"Fuck, yeah. Scrabble's fuckin' boring eh? I liked Battleship."

"You used to say there were do-overs in Battleship" I grumbled.

"Yep, there fuckin' are." With that Jason went into the house.

"No there aren't" I said to Eric, "That one he's just making up."

Eric just shook his head and walked through the door after Jason.

EPOV

Ever since the first time Jason had come to stay I always got a bit nervous with him around. I wasn't convinced he wasn't going to try to jump Sookie when she wasn't looking, and the fact that he was forever boasting that he could still put her in a figure-four leg-lock if he wanted to just added to my worries.

But so far he hadn't done anything too worrying. Well, if don't consider turning putting up a tent into a competitive sport, worrying. I didn't really think that the front garden was particularly enhanced by the addition of a tent either, but Sookie seemed to like it.

I hoped we weren't going to keep it.

Once the tent was up I went to get the kids from daycare. They were only doing a half-day and by the time I got there, half the stuff had been packed up already. Felicia was in the sand-pit in the toddler playground. "Daddy!" she shouted at me.

"Hey" I said. "It's time to go now, Leesh."

"No." She carried on digging.

"Yeah, it is."

"No. Stayin'"

"Felicia if you stay then you'll miss...um, Christmas."

"No."

Fuck, I thought. I really didn't want to stay here any longer than I had to. And I still had to get another kid to come with me. I tried to think of what might mean more to her than Christmas.

"If you don't come now, then Amelia will have to take your turn with the advent calendar tomorrow. And get the last piece out." The advent calendar was huge at the moment, with Amelia insisting that every morning it was 'her turn' and Felicia randomly moving the little magnetic pieces that made up the nativity scene when Amelia wasn't looking. There'd been a rather nasty fight over a camel that had ended up in the sky where only the angels and the stars were allowed.

Both of them knew that you got the baby on the last day, and Amelia was devastated that it was going to be one of Felicia's days. Felicia of course tried to liberate the baby Jesus at every chance she got and put the 'bubba' into the picture.

"D'vent lenda?" Felicia asked, looking up from her pile of sand.

"Yeah, you'd miss out. That would be sad. So it's probably best to come now, isn't it Leesh?"

"OK." She put down her shovel and walked towards me, sand pouring out of her shorts. I cleaned the sand up as best I could and then spent five minutes locating her shoes in the playground.

By the time we said goodbye to everyone and I collected Felicia's Christmas present to Sookie and I, which was a small square canvas with some small red circles on it, another 15 minutes had passed.

Good thing no one had turned 'getting your children out of daycare' into a competitive sport yet.

Amelia was slightly easier to manage, in that she had an idea of what was happening, but she had much more of a need to talk to all of her friends first. And promise them sleep-overs. Fuck, I hoped Sookie knew about that.

Eventually we got to leave. Amelia was clutching a big envelope that she wasn't giving up for anything. I was carrying everything else, including Felicia who I didn't trust not to run off if I let her go.

"Is Uncle Jason coming today?" Amelia asked as we were driving home.

"Um, yeah. He's already here."

"Oh." She then branched off into a very complicated story about how she was going to Maisie's house. Only the story stopped abruptly once we got home and she saw the tent. "What's that?" she asked. ""ook!" Felicia said, excitedly, at almost the same time.

"Oh, it's Uncle Jason's tent."

"Jay!" Felicia yelled.

"Why is it here?" Amelia asked.

"Because he's staying with us. Over Christmas." I couldn't quite figure out why that required a tent either. Surely if they didn't fit in the house there had to be a motel around here somewhere.

"But why is the tent here?"

"So he can sleep in it. And Crystal and her kids can too."

"Are they here?"

"No."

I got Amelia and Felicia out of the car and they went running off to examine the tent. Jason was back checking a few of the ropes and Sookie was inside sweeping it out. As I got the stuff out of the car I could hear Amelia and Felicia's excited squeals as they ran around looking at the tent.

I just carried the stuff into the house and dumped it in the family room. I was in the bedroom taking my shoes off when Amelia came bursting in. "Daddy!" she said. "Daddy we're having a sleep-over. In the tent. With Uncle Jason."

"Oh. Are you?" I asked, wondering how Jason felt about the two tiny house-guests he was getting tonight.

"Yeah, and we're going to sleep on sky-beds and use our sleeping bags and everything!"

"Air-beds, Amelia" Sookie said, entering the room.

"Yeah, that's what I said" Amelia retorted. "So we'll sleep out there, just like Mum did she was little. They did it ALL THE TIME, but I've never slept in a tent, so that wasn't fair, was it? Was it, Daddy?"

"Um, no?" I didn't know. I'd never slept in a tent either and I didn't feel particularly hard-done-by.

"Yeah, so I'm going to sleep there tonight. Oh, and Felicia. Even though she's really a bit little. She's too little, isn't she Mum?"

"No, I slept in a tent at her age."

Amelia just looked blankly at Sookie, as if the idea of her mother ever having been a toddler was just a made-up thing. "OK, well, I better go and get my sleeping bag."

"It's in your…wardrobe" Sookie said, but Amelia had gone running off without listening.

"Where's Felicia?" I asked Sookie.

"Oh, out there following Jason around. He's showing her how to hammer in tent pegs or something."

"Oh." I couldn't really see the appeal of that activity, and it seemed wrong somehow not to have Felicia underfoot when she'd just arrived home from daycare. Usually she was clinging to my leg or something. "Do you, um, think they'll be OK out there? Tonight, with Jason?" I asked Sookie.

"Yeah, well I'll be out there too" she replied.

"Oh. You will?" Fuck, she was abandoning me too?

"Yeah, I don't really want to leave him with the responsibility if they get scared or Amelia needs the loo or anything. So I'll sleep out there. It'll be like old times really, sharing a tent with Jason." She laughed.

"Yeah, guess it would be…"

"You know" Sookie said, looking at me. "You're welcome to join us. You do count now."

"Count as what?"

"Family. So you know, you get a place in the tent too."

"Oh, no. It's fine. I'll be OK in here." I didn't think I really would be. I hated sleeping without Sookie.

"Oh." Sookie sounded a bit deflated. "Yeah, I doubt you'd fit on my air-bed anyway. OK, well I suppose I should go and start lunch." She wandered off out of the bedroom looking sad. Fuck, I didn't want her to be sad on Christmas, but I really, really didn't want to sleep in that tent.

Fucking Jason. This was all his fault. It was bad enough he was determined to eat all the mince pies, but now he was taking Sookie and the kids too.

This was not the way I fucking wanted Christmas to start.

**A/N Matamata is one of the easier ones, it's pronounced Matter-matter.**

**Ute is short for utility vehicle, and it's what we call what are basically pick-up trucks. **

**The Tamaki in East Tamaki Road is pronounce Tam (rhymes with Pam)-ack-ee**

**In case you missed it, we're very upset about Georgie Pie. Still. They were sold to McDonald's in 1996 and either closed or converted to McDonald's outlets. There hasn't been one since 1998. But we still remember. And we're still holding a grudge.**

**Thanks for reading, and have a Happy New Year's if I'm not back before then!**


	24. Chapter 24

**A/N Phew! It's been difficult writing this, I've had to do it in dribs and drabs between exciting holiday-type activities like finding lost hats and covering my kids in sunblock. Ah, summer! Of course here this is our big holiday period. Because this year the normal statutory days (25 & 26 Dec and 1 & 2 Jan) have fallen on the weekend, the holidays were moved to the 27 & 28 Dec and 3 & 4 Jan. So most people are off work and lazing around at the moment. And it's really hot and sunny!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I didn't want to be all annoyed about the tent, I really didn't. I mean, it wasn't like I ever thought I'd see Eric in a tent. It was always blatantly obvious that I was much more a camping holiday kind of person and Eric was the kind of person who knew how to deal with the valet-parkers at hotels and who'd be greeted with the whole 'welcome back Mr Northman' speech at the reception desk.

Left to my own devices I would have still been standing outside the front entrance trying to work out if it was safe to hand over my house keys with my car keys and whether I needed to take the umbrella out of the boot, while some guy in a waistcoat stared at me with thinly-veiled exasperation.

But still, it wasn't like we were actually going camping. It was only one night in the front garden as a treat for the kids, in just the same way Jason and I had always slept over-night in the tent anytime Dad had put it up at home to dry it out. Surely Eric could suck it up for that long?

There wasn't much I could do about it so I went and made everyone lunch instead, which seemed a better use of my time. Well it was as far as Jason was concerned. I headed outside to tell him there was stuff for sandwiches on the table and he clapped his hands together and said "Fuckin' excellent."

Just then though, Felicia emerged from the tent, where Amelia had set-up a makeshift tea-party. Felicia had obviously been sent out to take orders. She marched up to Jason and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea, except when she said it, it kind of came out "Doyawa'acar-tee?"

I was about to translate for Jason but he just said "Yep, that sounds bloody good." I hadn't realised he spoke fluent Felicia.

Felicia ran back into the tent and I could hear her telling Amelia something that sounded like "'oody 'ood!". This was followed by Amelia loudly asking Felicia several times if that meant yes, before Amelia poked her head out the tent-flap and asked exasperatedly if Uncle Jason had really said yes. He confirmed he had, while trying to keep a straight face about the whole thing. In fact both of us were trying not to laugh.

There was some more clattering and muttering from inside the tent, before Felicia emerged again, carrying one of the tea-set cups. It was filled to the brim with water. I hadn't realised they had actual water in there, and I guessed I'd be adding 'mop up the puddles in the tent' to the list of all the other things I had to do today. Terrific.

Felicia got about ten steps from the tent then stumbled and sloshed water all down her front. "FarFARKswayke!" she yelled, before straightening up and carrying on. That was it for Jason, he doubled over laughing. "Oh, shit Sookie" he said. "Your kid is fuckin' funny, eh?"

"Um, yeah, I guess" I said. I wasn't thrilled about the swearing and the person who was to blame for that one arrived behind me just then, to see what was going on. And why no one was coming in for lunch.

"What's happening?" Eric asked.

"I'm getting a cup of tea, eh?" Jason answered, as we watched Felicia's progress across the lawn. Eventually she got to Uncle Jason, and held the cup out to him and he bent down to take it off her. Pleased she'd completed her task she gave him one of her best cheeky grins, Jason grinned back at her. His expression was an almost identical copy of Felicia's. Or perhaps the other way around. At any rate, it was a bit scary to see.

"Oh, OK. No one told me there was a tea party" Eric said, as though he was missing out on something extraordinary. Something we didn't get five times a week. I sighed. Eric didn't want the fun of one night in the tent, but he was annoyed about the impromptu tea party. I gave up.

Amelia emerged from the tent, carefully stepping through the door with a cup in each hand. "It's not a tea party" she said, making her way towards us. "It's a café."

She handed a cup to me, and one to Eric. "So can I get, um, coffee?" he asked.

Amelia looked pointedly at the cup she'd passed him. "But I made tea."

Eric peered at the water in the small teacup. "We, uh, can't pretend its coffee?" he asked.

Amelia shook her head. "No! Because it's tea, silly. I didn't make coffee." She turned to me with her best 'gee, Mum, where'd you find him!' expression. Eric looked at the water in the tiny teacup and looked confused about why he was stuck pretending that was tea. He still really sucked at this game, but I guessed he might figure it out. One day.

"OK, well let's just go and eat lunch, shall we?" I said, trying to move things along a bit.

"Can we eat in the tent?" Amelia asked.

"No, let's eat inside" I said, and her little face fell. "But we're still sleeping in it tonight."

"Yay!" Amelia said. "It's going to be super-fun, isn't it Daddy?"

"Um." Eric looked unsure of what to say. "Yeah, you should have a good time."

I don't think Amelia picked up on the fact Eric wasn't intending to join us and she just chattered nonstop all the way to the table. Jason just sort of looked at me and raised his eyebrows, but I didn't respond. It really wasn't any of his business what Eric did or didn't do.

After lunch Jason stood up from the table, said "Thanks, Sook. I'm off out."

"Out where?" I asked.

"Shopping. Gotta buy Christmas presents, eh? St Luke's is pretty close, isn't it?"

"Um. Yeah, but it'll be packed. Absolutely bursting."

"Yeah, I maybe wouldn't…" Eric added. I guessed he'd learnt that lesson the previous year.

"Nah, I'll be sweet. Everyone else will have finished by now."

I just stared at him. "You're mental!" I said.

"Nah, I'll be fine Sook. Don't worry about me. See youse!" And with that he headed out the door.

"He's mental!" I said to Eric, and Eric just nodded. At least one of them agreed with me.

The kids went back outside to the tent as soon as I let them. God knows what was going on out there, but at one point I did hear Amelia shout "You're mental!" to Felicia. I sighed, I really should know better.

I busied myself with cleaning the bathrooms and doing a last minute inventory of the food I'd need. I was starting to feel a bit nervous about having Crystal and the kids here. God, I hoped everyone got on. At least they had the tent to retreat to, but still. It's not easy having houseguests.

I lost Eric for a bit until I was following a trail of what looked suspiciously like Christmas mince pie crumbs with the dustbuster and I found him on the deck. He looked up from the book he was reading and turned around to look at me, perched at the edge of the family room on my hands and knees. "What are you doing down there?" he asked.

"Cleaning up your mess by the looks of it" I said, somewhat grumpily. I was hot and bothered and would rather have been sitting on the deck too.

"Um. Anything I can do to help?" he asked. At least he had the good grace to realise he was in trouble.

"Well, actually there is. Clean down the deck."

"What? The deck's fine, Sookie."

"No. It could do with a bit of a hose-down. So give it a good sweep and then hose it down." Eric looked at me like I was mental now. "Otherwise I'll have to do it, instead of making more mince pies. And I bet there are hardly any of those left now, are there?"

Eric looked a bit guilty. "Fine. If you really want me to, I'll do it."

"I do. I'll be in the kitchen."

"Where are the kids?" he asked.

"Still in the tent I guess" I said, as I walked back across the family room. Eric said something that sounded like "Figures", but I didn't bother getting him to repeat it. I got the general idea. He was still upset he'd been replaced by a tent.

Eric had to shut the doors to the deck so the water didn't spray into the house and it was really hot in the kitchen. By choice I wouldn't have been baking on such a hot day, but when I looked in the tin the mince pie supplies were dangerously low and I didn't want to risk there being an incident later on.

When I was done, and the pies were out of the oven, I did a brief check on the kids, who seemed to now be lying in the tent singing tunelessly. I guess they were figuring out that the inside of a tent on a hot day sapped all your energy pretty quickly.

Next I went to see how Eric was getting on, so I walked around the side of the house. He was intent on what he was doing and didn't see me for a moment.

"That looks better" I yelled at him.

"What?" he asked.

I walked up the steps, trying to avoid the spray. "I said, that looks better. See, it was worth doing, wasn't it?"

Eric just looked at me. He was still holding the hose and pointing it down at his feet. "Are you less grumpy now?" he asked.

"I wasn't grumpy in the first place!" I said. "Although I could have done without the crumbs."

"Yeah, and you were grumpy about it."

"Well, you're all pissed off about the tent." I waited to see what Eric would say about that. He didn't say anything. He just sprayed me with the hose.

"Ah!" I yelled, "I'm all wet now!" In actual fact, once I got over the shock it wasn't bad, given how hot I'd been, but still. You didn't just spray people with water like that.

"Yep" Eric agreed, staring at the front of my now sodden t-shirt.

"Why did you do that?" I asked him, still trying to shake the excess water off my arms.

Eric shrugged. "Seemed like it might be fun."

"Well, for you. Not for me. I'm soaking!" I walked the rest of the way up the stairs and closer to Eric, not taking my eyes off the hose the whole time. But it didn't do me any good when he lifted his hand and sprayed me for a second time, I wasn't quick enough to get out of the way.

"Eric!" I yelled. I may have stamped my foot, which obviously didn't help Eric look any more remorseful.

"Well let's see if you like it then" I said, lunging for the hose. Eric dodged away from me though and I swiped at thin air. "Just stand still!" I said, making another lunge.

"Now why would I do that, Sookie?" Eric asked, backing away from me.

"So it's fair!" I said. "I'm all wet now, and you're…you're not!"

"You sound like the kids" Eric commented, keeping his eyes on me as I circled around him.

"You act like a kid!" I threw back at him, trying to work out a way to get closer to him without him getting away. It really wasn't fair he had the advantage of longer legs and arms. I figured the only way I was getting the hose was if I took him by surprise and threw him off balance. I put my head down and I went for it.

Unfortunately he saw me coming and caught me with his free hand, using his arm to pin me to his side. "You don't fight fair" I said, trying to reach across Eric for the hose.

"Who's fighting? I'm just trying to clean the deck."

"Oh, very funny. Now give me the hose!"

"Nope. If you want it, you have to get it."

"Fine!" I wriggled as free as I could and I managed to get a hand across Eric to the hose, but I couldn't prise it out of his grasp. He was struggling though to hold onto me and the hose and I might have got it, had we not been interrupted by the door to the family room opening at that moment.

"What's happening?" Amelia asked, looking at the both of us.

"Um, Daddy was cleaning the deck" I said, trying to sneak a hand across to the hose. Eric saw that one coming though and just held it out of my reach. Damn him.

"But you're wet" Amelia said, looking at me like it was my fault for getting in the way of the hose.

"Yeah, he sprayed me with the hose" I said, thinking I might get a bit of sympathy.

"Really?" Amelia asked, incredulously.

"Yes!" I said, having another go at trying to get the hose. Eric was now holding me against his front and he didn't seem to mind the fact I was trying to squirm out of his grasp.

"She needed cooling off" Eric added.

Felicia appeared next to Amelia. "Wet" she said.

"I'm hot too!" Amelia said. She did look sweaty and flushed. I remembered how we'd tried to avoid spending any time in the tent in the heat of the day, but Amelia and Felicia were just figuring that out now.

"Hot!" Felicia agreed. "Hot, hot, hot!"

"Spray me!" Amelia shouted, coming out onto the deck, with Felicia following.

Eric looked at me and I nodded. "OK" he said, "Get on the lawn then and I'll spray you." He finally let go of me, with a last good perv at my boobs in the wet t-shirt.

I stuck around to make sure the kids got down the steps OK, without slipping over in the wet and then I headed inside. I hoped this cheered Eric up a bit, after all it was pretty certain that on a hot afternoon Dad with a hose was going to trump being inside a hot tent.

And I cheered up immensely once I realised Eric was so intent on spraying the kids he wouldn't notice what I was doing. I stood on the deck and chucked a mixing jug of water on him, and managed to avoid the spray of water that shot at me when he realised what had happened. I dashed back into the house to avoid further repercussions and to get changed.

Jason was just coming into the house as I arrived inside. He had his arms full of bags so at least he'd achieved something. "What happened to you?" he asked, taking in my dripping wet appearance.

"Eric bloody Northman" I said.

Jason peered past me through the doors and saw what was going on. "Oh" he said. "The hose." He laughed. Probably at me. "Nothing better on a hot day" he said. "Remember the slip'n'slide?"

"What? The one Dad made because he thought the bought ones cost too much for what they were?"

"Yep. That was awesome, eh?"

"It was the hose tied to a strip of black polyurethane. It got really hot, and then you squirted it with dishwashing liquid and it got really bloody dangerous."

"Yep. Those were fuckin' good days, eh Sook?"

"Yeah, they were. I'm off to get changed."

When I was dry and back in the kitchen, I found Jason stealing a mince pie. "Don't you eat all of those!" I admonished. "I need some of those for the guests!"

"I'm a guest" Jason said with his mouth full.

"Not a real one. So just leave some, OK?"

"Jeez, you're all pissy. But OK. You want a drink?" Jason started loading beer into the fridge. At least he'd contributed something I guessed.

"Um, yeah" I said. "But not beer."

"Some of this then?" Jason held up a bottle of wine he'd found in the fridge.

"Um, not that either. I'm got some, um, pre-mixed drinks in there…" I said, pointing to them.

"Ugh. Girlie shit. OK, well that's yours then." He passed a bottle over to me and opened a beer for himself. Luckily he hadn't seemed to notice that he'd handed me a virgin mojito. It wasn't that I drank a lot of course, but at the moment, I wasn't drinking at all.

Not when we were trying for a baby. It was my thing. I gave up drinking as soon as I started trying. I just didn't want to risk it.

But it was a dead giveaway that you were trying. Well, it was to anyone who was even slightly observant. I was probably OK with Jason, but I'd have to avoid Tara for the next little while because she'd figure that one out pretty quickly.

"So how was St Luke's?" I asked Jason, as I started to pack away the mince pies.

"No problem. I don't know why you fellas thought I'd have such trouble, eh? I just pulled into the carpark and this chick was walking back to her car and she flagged me down and I followed her and she let me have her spot. Piss easy, really."

"Great" I said. Typical of Jason to fluke it and prove me wrong, it really was.

"Oh, and I got you these" Jason said, holding out a box.

"Scorched almonds?" I said as I looked at it.

"Yep. Well, it's not fuckin' Christmas without them, eh?"

I opened the box and offered Jason one. It was obviously what he was angling for. He took a couple and popped them in his mouth, and I ate one. "Now it fuckin' feels like Christmas" Jason said.

"Yeah…" I agreed, thinking. "But you know what else we need?"

"What?" Jason said, helping himself to another of my scorched almonds.

"Come on" I led the way into the living room. And when Eric appeared in the doorway, looking dishevelled and still slightly wet, he found Jason and I standing in the living room, eating scorched almonds and singing "Christmas bells, those Christmas bells!" loudly along with Snoopy's Christmas.

EPOV

Sookie was annoyed about the fucking tent. She was pretending she wasn't, but it was blatantly obvious she was. I just couldn't see what the big deal was about it. It was a tent, and even though it spent most of the afternoon being occupied by Café Amelia it still didn't seem very appealing.

And I doubted there'd be room in there for me anyway.

So I tried to stay out of Sookie's way, but she found me and found a reason to berate me for leaving crumbs on the floor. There may have been _some_ crumbs, but I didn't think it was that bad.

As a punishment I got the completely pointless task of cleaning the deck. Like Crystal or Judith or Sookie's aunt were really going to look that closely at the deck for fuck's sake, but I wasn't going to argue with her about it.

I soon realised I should have, because it was hot standing out there sweeping the deck. Hot and boring. Hosing it down wasn't much improvement. So when Sookie appeared again I wasn't really feeling like being told off again. And she decided to tell me I was fucking pissed off about the tent.

She does look fucking good wet. But she gets stupid fucking ideas about turning the tables on me. Yeah, that wasn't part of my plan at all.

But she's sneaky, I'll give her that. I thought she'd given up when the kids came out and she went inside. I didn't expect to get a jug of water dumped on my head, that's for fucking sure.

By the time I'd persuaded the kids that enough was enough Jason had arrived back and he and Sookie were singing some weird fucking Christmas song. Really fucking loudly. It's fucking odd seeing those two together. Sookie goes on about how much he pisses her off and what a moron he is, and yet…somehow they have that connection. The connection of two people who have their own rules for board games and want to sing along to songs about Snoopy because that makes it Christmas.

I just didn't get it. At all.

I'd look at Amelia and Felicia and wonder if they'd be the same in 30 year's time. If Amelia would still want to tell Felicia exactly how to do everything and if Felicia would be happy to be the willing helper. Whether there'd be a third one and what her role would be. It was just a bit odd really, from the outside looking in.

SPOV

I enjoyed the sing-a-long to Snoopy's Christmas. That song had always meant Christmas when Jason and I were little, it was a huge thing to hear it on the radio and know that Santa was coming soon. The kids arrived in the room soon after Eric did, he'd managed to change them out of their wet clothes first.

"What's this?" Amelia asked.

"It's a fuckin' classic, eh?" Jason commented.

"Snoopy's Christmas" I told her.

"Oh" Amelia said. "Play it again?" So we did. Several times. While Amelia and Felicia danced around and giggled a lot. Eric disappeared on me again. He was really weird today, one minute he was trying to drown me in the back garden, the next he didn't seem to want to hang around us. I guessed he was feeling left out, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

I found Eric in the kitchen. "You're on dinner" I told him.

"Oh. Barbecue?" he asked.

"Um, no. That's tomorrow night. Tonight I think its takeaways."

"OK, what do you want?"

I shrugged. "Don't mind. You can pick."

Eric thought for a minute. "Burgers?"

"Burger Wisconsin?" I asked. For someone who didn't like beetroot in his burger, Eric had taken a shine to the gourmet burgers from that chain. He was working his way through the menu.

"Yep" Eric replied.

"Yeah, that's fine. Take Jason with you."

"OK."

I went to round up Jason while Eric got his keys.

EPOV

For some reason every time he came to stay Sookie made me take Jason to go and get dinner. I don't know why she thought that would help, the pair of us spending time alone together. I didn't mind Jason, but I didn't actually want to hang out with him.

We drove up the road to the Burger Wisconsin outlet and placed the order. And then of course we were stuck waiting for the food.

"So, Eric" Jason said, as we sat at the counter. "You like being married…or, whatever the fuck it is that you and Sookie did?"

"Um. Yeah. It's no different really."

"Yeah, 'cept you can't get away now, eh?"

I shrugged. I didn't particularly want to go anywhere.

"And now you get to sleep in the tent with the rest of us. Welcome to the family and all of that."

"Oh, yeah. I'm not."

"Not what?" Jason asked, looking confused.

"Not staying in the tent. Sookie, uh, didn't think I'd fit. On the airbed, or something."

"Oh, no. You'd be fine, mate. Heaps of room, eh?"

"Yeah. We'll see."

"It'll be sweet. Except the kids might cramp your style, eh? No fuckin' room for anything in a tent. I still can't fuckin' believe Sookie arrived 9 months after that holiday Mum & Dad took me on to Whangamata, eh?"

"Um…OK." I really wasn't sure what you said to that. Jason had no boundaries, obviously. And far too much of an interest in his parent's sex-life. I didn't know that having the whole family in a tent was that healthy.

"Fuck, Eric. It's OK. I don't mind that you want to root my sister, eh? I've seen you check her out every time she walks out of a room. It's fine, mate. You fuckin' married her. Or…whatever the fuck that was. So, yeah, don't feel bad. Just…maybe not in the tent, eh? Airbed's fuckin' suck for that."

I couldn't even formulate a reply to any of that, but luckily the girl at the counter called our number and we could just get the order and go home.

We got home without Jason talking too much more shit. I hoped he'd get better when his family arrived the next day, although I had no idea what to expect from them. It was just starting to dawn on me that for a few days at least there was going to be an entire family I knew nothing about living in my garden.

This was the kind of shit they wrote kid's books about. Not the stuff you actually had happen to you.

I handed Sookie the food when we got home and she started putting it out. "What did you get this time?" she asked. "The blue cheese one again?" She wrinkled her nose. Yeah, she hadn't liked that one much.

"No, I thought I'd try the venison."

From the face she pulled, Sookie didn't like the idea of that one much either. "I don't get why you'd want to eat Bambi's dad in a burger" she said.

I shrugged. "I never saw Bambi." We carried the food over to the table, where Jason was sitting with the kids.

"Who's Bambi?" Amelia asked.

"Never mind" Sookie said.

"So when do we go out to the tent?" Amelia asked excitedly.

"Oh, after dinner. And bath. So eat your dinner up" Sookie said.

"It's going to be so much fun!" Amelia exclaimed.

"Yeah, for you guys" Jason muttered. "You only have to sleep there one night. I'm stuck in there for the next three weeks."

"Really? Three weeks?" Amelia asked, having lost all interest in her burger. It was a nightly battle getting her to eat at the table rather than talk. And then she'd complain that she was the last one left eating.

Felicia poked me in the side. "Try?" she asked, pointing to my burger. I broke a bit off for her and she chewed it happily, obviously not sharing her mother's qualms about decimating Bambi's extended family.

"Yep" Jason continued on. "We've got, what? Four nights' here, then I'm up off North, eh? To stay with Crystal's rellies. So it'll be a while before I get a real bed again."

"Oh. You can have my bed" Amelia said, remembering to bite into a fry.

"Thanks, Ames. I'll do that. You don't mind, do you Sook?"

"Oh. Oh, no. I guess not." Sookie looked a bit taken aback. "Are you sure Amelia?"

"Yep. Uncle Jase can have it. For a bit, anyway. I'm good at sharing!"

"Oh, OK then. I'll change the sheets and you can have it then Jase" Sookie said.

"Sweet" Jason replied, still munching on his burger.

Fucking terrific. Now it was Jason and I in the house and the rest of my family were going to be in that stupid fucking tent. I sighed. And then I watched Sookie, waiting to see if she'd say anything else about me joining them. But she didn't. Instead we all finished dinner and Sookie cleaned up while I bathed the kids. Amelia was still talking about the tent. "It's going to be fun, isn't it Daddy?" she asked.

"Um, yeah. I guess you guys will have a good time."

"Mum said. Mum said she used to sleep in it when she was little. In the olden days." I wasn't sure Sookie really thought of her childhood as the olden days, so I just nodded. "Yeah, that was their family holiday. I've never been on a family holiday. Until now, that is. So that's good isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Tent! Tent!" Felicia shouted.

"I'm sleeping on an airbed. And you'll have an airbed, too?"

"No. No I'll be inside. I'm sleeping inside tonight." Although I wasn't sure how much sleeping I'd be doing. I'd never slept in that bed without Sookie. It was going to feel wrong, I was sure of it.

"Oh" Amelia said. And then she was quiet for a bit. Not a long time, but enough that it was noticeable.

After the kids were bathed they were allowed to watch a movie which was a huge treat. Amelia decided on Toy Story 3 again, that was tough on Sookie. It always made her cry. She denied it, but she got really tearful at the end. At the very least there was some significant lip-wobbling that went on.

And then she disappeared off to the bedroom to get ready. She'd blown up some airbeds using her hairdryer while I bathed the kids, and now we just had to carry them out to the tent. Sookie was changing into her pyjamas when I found her.

"Hey" I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

"Hey. You going to be OK? In here?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'll be fine. Will you be OK?"

"What? Oh yeah, I don't think anything is going to get me in the front garden. And now Jason's scored himself a bed I don't even have to worry about him. Did I tell you about how he scored a park at St Luke's today? Honestly, no woman can bloody resist him, and apparently, that includes his niece too."

"Uh-huh" I said. I didn't really care about Jason's success or otherwise. I just wanted Sookie to stay in here with me.

Instead though she stood up, and kissed my cheek. "Well, night" she said.

"Oh. Hang on, I'll help you carry the stuff out."

And there was a lot of stuff, just for one night. Torches and airbeds, sleeping bags for the kids, their pillows. A duvet for Sookie to throw over herself, her pillow. Some books. Sockie. A selection of Amelia's most loved dolls. It took a few trips.

Once they were all settled in there I kissed each of them. "Have a good night" I said.

"Daddy?" Felicia said.

"Yeah?"

"Not stayin'?"

"No, Daddy's sleeping inside" Sookie explained. "So it's just us girls."

"Oh" Felicia said, clutching Sockie. Amelia didn't say anything. I just left the tent, zipping up the door behind me.

Jason was in the living room watching TV but I didn't feel like joining him. I went into the bedroom and sat on our bed and tried to read, but it just felt wrong to be in here, without Sookie. Without any of them.

After about half an hour Amelia appeared in the doorway. "What are you doing in here?" I asked her.

"I needed the toilet" she said, just standing there.

"So, have you been?" I asked.

"Yeah." She didn't say anything else, just kept standing there.

"Did you need anything else?" I asked.

"Um. You know it's a family holiday right? In the tent?"

"Yeah, you said earlier. Like when your mum was little."

"Yeah. But…you're not there." She sighed and walked off. I heard the front door shut.

I sighed. I guessed that was as good an invitation as I was going to get. And I had fuck all chance of sleeping in here really. I might as well join them.

I grabbed my pillow and headed out the front door.

**A/N For some reason Nestle Scorched Almonds are huge at Christmas. They are just chocolate covered almonds. But we eat them by the box-full.**

**Snoopy's Christmas is a song from the late '60's and it's insanely popular here at Christmastime. They play it on the radio and we all know it. But it's not a Kiwi song, it's actually American. Somehow, we just adopted it.**

**Whangamata is a very popular holiday spot on the Coromandel. It's pronounced Fong-a-mah-tar.**

**Thanks for reading and Happy New Year to everyone!**


	25. Chapter 25

**A/N Phew! I feel like I've run a marathon, finishing this chapter off. It's hard work when I can't sit and focus on it because of the interruptions (i.e. kids) around the place at the moment. Of course the feeling could also be due to the fact that I'm hot and sweaty, again. It's humid, again. I know, it's not really news.**

**But thanks for all the reviews for the last chapter! Glad that everyone is sticking with this.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I was a bit mean and made them sleep in a tent.**

EPOV

I made my way down the front steps and onto the lawn. On the way to the tent I passed Bob who flicked his tail in a way that I think was the cat equivalent of a nod in my direction. I guessed he was off to put into practice whatever nefarious scheme he had planned for the evening. Whatever it was, it didn't involve sleeping on a fucking airbed. Lucky old Bob.

As I got closer to the tent, I could hear Sookie's voice. They were obviously reading stories in there, and I heard they were currently reading the book about the fucking tiger that eats everything again. I would never understand that book. Especially the bit at the end where the tiger never comes back, Sookie always looked sad at that bit. I would have thought any normal person would be fucking glad to get rid of a four hundred pound tiger that had eaten all the cookies in the house.

Sookie never agreed with me.

I unzipped the tent and stuck my head in the door. "Hey" I said.

"Oh, hello" Sookie said, looking from my face to the pillow I was carrying. I stepped inside.

"Daddy!" Felicia yelled, excitedly, shuffling over to me on her hands and knees. "Hi Leesh" I said, squatting down on the floor. "Stories!" Felicia said.

"Yeah, I heard."

"I'm reading the next one" Amelia announced. She could recognise the odd word these days, but she still mostly made up the stories she 'read'. Still, it didn't stop her reading to us at every opportunity.

I sat next to Sookie on the airbed, which immediately sank down to the ground under my weight and caused Sookie to sort of crash into my shoulder. We re-arranged ourselves a bit and then tried to pay attention to the story Amelia was reading about some bunnies making a present for their mother.

When Amelia had finished her story she shuffled through the pile of books and handed me The Gruffalo. "You do the voices better than Mum" she said. Felicia came to sit on my lap, which meant the airbed sank even further to the ground. Sookie still hadn't said anything to me about my appearance in the tent. Maybe she wasn't going to.

It wasn't easy trying to read by the light of the lamp in the corner, which I assumed had been borrowed from Jason. But it was kind of cosy in here with the four of us. After The Gruffalo I got pressed into reading a story about a dinosaur and Sookie read something about a witch who couldn't fit all her animals on her broom, at Amelia's request, and then Sookie announced it was sleeping time.

"More stories!" Felicia chanted.

"No. It's sleeping time now, or else you'll be tired and grumpy tomorrow when the guests arrive" Sookie said, firmly.

"What guests?" Amelia demanded.

"Jason's partner Crystal is coming. And her kids. I told you that" Sookie replied.

"No you didn't."

"Yeah, I did" Sookie retorted. I realised this could go on all night and no one would get any sleep. "But it's bedtime now anyway" I reminded them.

Amelia sighed, but she climbed into her Dora the Explorer sleeping bag, and spent a long time arranging her various dolls and her Disney Princess torch so they were all in reach.

I helped Felicia get into her identical sleeping bag. She looked really little in hers. And she couldn't stop grinning at me. "This's fun!" she said.

"Yep, but only if you go to sleep."

"OK" she said solemnly, holding Sockie up to her face.

I kissed the pair of them and Sookie did the same and then she crawled over and turned off the lamp. I froze to the spot as we were plunged into darkness and then as my eyes adjusted, I crawled over to the airbed. It was fucking tiny.

"This is fucking tiny" I whispered to Sookie.

"Well, what did you expect? It's a double. We'll have to make do" Sookie whispered back. I could see OK now thanks to the fact the moonlight was shining in through all the seams in the tent, and I watched Sookie pull back the comforter and climb in. She'd decided earlier in the day that a sleeping bag would be too hot and she'd just take this out.

I climbed in on the other side of the mattress and lay on my side facing Sookie. Predictably my hip pretty much hit the hard ground immediately and Sookie rolled back onto my elbow as I'd caused a fairly significant dip in the middle of the airbed. "Ow!" she exclaimed.

"It's sleeping time!" Amelia said from her corner of the room. I sighed. It was a large tent, but we were all in the one room, Jason having kept the back room to store his stuff in. It was going to be really fucking cramped tonight.

I tried to get as comfortable as I could, which was nearly fucking impossible given that the airbed gave me no support, my feet hung over the edge and every time I moved Sookie muttered about how she should have put more air in the mattress.

It was going to be a long night.

SPOV

I loved Eric. Really, really loved him. But I wasn't sure sharing my airbed with him was such a great idea.

I'd been surprised when he'd arrived in the tent just as we were finishing up The Tiger who Came to Tea. He was carrying his pillow so he was obviously here for the long haul. And just in time to read The Gruffalo. No one liked it when I read it.

And then we had to persuade the kids to actually lie down, which was easier said than done, and then lie down ourselves, which was even harder. Eric kind of took of all of the available space, and even then I suspected his feet were hanging off the end. Not to mention he created such a dent that I had no choice but to end up half-lying on top of him. I should have pumped the bed up more. But I didn't realise I'd be spending the night being sucked into Eric's orbit in quite this way.

I was used to sleeping right up against him, but perhaps not on the angle I was currently, where half my body was higher than the other half. And Eric couldn't get comfortable, because he'd shift around and send waves through the airbed that would jolt me. It seemed to happen every time I just about fell asleep. Or one of the kids would move around and rustle a lot, or Felicia would say something and Amelia would go "Ssh! It's sleeping time!" in a loud voice.

There were a lot of people in this tent with me. I sighed. It was going to be a long night.

EPOV

It didn't seem fair that Sookie could fall asleep so easily on the fucking airbed. She'd grumbled a bit at first, and told the kids to lie down and be quiet a few times, and then her leg had twitched, kicking me hard in the shin, and all of a sudden, she was asleep.

Even the kids had stopped rustling around and complaining about each other and all I could hear was their breathing. It was kind of loud.

As were the sounds coming from the garden. Those crickets were fucking loud. And every time a car drove past it sounded like it was going straight through the tent. No wonder I couldn't sleep.

I wasn't comfortable either, that certainly wasn't helping. I felt like I was lying directly on the ground. I really wanted to shift around a bit, but I was scared of disturbing Sookie so I held out as long as I could and then I rolled onto my back.

Sookie sort of rolled with me, but she didn't wake up. Nice for her.

I figured she was used to this, being in a tent. Certainly there'd been no camping trips when I was growing up. I didn't really think sitting in the car waiting for Dad to come out of a bar actually counted. And even then I'd only done that a couple of times. If Dad could find someone to leave me with, he'd do that instead. I had some really shitty babysitters over the years. Until I got old enough to look after myself anyway.

But Sookie, well she'd obviously spent a lot of time in tents. And possibly she'd been conceived in one, if Jason was to be believed. Fuck, I really hoped it wasn't this tent.

I still couldn't get comfortable, so I tried shifting back onto my side again. Only now, Sookie had rolled so far towards me that I was dangerously near the edge of the airbed. I tried shuffling her forwards, but she wasn't budging. All she did was stick her butt further in my direction and kind of wiggle it around a bit, so it rubbed against my groin. Well, that really wasn't going to fucking help me sleep at all. Even if it did feel nice. There wasn't anything I could really do about it, not with Amelia and Felicia sleeping about three feet away.

Jason had to be wrong. No way was anyone having any sex in a tent. I pondered for a while whether it would make any difference if we were in one room of the tent and the kids were in the other, would they have any clue what happened on the other side of the canvas divide? How deeply were they sleeping? Occasionally they'd move around, but they seemed pretty out to it, as did Sookie.

Then I lay there and tried to think of some kind of emergency that would mean abandoning the tent for the night. I couldn't figure out how I could conjure up a storm, or a flood, and a fire just seemed fucking dangerous. Not to mention if I destroyed the tent I was stuck with Jason in the house with us.

I followed that train of thought for a while, and then, finally, I was close to drifting off to sleep. Except that just as I was about to go under, a small hand touched my cheek.

"Daddy!" Felicia said excitedly.

"Huh?" I said, trying to roll over and look at her. It wasn't easy on the fucking airbed.

"We's ina tent! It's fun!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah" I whispered, hoping no one else woke up. "But it's better if you're asleep."

"Wanna sleep wi'you" she said.

"Oh. Oh, well I don't think…" Felicia climbed over me and somehow, God knows how, managed to insert herself between Sookie and I. There hadn't even been a gap there.

"Um, OK. Well go to sleep then" I said, realising that now at least half of my back was sticking out over the edge of the airbed.

"Yeah, g'night Daddy" Felicia said, and then she wriggled around a bit. And then she wriggled around some more. And then her heel jabbed me in the thigh, dangerously close to my groin.

She reached over and picked up a strand of Sookie's hair and stroked it. "Mummy's hair's pretty" she said, admiringly.

"Yeah it is" I agreed. "But go to sleep."

"OK. It's not up-time?"

"No, it's sleeping time. It's still dark."

"OK." There was a bit more shuffling from Felicia and then she stopped, and her breathing deepened, and she sort of lolled backwards against me, snoring slightly. And making me really hot.

So it was just me that was awake still. I lay there for a bit and then I eased myself backwards off the airbed; it wasn't difficult given how far off it I already was. I knelt beside the bed and looked at the sleeping, and now sprawling, Felicia. I could just take her airbed of course, but I looked over at it and it looked fucking minuscule. No way was that going to work.

So instead I reached over and unzipped her sleeping bag, before scooping her and depositing her back in it and zipping it up. Felicia didn't stir; she just snuggled against the pillow and sighed. I looked over at Amelia. Obviously she'd felt hot and had crawled out of her sleeping bag and was now lying on top of it, facing the wrong way with her feet on the pillow. She looked comfortable enough, so I just covered her loosely with a rather disgusting old blanket Sookie had carried out here 'in case it gets really cold' and left her to it.

It wasn't really cold though. It was fucking warm in the tent. And a bit airless. I decided while I was up I might let in a bit of fresh air, so I crawled over to the door, trying not to knock into Sookie in the process, and partially undid the zip. Breathing in the cool night air helped enormously, I'd been starting to get a really awful headache.

Leaving it open I crawled back to my side of the airbed, although it appeared that it was actually part of Sookie's side as well from the way she was now sprawled. I eased myself back under the comforter and kind of grabbed Sookie and moved her and I further towards the other side of the airbed. She was obviously really deeply asleep as all she did was sigh. And wriggle. Fuck, why did she keep wriggling her ass like that?

She dialled it down though, and finally, finally, I was almost asleep. But then something walked over my legs. "Fuck" I muttered, sitting up and forgetting about not waking everyone else up. There was fucking something in the tent with us, and we'd have to go inside now. Fuck knows what it was. But it was probably not something we should be sharing a tent with.

Sookie sat up sleepily, and sort of patted around the bottom of the airbed. I was about to tell her to watch out she didn't get bitten, when the sound of loud purring filled the tent. "Well done, Bob. You found us" Sookie said, lying back down again. "Thanks for letting him in" she said, still sounding half-asleep.

"Oh, OK" I said, lying down again as well and wondering how the fuck Bob was going to fit on the airbed with us. I guessed he was using the space on the other side of Sookie that she wasn't using because she was half on top of me again. At any rate he was still purring. Loudly. The tent wasn't that fucking great, I wanted to tell him, but I really wanted everyone to stay asleep because more than anything, that's what I wanted to be.

I put my arm over Sookie and just tried to tell myself the airbed was cosy, not hot and cramped and awkward. Cosy. It was nice sleeping next to Sookie. It was always nice sleeping next to Sookie.

Even if we had to do it in a fucking tent.

The next thing I knew I was hot. Really hot. The airbed was moving and something was being jabbed close to my face.

I opened my eyes, tentatively. Fuck, that was bright. The sun had obviously been up for a while because the tent was just flooded with light. And it was hot. I blinked. Amelia and Felicia were sitting there looking at me.

Felicia poked her hand nearer to my face. She had something clasped in her fist. "Bubba!" she exclaimed.

"It's the baby Jesus!" Amelia shouted.

"Uh-huh" I agreed. I guessed they'd opened the advent calendar already today then. I wondered what the fuck the time was.

I sat up slowly feeling hot and headachey and almost hung-over. Fuck, who would want to sleep in a tent if you woke up like this every morning?

"Bubby sesus" Felicia said again, clutching the little wooden piece to her chest.

"Yes, but you have to give it to me, so I can put it in the picture. Because I know where it goes, don't I Felicia?" Amelia told her.

"My turn today" Felicia countered.

"To _open_ the calendar, but _I_ get to put the piece in. You do it all wrong." Amelia stared at Felicia, and held out her hand. Felicia clutched her hand to her chest and looked at me.

"Amelia, let her do it. It's Christmas."

"But she'll do it wrong! You have to put the baby in the manger. Not anywhere else! It's the rules!"

"Well, maybe you can fix it later on, after Felicia's had her turn putting it on."

"Really? Can I fix all the pieces? Because I don't think the sheep should be all over the place, I think they need to be standing next to the shepherd. There's four sheep. That's a flock."

"Um, OK. If it's really important to you."

"Yeah, it is. OK, Felicia, you can put the baby Jesus on, and then I'll fix it. Because you're just little and you don't know."

Felicia smiled a big toothy grin and Amelia looked satisfied.

"So, uh. What's happening? Inside?" I asked, still feeling a bit groggy.

"Oh, well Uncle Jase made us breakfast. He made boiled eggs and soldiers. He's up _early_. Not like you. You sleep for a long time." Amelia paused for breath. "And, um, oh we did the calendar and I'm going to fix it later on. Santa hasn't been but that's tomorrow. One more sleep. Uncle Jase doesn't play games properly. Mum keeps muttering stuff but I don't know what. She mutters a lot sometimes. It's _rude_. You should speak up."

Felicia held out her hand again "Bubby sesus. It's my turn."

"Right. OK." I felt slightly more enlightened. "Where is your mum?" I asked Amelia.

"Um, she said something about a shower…"

I suddenly felt a bit less groggy. A lot less groggy. "OK, well you guys go back inside and hang out with Uncle Jason, I'm, um…going to see your mum…"

"Oh, OK, but I didn't tell you about the rat…" Amelia said as I started to leave the tent.

"Yeah, um, tell me later." I sprinted into the house and heard Jason yell "Morning Eric!" from the kitchen as I stepped inside.

"Yeah, morning" I yelled back. I stopped briefly in the main bathroom and then walked as quickly as I could to the ensuite, hoping like fuck that Jason didn't decide to materialise and tell me about the rat, or anything really. I'd had a shitty night in that fucking tent and I felt I deserved something that was going to make up for it. And I had a pretty fucking good idea what would make it up for it.

Except that I stepped into the ensuite just as Sookie turned the water off. "No!" I said.

"What?" she asked, reaching for the towel that was draped over the shower stall.

"No. You can't be finished. Turn the water back on."

"Eric! Don't be all bossy."

"I'm not being bossy!" Fuck, I thought, now I sound like Amelia. I took a breath. "I just, I just wanted to spend some time with you."

Sookie snorted. "Yeah, when I'm naked. Come and hang out with me later on when I'm chopping up vegetables."

"Will you be doing that naked?" I asked.

"No, and you have a one-track mind." She kept drying herself.

"I just…I just wanted to…well, you know…" I trailed off.

"Yes, I do know. And we can't. Everyone's up and about."

"Jason has the kids under control." I was sure he did. Well, he wouldn't let them do anything completely stupid or dangerous. Probably.

"Mmm" Sookie said, wrapping herself in her towel and stepping out of the shower. I wanted to yell 'No!' again, but I didn't think it would do me any good. I pulled my t-shirt over my head, figuring I might as well just get ready for the shower.

"No!" Sookie yelled at me. "No getting naked either, not until I'm finished."

Fuck, she was weird sometimes. I sighed. "I had a really shitty night's sleep in the tent and I just wanted to have a nice time with you" I said.

"So is nice time the new code for orgasm? OK. But it can't have been that bad a night's sleep. You've been snoring away in there for ages. We've all had breakfast. And Amelia and Jason have played Trouble, but it was more arguing over the rules than playing, she wouldn't let him have do-overs and he didn't believe her rule about not sending people home when you land on their space. That was your rule, wasn't it?"

"Well, she's only little. And the game takes forever otherwise…"

"Uh-huh, so anyway, now it's time to get started on the day. There's a lot to do. And unfortunately my to-do list doesn't include having a _nice time_. Not even with you." Sookie did at least have the decency to look a little wistful at that. She reached for the panties lying on the pile of clothes balanced on the lid of the toilet, and pulled them on under the towel. I just watched her. This didn't seem fair. I'd slept in the tent, what more she did want?

"If I take my towel off, you have to keep your hands to yourself. No boob-grabs, OK?" Sookie waggled her finger at me in warning.

"I'm not that bad" I said, feeling a little hounded.

"Yeah, you are. You're like a moth to a flame. So just stand there and don't move." She reached past me and grabbed a bra off the toilet then moved away again. Well, as far as she could in this tiny room. She turned her back and dropped her towel, before slipping her arms into the straps of her bra.

I just stared at her back. Well, her butt really. It was nice to look at. Then my gaze dropped a bit lower, to the ugly yellow and purple mark on her left thigh. I took a step forward, which brought me right up behind Sookie, and ran my hand over it.

"What are you doing?" she asked rather grumpily, while folding her towel.

"You've got a bruise" I said, letting my hand fall away. Sookie turned around and peered over her shoulder, sticking her butt out to try to see below it. That just made her butt rub against me, and I shuffled back a bit. Finally she used her hand to lift her butt cheek and she could see it. "Oh" she said "Yeah, that's from when I fell over putting up the tent." She started hanging her towel back on the rack.

"It looks nasty" I said, crouching down to get a better look. I ran my hand over it again. And then I sort of let my hand drift higher to her butt cheek. "Maybe I should kiss it better?" I didn't wait for a response, I just did it.

"Mmmm" Sookie said languidly, so I kissed it again, while grabbing the other butt cheek and kneading it a bit. It felt pretty fucking firm and delicious. Sookie had a really, really nice ass.

"Eric…" Sookie said, a hint of warning in her voice, but I wasn't listening. Sometimes it was best to just ignore her for a bit. I was struggling to ignore my cock though. It was making its presence known against the fabric of my boxers. I really, really hoped that Sookie wasn't going to try to run off and chop vegetables or anything. I just kept kneading her butt while trailing kisses up her thigh and over the fabric of her panties.

"You're going to push me into the towel rail" she grumbled. I grabbed her hips and kind of moved her around 90 degrees so she was standing with her back to the bathroom counter and she was now facing me. She looked down at me and frowned a bit, but didn't say anything, so I guessed I was probably OK. For now.

I lent forward and kissed the skin just above the line of her panties, and then I kissed the fabric of her panties. Sookie leaned back and braced her hands on the counter and parted her legs slightly for me. That was definitely a good sign. I kissed her clit through the fabric, and then I slid the panties down. I could hear Sookie mutter "I only just put those on" but she didn't seem that upset.

I lifted one of her legs and put it over my shoulder and then moved my mouth back to her clit. Sookie moaned, a proper happy moan that told me she wasn't really about to push me away. Instead she braced one hand on the counter and the other she put in my hair, so I figured I was definitely on the right fucking track.

I eased two fingers inside of her, and started pumping them in and out while I continued to use my tongue on her clit. "Oh yes" she whispered. "Yes, yes, yes"

I groped upwards, trying to get a hand to her boob and she helped me along by pulling down the cup of her bra and arching into my palm. Fuck, her nipple was so fucking hard now. I could hear her breathing faster and faster and then I felt the internal pulses that meant she'd gone over the edge. "Yessss…" she said through clenched teeth.

I slowly withdrew my fingers and reluctantly moved my hand away from her boob. I was pretty breathless too now. And really fucking hard.

"Well, that was a nice time" Sookie admitted.

"I don't know why you don't believe me" I said to her.

"Because there are other things in life than sex you know."

I just shrugged. I'm sure there were. But right now, I couldn't really think of any.

"OK, your turn" Sookie said, motioning for us to swap places. I stood up and lent against the counter while Sookie got on her knees in front of me. I tried to focus on not coming just from the thought of the blow-job. It would be nice to actually get it, first.

Sookie pulled down my boxers and dumped them in the laundry hamper. And then she licked my cock a few times before taking me in her mouth. That felt so fucking good. It always did.

It didn't take too long before I was starting to get close. I gripped the counter and let out an "ohhh, fuck" and then the door-handle rattled. Thank fuck I'd locked it.

"Mum" Amelia's voice said. "Mum! Mum, Felicia won't put the baby Jesus in the calendar picture. She's still holding onto it. Daddy said I could fix the picture, but I can't if she's still got that. Come out and tell her, Mum!"

"Your Mum's busy Amelia, she'll be out soon. She's, um, drying her hair" I managed to get out. Sookie hadn't stopped and making any kind of intelligent conversation was pretty fucking difficult.

Sookie reached behind her and turned the hairdryer that was lying on the floor on. Fuck, she's really good at multitasking. She hadn't missed a stroke.

"Well, it's not fair!" Amelia yelled again.

"She'll be out soon" I said. "Go and see what Uncle Jason is doing."

Amelia huffed, but I was pretty fucking glad when I heard her stomp off. Especially as I was so close, so fucking close. Sookie had the fingers of one hand around the base of my cock, and the other was fondling my balls. Oh, that was so good. And then I came. "Fuck, Sookie!" I said, trying to catch my breath and hoping that the noise from the still-running hairdryer would stop anyone hearing me.

Sookie pulled away and picked up her panties before putting them on again. "Right, you better get in that shower before we get another attempted break-in." She picked up the hairdryer and pointed it at her hair, muttering that it was probably a lost cause now.

"Yeah, uh. Just give me a minute."

"Well you have these brilliant ideas. On Christmas Eve. When we have a lot to do. So get a move on."

I sighed. "You know how Amelia's really bossy…" I started to say, as I opened the shower door and turned it on.

Sookie turned around and pointed the hairdryer at my face, "That is not me!" she said. "That's from them. You know that. I'm sure Calvin complains about Judith all the time to you."

"Uh-huh" I said, getting under the water. "Yeah, from them."

"Can you say it with more conviction?" Sookie asked loudly, over the noise of the hairdryer.

"No" I muttered, ducking my head under the water.

Sookie turned the hairdryer off and when I straightened up she was pulling on her shorts and t-shirt. "You have some weird ideas" she said.

"I thought you said I had brilliant ideas" I countered, reaching for the shampoo.

"Well…" she said thinking. "Well, I had a nice time. I'll give you that. Because it's Christmas."

"Yeah, of course you will" I said, but she'd already walked out the door and I could hear that Amelia had ambushed her in our bedroom.

**Thanks for reading!**


	26. Chapter 26

**A/N So we're about through the whole holiday period here and we should be able to resume our normal scheduled programming. Which pleases me as every time I have to write in fits and starts I lose focus and start to worry the whole thing is drifting and have to talk myself off the ledge. It's so much easier if I just write and post, write and post! Less of the thinking, more of the doing.**

**Of course I am meant to be finding a job, but I looked this morning, I swear, and there weren't any. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and yes, I've been known to fret about that as well.**

SPOV

I had a busy day planned for today and everyone seemed out to ambush and waylay me. First it was Eric, with his plans for sex in the bathroom. I'd failed miserably at avoiding that one. I blame the bathroom. It's really tiny. I thought Eric took up all the room on the airbed, but it's worse in that ensuite. There's no avoiding him.

And there didn't seem to be any way of avoiding Amelia either. I didn't know how long she'd been loitering, waiting for me to appear, but I hoped to God she hadn't figured out what was going on in the bathroom. With any luck her natural childish self-centredness made her oblivious to the fact that Eric and I could be doing anything that didn't involve her.

What Amelia was mostly concerned about at the moment, was the advent calendar. "Can you get Felicia to give me the baby Jesus?" she said grumpily, as soon as I stepped through the bathroom door.

"It was her turn today" I said. I wondered briefly how we were going to get on when there were three of them taking turns. Amelia would possibly have a nervous breakdown, I thought. I just wasn't sure how to convince her that she wasn't in charge of the whole operation. The calendar had been a present from Lorena for the kids, and while I loved that it wasn't something with Dora on the front and yucky chocolates on the inside, it seemed to cause a disproportionate amount of tension. Still, at least it took their minds off Santa.

"Yes, but Daddy said that I could fix the whole picture when Felicia puts the baby Jesus on. And now she won't! It's not fair!" Amelia cried.

I had no idea what Eric had negotiated with them. "Well…" I said, trying to think. "Maybe if you just wait a bit she'll put the piece on."

"She won't! She's just holding onto it!"

"Have you tried asking her nicely?"

"Yes" Amelia grumped.

"Have you told her she can help you with fixing the picture?"

"No! Because that's not what Daddy said! He said that I could do it! It's my job!" Amelia was just about vibrating from the unfairness of the whole situation.

"Oh…well. Go and take it up with Daddy then" I said, gesturing to the bathroom door. Really, I was out of ideas.

Amelia sighed and opened the door to the bathroom saying "Daddy, Felicia won't…" before she was even properly through it. Oh well, I thought. Eric had wanted company earlier.

I headed into the kitchen to find Jason trying to steal some Christmas mince pies while no one else was around. "No!" I said, pointing at him.

"Fuck, Sook!" he said, jumping around. "You fuckin' gave me a heart attack, eh?"

"Oh, I did not. Too much pastry will give you a heart attack. So stop eating the bloody mince pies, alright?"

Jason sighed, and put the lid back on the tin and muttered "I bet Eric gets to eat some."

"Oh, for goodness' sake Jason."

"Well, I'm a fuckin' guest, eh?" Jason said, indignantly, as he put the tin back in the pantry.

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean you to get to raid the kitchen at every opportunity. Just behave. Honestly, now I know how Mum felt."

Jason sighed but he didn't say anything else. "Anyway" I continued. "You and I have an errand this morning."

"Oh, we do?" Jason looked surprised.

"Yeah, I need you and the ute…" I stopped because Felicia appeared and tried to wedge herself between Jason and the pantry door. "Sssh!" she said to us.

"What's up Leesh?" Jason said to her, which made Felicia look really grumpy.

"I's hidin'!" she said.

"Who from?" Jason asked, but that question was answered when I heard Amelia say loudly "Felicia! Felicia come here, Daddy wants you!" I wasn't sure if Eric really needed Felicia or not, but it was a good ploy on Amelia's part because I could see that Felicia was quite keen on going to Daddy. You could almost see the indecision written on her little face. In the end she sighed and trudged off towards the sound of Amelia calling "Felicia! Felicia! Daddy needs to tell you something!"

"What's that all about?" Jason asked me.

"The baby Jesus" I replied. Jason looked a bit confused, but didn't ask anything else. "Right-o. I'll just go and get ready then, eh?" he said.

"Yeah, you do that. I just need to tell Eric we're going and then we'll head off."

I found Eric, and the girls, standing beside the advent calendar which was perched on the cabinet in the living room. Eric still had wet hair and looked like he'd been dragged forcibly out of the bathroom to negotiate the Christmas Eve peace accord. "So what's going to happen" Eric was saying, "Is that Felicia's going to put the baby Jesus on, wherever she wants, we'll take a photo of it like that, then Amelia gets free rein to re-organise it. OK?"

"Hey" I said to get his attention.

"Oh" he said, turning around. "Hang on guys." Amelia gave me an exasperated look, as I was clearly interrupting a very important process, and Felicia just held onto the baby Jesus and smiled a lot.

"So, Jason and I are going out and you don't need to know where" I said, in a rush. Eric looked curious, but didn't comment. "And I need you to take the troops to Nosh to get the ham. And there should be a lamb roast there for me too. And can you get some steak for tonight, and some sausages? Also, I need fruit, for the fruit salad. And capsicums, and maybe check out their pre-made salads because I don't fancy …" I noticed Eric's eyes had started to glaze over. "Oh, I'll write you a list" I said, walking back to the kitchen and leaving Eric to finish dealing with the advent calendar.

EPOV

I finally managed to extricate myself from the whole advent calendar situation and went to the kitchen to get a quick breakfast. Everyone else seemed to have eaten a while ago.

Sookie was in there writing out the list. It looked fucking long. "OK" she said, finishing and handing it to me as I grabbed a bowl out of the cupboard. "There's not much, but if you could just grab this it'd be a help."

"Uh-huh" I said, reviewing it. Fuck, if this was a small list, what did a normal list look like?

"So, they're OK now?" she asked.

"Yeah. Felicia just needed to feel like her contribution was valued too. So I took a picture of the pair of them in front of the version that has the baby Jesus flying through the sky, and then I have to go back and take another picture when Amelia's finished." The problem was that none of the pieces were as good as the baby Jesus, but Amelia should never, ever have let that fact slip to Felicia. Felicia was a bit more ambivalent about the whole thing, but knowing that her sister really wanted that piece, well, that was just a whole reason to hold onto it that bit longer. Felicia might not be two yet, but she wasn't stupid.

I took the Weetbix out of the pantry and the milk out of the refrigerator. I glanced at the coffeemaker, yep, typical. If I didn't make it no one else did. I sighed; I guess I'd have to wait until we got to Nosh then.

Jason arrived in the kitchen and looked at Sookie. "You ready to go, Sook?" he asked.

"Yeah, hang on. So everything on the list makes sense then?" Sookie asked me. My mouth was full of Weetbix so I just nodded. I was pretty sure I could handle it. It was only groceries.

"OK, I'll see you later on then" Sookie stood up to kiss my cheek and then she and Jason left, with Jason calling out "Bye, Eric!" over his shoulder as Sookie pushed him out the door. I had no idea what she was up to. But I didn't have long to ponder as I heard Amelia yell "No Felicia! Don't take that!" and I had to go and supervise the re-arranging of the advent calendar picture.

SPOV

Jason unlocked his ute and I got into the passenger seat. It never ceased to amaze me that for as much as he was a slob elsewhere, and I'd seen his bedroom when he was growing up so I knew exactly how bad he could be, his vehicles were usually pristine.

I made a mental note not to let Jason see my car. I had kids. They weren't tidy. Enough said, really.

"So are you going to tell me where we're going?" Jason asked, as he started the engine.

"I've got to pick up Eric's present. So, um, Mt Wellington Highway if you please."

"OK, well you're in charge." Jason did a u-turn and headed back towards Mt Eden Road.

"So when's Crystal getting here?" I asked, trying to figure out how many people I had for lunch as well as dinner.

"She texted me earlier, eh? Said they were leaving about 8am, but she wanted to stop in Manukau to do some shopping at The Warehouse."

"Oh, OK." Well I guessed she wasn't here for lunch then. She was also stupidly keen going out shopping on Christmas Eve, but I couldn't talk. Although I, at least, was just doing a pick-up.

We spent a while trying to get on to the motorway at Greenlane, and I amused myself by fiddling with the stereo and the air-conditioning in the ute. Jason hated it if you changed his settings. Every time I pushed a button or turned a knob I could see his hand twitch as he desperately tried to fight the urge to change it back.

Eventually, it got too much for him. "Sookie! Will you just leave everything the fuck alone!" Jason exploded, when we were finally going around the Greenlane roundabout.

I burst out laughing. "You never change Jason! You're hilarious!"

"I'm not fuckin' hilarious" Jason grumbled. "I just like things the way I had them, so get your grubby paws off the fuckin' dashboard!"

I just laughed harder. Then I changed the temperature setting for the air-con.

"Jesus Sookie! I had forgotten how fuckin' annoying you are! Are you this bad in Eric's car? Because seriously, I'm fuckin' surprised he married you if you are."

I couldn't talk after that, I just laughed all the way to the Mt Wellington off-ramp. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to mess with Jason.

EPOV

I'd evntually made it to Nosh. It was still only 10am and I felt like I'd spent at least half a day involved in major peace negotiations. Honestly, it couldn't be worse in the Middle East. The more Amelia wailed, the more determined Felicia was to hold onto that baby Jesus piece at all cost. Fuck, and everyone said Amelia was the stubborn one.

But we were here. And we'd managed to get a carpark after being waved into one by some pimply kid who was spending his break from college parking cars at Nosh. That seemed to be a particularly shitty job. I turned to the backseat and laid down a few ground-rules. "When we go inside" I said "there will be no whining for things, no running off and no fighting. Does everyone understand me?"

There were some half-hearted replies of "yes" from Amelia and Felicia, so I took that as good enough and let them out of the car. This was going to be hard-work keeping an eye on both of them, I realised, as I had to drag them both across the carpark. The previous year I'd just had Amelia but there was no way you could leave Felicia behind these days. So I had two kids, in a crowded gourmet supermarket, on Christmas Eve.

But I had a plan.

We got through the turnstiles and I bent down to them. "OK" I said, "We're going to get the fruit and vegetables first, because they're right by the door. Then we'll go to the back of the store and I'll buy you fluffies. IF you're good, that is. Then last we'll get the meat and the salads. Everybody clear?"

There were nods all around so I picked up a basket and headed to the fresh produce section. I was feeling kind of confident, I wasn't a newbie at this after all. The kids would at least behave long enough to get their fluffies and the meat shouldn't take too long. I was feeling really good about my plan, Amelia and Felicia were sticking close by and were actually helping me pick the fruit, no one had asked for anything yet, and I'd just seen some guy chase a small girl who seemed to be heading for the door to the carpark. He obviously had no clue.

But then I hit a small speed-bump. What the fuck were capsicums again? I started to look around for a sign, but as I did so I noticed that Amelia and Felicia were obviously losing interest in produce and had starting making their way towards a display of candy. Fuck.

"Hey, Amelia" I said, loud enough to get her to turn around. "What are capsicums?"

She looked at me like I was an idiot. "They're vegetables, Eric" she said. I was back to being Eric, so definitely an idiot then.

"Yeah, but which ones?" I asked, scanning the vegetables again, while trying to keep one eye on Felicia who was edging ever-closer to the candy.

Amelia looked at me blankly. I guess her mother didn't ask her dumb questions like this. I was starting to think we'd have to give up on the capsicums, when someone touched my arm. I turned to my side and saw someone I vaguely recognised, she was one of the mothers from daycare. Her son was slightly older than Felicia so had just moved to the pre-school class with Amelia.

"Um, sorry" she said, "I just overheard. They're…um, they're there" I followed the finger she was pointing with. Oh yeah, bell peppers. Why the fuck could I never remember that one?

"Thanks" I said to her and she smiled at me. The son just stood there looking at me, then over at Amelia and Felicia and back again. He looked as though he didn't expect to run into us all in one place. "I'm um, Eric."

"Oh, I know" she said. "Um, Amelia's told me…I'm Carmen." She held her hand out and I shook it. "OK, well…have a good Christmas" she said, as she started to walk away.

"Yeah, thanks. You too" I said, grabbing some peppers and hustling Amelia and Felicia towards the coffee counter. Amelia grabbed my hand which would have been OK, in that it meant I knew where she was, except that Felicia wanted the other hand, which made balancing the basket on my arm kind of difficult. Not to mention it wasn't easy to manoeuvre all of us through the crowded store.

We queued up to order. "Do you guys want a muffin?" I asked. There was a chorus of 'yes' all around.

"Which one?" I asked. There was no way either of them could eat a whole muffin, they'd have to split it.

"Shoclit" Felicia said, at the same time that Amelia said "Blueberry". They could never make things easy, could they?

I ordered my coffee, their fluffies, and two muffins and arranged the pair of them on high bar stools, which they thought was great. I stood behind them, as I had to stop Felicia trying to spin hers around. I wasn't convinced she wouldn't spin herself right off.

One of the waitresses brought our drinks over and Amelia asked loudly where her muffin was. The poor girl scurried back to get the food and I glared at Amelia's head. She really had no manners sometimes.

We were part-way through our snack, meaning that both kids were covered in food and chocolate from the top of the fluffies, there were crumbs everywhere and I had a mouthful of the leftover muffin, when Carmen appeared again with her son.

"I guess you guys had the same idea then!" she said, as she sat her son, who's name I could not for the life of me remember, on the stool next to Amelia, who turned and glared at him.

"Yeah" I said, hastily swallowing my mouthful. "I didn't get coffee this morning, so I thought we'd stop. I just forgot that these two create this kind of mess" I said, gesturing to the pile of crumbs and split milk. Amelia turned and glared at me.

Carmen laughed. "Yeah, I guess its better the crumbs are here than at home though?" she asked.

"Mum would clean it up" Amelia grumbled, but I ignored her. She was in a mood again. Probably still upset about the baby Jesus fiasco.

"Yeah, you're probably right" I agreed, putting one hand on Felicia who was threatening to slide off her stool.

"I just thought I'd grab a coffee to go" Carmen continued, "I promised Rocco I'd take him to a park after this. He needs to burn off some energy."

I looked at Rocco, and wondered who the fuck names their kid Rocco? He didn't exactly look like he needed a run around either. He was just staring at Amelia, who was glaring at his mother. Amelia maybe needed a run around.

"So, do you know where the nearest park is to here?" Carmen asked, as she took her coffee from the waitress.

"Um, probably the one up the road from here? You know, sort of back towards the daycare?" I had no idea why she was asking me, surely she'd know where the parks were.

"Oh, um, yeah" she said. I expected her to leave, but she stood there, looking at the coffee in her hand. "So, um, is it a good park?" she asked in the end.

"Um…yeah. Do you like it Amelia?" I asked her, and she turned to look at me. "S'alright" she said, and then she went back to staring at Carmen. Carmen looked at her coffee. Rocco stared at the remains of the muffins with a certain amount of longing. Felicia made another attempt to spin her stool and when that didn't work she threw a piece of crumbled muffin on the floor.

"Well, thanks. You've been helpful" Carmen said at last, smiling at me. She reached over and patted my arm.

"Oh no problem. And thanks for helping me out earlier."

"Oh, that was fine. Anytime!" she laughed again.

"Go away!" Amelia yelled at her. I looked at Amelia, not really believing she'd just said that. "Amelia!" I admonished. "Don't talk to people like that."

"Well she's not being nice. And she can't take you." Amelia was glaring at me now, and I wasn't sure what to do.

"Say sorry" I said to her.

"No!"

Carmen was looking a bit embarrassed about the whole thing and I couldn't blame her really. Amelia was being a total pain in the ass for absolutely no reason. And I really just wanted her to fucking apologise so we could move on.

"Well, I should, um, get going then…" Carmen said, starting to lift Rocco off the stool.

I bent down and spoke directly into Amelia's ear "Apologise to Rocco's mom" I hissed. "It is not too late for me to call Santa!"

Amelia just frowned for a long time. "Sorry!" she spat out in the end. "Thank you" I muttered.

"Don't worry about it" Carmen said. "The kids are all a bit wound up by Christmas at the moment." She looked thoughtful, and then finally she said "OK, well I'll see you all in the New Year. Come on, Rocco."

"Bye" I said. "Bye!" Felicia yelled cheerfully. Rocco gave a half-hearted wave. Amelia said nothing.

When they were out of ear-shot I turned Amelia round to face me. "What is your problem Amelia?" I asked her.

"He can't have you!" she spat out.

"What? Who?" I was kind of lost.

"Rocco!" Amelia wailed. "He doesn't have a daddy, and he can't have you."

"I don't think he wants me" the kid had spent most of his time staring at the food.

"Well his mum does. And _she_ can't have you." Oh, I realised Amelia was scared some strange woman was suddenly going to run off with me. I wondered where the fuck she'd got that idea from. "Amelia…" I tried to cut in, but she carried on.

"She can't have you, because Mum said. Mum said we wouldn't get another one." Amelia looked really upset, even more upset than she had been by the advent calendar this morning. Felicia was starting to glance at her worriedly too, I hoped she wasn't going to suddenly get the wrong idea as well.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I asked Mum, one time when you didn't like each other. I said if you went would we get another one, and she said no, because…um, well I think she said it was too much effort or something. So if you go we don't have a daddy!"

"Daddy's goin'?" Felicia asked, confused.

"No! I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here."

"You promise?" Amelia's lip was wobbling rather dangerously and her eyes were shiny. Felicia's eyes were huge as she looked from me to Amelia.

"I promise. I don't want to be anyone else's daddy" I said, putting my arms round both of them as best I could.

"That's good" Amelia said, sniffing loudly. I kind of wished I had Sookie here because she usually travelled with tissues. I reached over and handed Amelia a paper serviette and she blew her nose, loudly.

"Not goin'?" Felicia asked.

"No, I'm not going."

"Felicia would be sad" Amelia said. "She likes you."

"Yeah" I agreed.

"And we're used to you now. And the fact you talk funny, like the TV. But you don't know what capsicums are. That's weird."

"Yeah…" I said. "Well, shall we go and see if they have any potato salad?" I lifted Amelia and then Felicia off the stools. They were both pretty grubby now and Amelia's face was flushed.

"Yep" Amelia said cheerfully "I'll show you what it is. In case you don't know." And with that she skipped off towards the deli counter and all seemed right with the world again.

SPOV

When Jason and I got back, having called a truce on the way home because I bought him two sausage rolls and a cup of tea from a coffee shop while we were out, Eric was already there.

There was a reason I'd needed Jason and the ute to get Eric's present, it was big. And there was really no hiding it from Eric. He'd have to have it now.

I went inside to round him up and found him in the family room with the kids, who were covered in what looked like chocolate. The foil wrappings from some chocolate Santas that were lying on the table were pretty much a dead giveaway that Eric had been talked into buying treats at the checkout.

"Hello" I said.

"Oh, hello" Eric said, looking up. "Did you do what you needed to?"

"Yep. How was Nosh?" I put my bag down on the couch.

"Fine."

"Daddy doesn't know what capsicums are" Amelia said.

"Oh, sorry. I forgot to translate that!" I realised I hadn't put the American version on the list. It was hard work trying to remember the equivalent phrases for everything. I swear sometimes it wouldn't be this difficult if Eric spoke an entirely different language to me.

"It's alright, Rocco's mum told him what they were, but then she wasn't nice because Rocco needs a daddy, but I told her that we didn't like her, so it was OK. And I found the potato salad!" Amelia said cheerfully. I looked at Eric trying to work out what had happened, but he just shook his head "I'll tell you later" he said.

"Oh, OK then. Well, come out and see your present!" I said, grabbing his arm.

"What? Now?" Eric looked confused. I guessed that maybe browsing the internet on your phone was important, but surely everyone loves presents.

"Yes, now. It's too big to hide. Come on!" I grabbed Eric's hand and pulled and he stood up for me.

"You haven't gift-wrapped Jason or anything, have you Sookie?" Eric grumbled, as I dragged him out the front door, with Amelia and Felicia trailing behind me.

"No! Jesus, Eric. I wouldn't even do that to Crystal."

It took Eric a moment to figure out that the present was still on the back of the ute. He was going to have to help Jason get it down. And carry it around the house. So it was kind of a do it yourself present. Still, I didn't think he'd mind.

"A new barbecue?" Eric said, when he worked out what I was gesturing to.

"Yeah. A really flash one. With the hood and everything. Do you like it?" I hadn't known what to buy him, he's really crap to buy for.

"Yeah, yeah I do. Thank you" Eric bent down and kissed me. I could hear Amelia saying "At least Rocco's mum didn't make him do _that_!" but I had no idea what that meant. I guessed I'd find out later.

"There's a bit of an ulterior motive of course" I said, when we broke apart. "Because, you know, we need it for tomorrow, so you can cook the lamb roast, so you know, Merry Christmas!"

"I'm cooking the lamb roast?"

"Well it's not going to fit in the oven. Not with the chickens and the potatoes and the veges and stuff…" It was going to be a tight squeeze as it was.

"Um, how much food are we doing, Sookie?"

"Not that much! But there's going to be a lot of people here. So, you know…" I trailed off. I'd worried I was under-catering so I'd added some dishes, then I'd worried I was over-catering, so I'd trimmed it back. But then I'd remembered what Gran used to do and I'd worried I was under-catering again. At the very least, we should have some good left-overs for Boxing Day.

"OK, well I guess you know what you're doing. Don't go over-board though, will you?"

"No, no. I'm all under-control." Well that was a bald-faced lie, but Eric didn't need to know everything, did he? I was completely out of control, I was slightly worried about getting everything done in the rest of the day. But I didn't need Eric telling me I was being silly and no one would care whether they ate or not. It would end up like the time he pointed out the sign on the side of the KFC on Dominion Road which said they were opening at midday on Christmas Day. Telling me we had that as a back-up plan was not what I needed to hear. He has no clue sometimes. And he thinks he's really funny, when plainly, he's not.

Eric was obviously itching to get to his present because he jogged down the front steps and over to where Jason was opening the back of the ute so they could get it down. I left the pair of them to it and started to walk back into the house to get lunch. Amelia and Felicia started going in the opposite direction, keen to see the barbecue being moved. I heard Amelia say to Felicia "Well, he won't go now, will he? He's got that. I bet Rocco's mum doesn't have _any_ toys at her house. Not good ones, anyway."

I realised I was going to have find out what the story was with Rocco's mum, I couldn't even picture her, but just as I stepped in the front door I heard a horn toot and when I turned around, Jason was lifting an arm in greeting to an old station-wagon that had just pulled up, it's roof rack laden down with all sorts of stuff.

Crystal and her kids had obviously just arrived.

**Thanks for reading!**


	27. Chapter 27

**A/N Look at this! Just like it used to be! You didn't even know I was gone, did you?**

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

SPOV

I turned around on the spot and walked back down the front steps to go and say hello to Crystal. Amelia asked me loudly who that was, and I hissed "Crystal" to her, as I walked past. Eric and Jason were trying to lift the barbecue off the ute and kind of occupied. Eric especially, as he currently seemed to be taking most of the weight.

"You guys OK?" I asked, as I got to them. "Yeah" Eric sort of grunted at me, so I left them to it.

"Hi!" I called out to Crystal, who had got out of the car, but seemed to be saying something to the kids in the back.

"Oh, hi Sookie" she said, looking at me. "We made it. Finally. No thanks to this lot." She hunched down again and said something into the car that I didn't get. Probably because it was all in Maori.

This was going to be interesting.

Crystal opened the back door and three kids climbed out, with a certain amount of pushing and shoving and dirty looks. I guessed they'd spent a lot of time in that car over the last couple of days and were probably a bit over it all.

Crystal hustled them over to me and introduced them. "This is Aroha, she's 5, and Tama he's 6…"

"I'm 7" Tama interjected.

"Yeah, same diff" Crystal continued. "And this is Wayne of course."

"I'm 10" Wayne added, staring at me. Tama and Aroha just looked around.

"And this is Sookie, Jason's sister, and her kids Amelia and Felicia" Crystal gestured to Amelia and Felicia had arrived behind me to watch the proceedings. The kids all looked at one another for a bit. "We've got a tent" Amelia said in the end.

"Yeah, that's Jason's tent. We've seen it" Tama said.

Amelia looked a bit flummoxed, and then she brightened. "Do you want to see the trampoline?"

Aroha nodded and Amelia led her and Tama around the back of the house, with Felicia trailing in their wake. I could hear Jason yell "Hold on a minute" so it sounded as though the barbecue was still in transit.

Crystal looked at me and said, "I just need to ask Jason something" and she took off after the kids, calling "Jase! Jase, do I need to get…"

And that left me and Wayne. Wayne looked me up and down. "You've got a funny name" he said to me.

"Yeah, I guess" I agreed.

"Jason doesn't."

"Nope."

"Maybe your parents liked him more, eh?"

I shrugged. "Or maybe they liked him less?"

Wayne thought for a bit, and then he gave a brief laugh. "Ha, you're funny, lady. Like your name. I'll just call you Auntie, I think, eh? I got heaps of Aunties, and it's hard to keep track of youse all."

"OK, that should be…fine then" I guess I'd been called worse things than Auntie. "Do you want to come inside?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fuckin' sick of the car, eh? And The Warehouse. Mum wouldn't let me buy anything decent while we were there; I had to watch that the other kids didn't wander off. That fuckin' sucks, eh?"

I just nodded and started to walk into the house. I wasn't sure what Crystal's policy was on kids swearing but he wasn't really mine to discipline. Plus he'd fit right in at our house.

"You got food?" Wayne asked as we walked in the front door.

"Yeah, I'm about to get lunch ready."

"Choice. I'm fuckin' starvin' eh?" He looked out onto the deck. "What are those fullas doin'?"

"Oh, putting the new barbecue on the deck."

"Wow, that's a choice barbecue, eh Auntie?"

"Yeah, it is" I agreed, starting to grab stuff out of the fridge. "I picked it."

"Your old man didn't mind?" Wayne asked me, sitting down on one of the barstools.

"Um…it was a Christmas present…for, um…Eric…"

"What'd he get you?"

"Um, I don't know. I guess I'll find out."

"Yeah, Jase got Mum a new vacuum. It looks like a spaceship. She thinks it's fuckin' awesome eh? But she wasn't happy when Jase used it to vacuum the ute. He shoulda used the old one for that. It was worse than the time he used the towels."

"Towels?"

"Yeah. Mum got new towels. From The Warehouse. And Jase, well he used one, eh? After he'd been working on the engine for the old ute. Shit, Mum was fuckin' pissed off eh? Like really pissed off. More than when I put that hole in her tyre 'cos I was testing how sharp the axe was, eh? I thought she was goin' to give Jase a real hidin'; she had the frypan and everything. But after a while the yelling stopped and they disappeared into the bedroom and I didn't see them for ages. I had to get the little kids their tea, eh?"

"OK." I said. Wow, that was probably way more information about Jason and Crystal's relationship than I really wanted. "Um, I'm just going out to the freezer in the garage to get some bread rolls out, I'll be back in a minute" I said to Wayne.

He hopped off the stool. "I'll come with you, Auntie. I can carry some stuff for you, if you want, eh? Even Jase says I'm pretty useful, most of the fuckin' time. Sometimes he says I'm a bloody menace, but I think he's just jokin', eh?"

"Probably."

When Wayne and I got back to the kitchen I could see the barbecue now had pride of place on the deck, and I went out to admire it. I could hear Amelia yelling "NO Felicia! It's not your turn to jump" so it seemed she was having trouble controlling her sister. I just hoped they were all getting on.

"So is it alright?" I asked Eric.

"Yeah, it's great. Although I guess we'll know tonight, after I burn everything." I laughed and Eric put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my hair. Then Wayne appeared in front of us.

"Oh, Wayne. This is Eric. My partner." I didn't look up but I could just bet Eric was rolling his eyes at that.

"Hi Wayne" Eric said.

Wayne just frowned at him. "Have you got a gun?" he asked Eric.

"Um…no…" Eric replied slowly.

"I do, eh? Well, I'm getting it for Christmas. My koroua is gonna get me an air rifle."

"OK" Eric said slowly, obviously not sure what else to say.

"You want me to do anythin' else Auntie?" Wayne said to me. "I can get the little kids, eh?"

"Oh, if you want. Tell them lunch is ready…" Wayne had already taken off down the steps. "Hey, you lot! Get your arses over here, eh? Don't you keep Auntie waiting or she'll give youse all a hidin'."

I looked at Eric, who was looking at me frowning. "Of course I wouldn't!" I said. Then I peered over to the trampoline to see if Amelia and Felicia were coping with being told to come inside. Amelia seemed to have stopped talking and looked a bit shocked. I didn't blame her.

Jason and Crystal came back in the front door, having established exactly what they needed to get out of Crystal's car and we all sat down to lunch. It was a bit crowded around the table, we'd had to extend it all the way out and bring in an extra chair, and it was going to be worse the next day.

Lunch seemed to go alright, although Wayne kept asking me if he could pass me anything, and in between that glaring at Eric. I asked Crystal how her drive had gone and she told me enough to make the thought of three kids in a car less than appealing.

"You're from the States, eh Eric?" Wayne asked.

"Yeah" Eric said between mouthfuls. I wasn't sure whether he was too busy eating or just couldn't be bothered elaborating. Knowing him, it was probably the latter. He was economical with his history.

"You goin' back there?"

"No. I live here" Eric said, reaching for another roll.

"Oh. But it must be better there, eh? More shops and stuff, although most shops are borin', but you know. There's famous people, and um…cool cars and stuff…"

Eric shrugged. "I like it here. My family's here."

Wayne wasn't going to give up that easily though. "Really? 'Cos I think it would be better, there, eh? My dad went back, to Aussie, 'cos it was better there."

"Your dad is bloody koretake" Crystal muttered.

"Fuckin' Aussies. They're nowhere" Jason added.

I glared at Jason, as I couldn't really do much about Crystal's decision to slag off Wayne's dad, but Jason was too busy trying to move the container with the slices of roast beef farther away from Eric to notice me.

"I had another daddy" Amelia piped up, having noticed an opportunity to talk about herself. "He's in heaven, and he was sad to leave me."

Wayne shrugged. "My dad was sad to leave the telly, eh? But Mum made him."

I noticed Eric's eyes sort of slide towards Wayne at that point but I couldn't figure out what he was thinking.

"Least I bloody deserved" Crystal muttered. "And that was after I'd taken him back."

Wayne just glared at his mum, and, to be honest, I couldn't blame him. "I still think it would be better in the States, eh?" he grumbled.

"Definitely not" Eric said, shaking his head and looking around for where the roast beef had ended up. He grabbed the container back and handed a slice to Felicia for her to chew on, before making himself another roll.

After lunch I persuaded Eric and Jason to take the kids to the park, which they moaned about because it was going to be too hot, but they did anyway. Wayne elected to stay behind though, saying that he was 'too bloody old for kid's stuff, eh?".

I made a cup of tea for Crystal and I and we sat in the living room. "Thanks for having us, Sookie. I know it's a bit much…but, Jason got it in his head that he wanted to see you on the way up North and now you're kind of stuck with us."

"Oh, it's fine. It's nice to have some family around."

"I think we scare Eric a bit though, eh?" Crystal said laughing.

"Yeah…um. Well he's not really used to a lot of family." I didn't really want to go there with Crystal.

"I did wonder" Crystal said. "'Cos there was none of Eric's whanau at the wedding. Could they not make it over?"

Ah, yeah. What did I say to that? "Well, Eric's only got his dad and he's um…not very well, so the flight would have been a bit much for him." And the flight attendants might have sued.

"No brothers or sisters?" Crystal asked frowning.

"He's an only child" I said. This was true. Probably. Let's hope his mum didn't have any more kids she abandoned.

"Wow, that's just weird, isn't it?" Crystal said. "I mean, I'm one of seven and then there's all the cousins and my half-siblings and stuff. Shit, I can't imagine being the only one."

"Yeah, it would be odd. Although, you know Jason. It's not like I never thought about it!" Crystal laughed and we moved onto other topics.

After a while I wondered where Wayne had gone. Crystal had headed off to sort out the sleeping arrangements in the tent and I was trying to organise the food for dinner, when I heard Crystal say "Were you supposed to be doing that, Wayne?"

I went out the front to find Wayne standing by Eric's car, which appeared to be covered in most of my dishwashing liquid. OK.

"I was just being nice!" Wayne protested. "Oh, Auntie" he said, when he saw me. "I washed your car, eh?" He gave me a broad smile, and held the bottle of dishwashing liquid up. Yeah, that was mostly gone.

"Um" I said. "Um, that's Eric's car, actually…"

Wayne's face fell. "Well that fuckin' sucks" he said.

"Wayne! Language! And what the hell were you doing anyway?"

"Washing the car! For Auntie. Jeez, I was just tryin' to be helpful. You always tell me to try to be helpful."

"How is that helpful?" Crystal asked, pointing to the smears of dishwashing liquid.

"Um, let's just get the hose" I said, going round the side of the house to grab it and hoping that would break the stand-off between Wayne and Crystal. They were worse than Amelia and I.

We'd just finished hosing the car off when Jason, Eric and the rest of the kids arrived back. "What's happening?" Eric asked, spying the fact that his car was dripping water onto the drive.

"Oh, um, Wayne washed your car…" I said, not really sure why Wayne had had the idea in the first place. Wayne was sitting on the grass and had been watching me hose all the dishwashing liquid off.

"OK. Well, thanks Wayne" Eric said.

"Yeah. No problem" Wayne muttered. "But I still think they'd have better cars in the States, though eh?"

I didn't know whether Eric didn't hear that comment or just chose to ignore it, but he just turned and walked into the house with Amelia and Felicia. Amelia was asking if he could spray her with the hose.

Tama and Aroha walked over to Wayne. "Why'd you wash that lady's car? " Aroha asked Wayne.

Wayne shrugged. "Tryin' to be nice, eh? "

Tama looked at him. "You're a dumb hori, sometimes" he said.

"Shut up!" Wayne replied. "You're a bloody dick, eh?"

"Alright!" Jason said loudly. "No more of that. Now get inside."

Boy, Jason had his hands full. The kids trudged into the house and Jason followed. He stopped beside me and bent down, "I think you got a fan, eh Sook?" he said, giving me a wink. What?

EPOV

It was a bit odd with Crystal's kids here. Really fucking odd if you asked me. They weren't what I was used to at all, and they really weren't what Amelia was used to. She spent a lot of time complaining that Tama and Aroha wouldn't play according to the rules. Amelia had a lot of rules and she really didn't like it if you didn't follow them.

She was so like Sookie it wasn't funny.

But fuck knows who Crystal's kids were like. They were loud and they were kind of wild. Maybe it was because they lived on a farm. I couldn't tell.

And that Wayne kid was developing a bit of an obsession with Sookie.

Luckily there were no more incidents in the afternoon, the kids got on, for the most part, although there were some tears from Amelia when Aroha told her that her idea for a tea party was 'stink', but she got over it. She was just used to being in charge around here and it was a bit of a shock to find there'd been a coup staged by a bunch of outsiders.

Felicia just spent a lot of time watching the big kids. She was probably picking up ideas for later on.

Dinner time was my chance to try out my new Christmas present. I hoped like fuck I didn't ruin dinner in the process. It had taken me a while to get the hang of the last barbecue, which was now languishing around the side of the house. This one was a hell of a lot fancier.

Jason watched me as I cooked, holding a beer and talking away. "Thanks for having us, eh Eric" he said. "'specially Wayne, he's a bit of a fuckwit sometimes that kid."

I shrugged. "He's OK."

"Yeah, he just doesn't know when to stop, eh? But he seems fond of Sook."

"Yeah. Yeah, he does" I said, turning the steaks over and adding the sausages.

"I think she's been fuckin' sneaking him mince pies when we're not looking." I looked at Jason and he burst out laughing. "Fuck, sorry. I keep fuckin' eating them" Jason said, without sounding that apologetic. "But they're good, eh?"

"Yeah, they are." I agreed.

The steak was only slightly burnt by the time I was through with it. No one complained at least. Hopefully I wouldn't do the same thing to the lamb roast on Christmas day. I wasn't sure I really wanted the responsibility of cooking part of the lunch, but from what I could tell there was going to be so much other food that probably we weren't going to starve to death if I did ruin it.

I just hoped Sookie was coping OK with her responsibilities. She was starting to look a little bit stressed. I was just fucking glad I didn't have to assemble a trampoline this year. And I hoped I wasn't assembling anything else.

After dinner there was a bit of a log-jam for the bathroom with all the kids. I took Amelia and Felicia into the ensuite and put them under the shower. Felicia was very confused about the whole thing "Bath?" she asked me.

"Not tonight. You're having a shower like a big person" I told her.

"She's not a big person!" Amelia told me. "She's just little."

"Big enough for a shower" I said. "I don't think she'll go down the drain at any rate."

Amelia looked at the drain thoughtfully, then at her sister. "No, probably not."

"So, um, do you like having company here?" I asked them.

"They're loud!" Amelia said, loudly.

"'omp'ny?" Felicia asked.

"Other kids" I explained, reaching for the shampoo.

"'s'alright" Felicia said, as I put shampoo on Amelia's head. "Not goin'?" she asked me.

"They go after Christmas" I explained.

"She means you" Amelia said with her eyes screwed shut.

"Oh. No, I'm not going." I rinsed Amelia's hair out before adding shampoo to Felicia's hair.

"Noooo Daddy!" Felicia yelled as I tried to rinse her hair out. Yeah, she didn't like the water, and at that moment, she probably wouldn't have minded me leaving her alone.

We got the kids into bed , with only a few threats that Santa wouldn't come if they didn't go straight to sleep, and then I sat in the living room with Jason and Crystal and her kids while they watched some family movie on TV. I tried to get Sookie to sit down too, but she wasn't buying it. She was in the kitchen fussing over something.

About 8 o'clock a car pulled up. "Who's here?" Tama asked Jason.

"Dunno" Jason said, looking at me.

"It'll be Calvin" I said, going out the front to help him. We'd had him build a playhouse for the girls, and all he had to do tonight was assemble it in the back garden. Well that was my plan. Calvin's plan apparently involved me helping him, but at least I only had to hold the walls up. Jason's plan involved standing around watching us and drinking beer.

When that was completed Calvin went home and I tried to prise Sookie out of the kitchen again, she still wasn't budging. And she kept shooing Crystal away as well, telling her to 'just go and sit down, I don't have much to do'. Yeah, like fuck she didn't.

Tama and Aroha had been put to bed and only Wayne was left watching TV. "Who was that fulla?" he asked me.

"Calvin. He'll be here tomorrow too."

"Oh, what was he doing here?"

"Delivering the playhouse that Santa is giving Amelia and Felicia. He built it."

Wayne frowned. "It's from Santa? But that guy made it. So it can't be, eh? That's just dumb."

"No, it's really not dumb" I said, probably a bit harsher than I intended. "Amelia and Felicia still believe in Santa and if you do anything to ruin that for them I will be very, very pissed off."

Wayne just looked at me, and blinked a few times. "Jeez, you're a weird bloke, eh? There's no need to get all annoyed and shit, I know how to keep a bloody secret, eh?"

"Well please keep that one. In this house we still have Santa."

"Yeah, yeah. I get ya, eh? Right, I'm off to bed, see youse fullas in the morning." I heard him go into the kitchen and say "Goodnight, Auntie!" to Sookie and then the front door opened and closed.

Jason and Crystal arrived after a bit with a pile of presents for their kids and found a spot near the tree for them. And then Sookie finally came out of the kitchen long enough to spend a bit of time chatting with them. Of course she was wrapping presents as she talked. I was as well, I had Felicia's pile and she had Amelia's. I hadn't realised all the stuff that had been stored under the bed for Santa to give them. Once we had it all wrapped and piled up in and around their pillowcases it was hard not to compare it to the amount that Crystal's kids were getting.

It was going to be noticeable, but there wasn't much I could do about that now.

Eventually Jason and Crystal drifted back to the tent and Sookie took off again. She was back in the kitchen.

"You, um, haven't got your present yet" I asked.

"What?" she said, looking up from the recipe book she was peering into.

"I was going to give you one present tonight. You know, like we did last year."

"Oh. Oh, OK. I'd better find one for you to open too then" she turned around and dried her hands on a towel.

"No, it's OK. I got the barbecue."

"You sure?" I nodded. "How is it, anyway?" she asked.

"It's great. I love it. I'll cook all of Christmas lunch for you, if you like."

"Yeah…wish you could. I'll be fine though." She gave a little smile that wasn't really one. She just looked really tired.

"So, um, anyway. Here's yours" I said, pushing the gift across the counter to her.

"Thank you" Sookie said, smiling a little bit more warmly, before she opened it. "Panties?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I didn't get you any last year, so you know…" it had seemed like a good idea at the time. A sort of in-joke. But now she looked tired and stressed and not at all like she wanted to run off and put them on for me.

"Yeah, you didn't. I seem to remember I was promised them for my birthday too, and they never arrived."

I shrugged again, and walked around to her side of the counter. "Well, you know, you weren't really good enough" I whispered in her ear, and she giggled, just a bit.

"Thank you" she said again. "I'm sure they'll be very...um, handy." Then she bit her lip and stared at the counter-top. "But, um, maybe not tonight? I, um, have a lot to do and just…well, yeah…" she trailed off and looked up at me.

"That's OK. And I'll help."

"You sure?"

"'Course. I said I wanted to hang out with you this morning."

"Yeah, but I'm not naked. Or even wearing my panties."

"That's OK. I like you anyway. As does Wayne" I said.

"Yeah, he's a nice kid…" Sookie frowned. "Sort-of. He's a bit odd. And he keeps trying to be really helpful. Here, you can chop up the oranges for the fruit salad."

I got out a chopping board and a knife. "He's got a crush on you is why, Sookie" I said, starting to peel an orange.

"Really?" she asked, frowning.

"Yep. He keeps looking at your boobs when he thinks no one's looking."

"Euw! Eric, he's 10!"

"I don't think he knows he's 10. I think, maybe, he's had…well it seems as though he's had to grow up fast."

Sookie glanced up at me quickly, and I just looked at the orange. I thought Wayne was fucking weird. But I could kind of see where he was coming from.

"Yeah…" Sookie said thoughtfully, but she obviously decided to let the matter drop. "So, um, what was the story with Rocco's mum this morning?"

"Oh. I don't really know. I think Amelia was still upset about the advent calendar or something because she kept telling her to go away when she was talking to me. Something about Rocco not having a dad and them trying to steal me. I don't really know. I mean, I think she wanted to ask the girls to go to the park with Rocco, but Amelia wasn't buying that one. She was really rude."

"She asked you guys on a playdate?"

"Well, she asked me where the closest park was, and I said the one near daycare, which she probably knew about. But it never got further than that."

Sookie laughed. "I think she was trying to flirt with you, Eric."

I frowned. "But I was with the kids."

"Well, she was with Rocco. Having kids doesn't stop you wanting to date you know" she pulled a face at me.

I thought for a bit. "So is that why you asked me to the zoo that day then?"

"What for a playdate?"

"No, to flirt with me, or…whatever." I was a bit lost about how this all worked. I mean, I got the whole picking someone up in a bar, that was always pretty obvious, but how you hooked up when kids were around was a bit different. Even though I'd somehow managed it. Or maybe Sookie had.

Sookie laughed. "No, I just felt sorry for you, all hungover and alone. I couldn't let you wander around New Zealand by yourself."

"You didn't want to have sex with me?"

"Well, maybe just a little bit. But probably not at the zoo."

"Yeah, probably not the best choice." We were silent for a bit and then I thought of something else. "Speaking of animals, what was the story with the rat?"

"Oh, Jason found it on the lawn this morning. It was missing some, er, parts. Anyway, he got rid of it for us, but he was really impressed with Bob for being such a good hunter. And Bob really likes boiled egg."

"OK, so I didn't miss much then."

"Just a decapitated rodent by the camellia, so no."

"Cool."

I cut up a couple more oranges, and then some pineapple, while Sookie watched and I could see that she was itching to tell me I was doing it wrong, but she bit her lip and managed to keep quiet.

When I'd finished the pineapple I looked over at her. "What's next" I asked.

"That's it, I think" Sookie replied. "Just let me check through my list." She picked up a piece of paper that seemed to have a very long list of stuff on it, crossed a couple of things off and then said "No, we're good, it's bedtime."

"Good, because I'm fucking tired. I didn't sleep a wink last night in that stupid tent."

Sookie turned off the kitchen light and laughed. "Oh, you did too. You were snoring really loudly when we all got up. Honestly, we all sat there and had a big discussion about why Daddy was making that noise and it still didn't wake you up."

"Well…you spent half the night wriggling around and keeping me awake" I protested.

"I moved around? Jeez, every time you breathed the whole airbed moved, Eric. It was like going to sleep on a raft. _And _I was on an angle thanks to you. My head was way higher than my bum. Most disconcerting."

"I don't find your, er, bum, disconcerting at all. I like your bum" I said, giving it a pat. "And I'll look forward to seeing it in those panties."

"Oh crap, hang on" Sookie sprinted back to the kitchen and arrived back in the bedroom with the panties. "Best not to leave them lying around."

"No" I agreed.

"But, um, maybe we'll save them. Three more nights" she said, pulling out her pyjamas.

"Until we're alone again?" I asked. It was like the kids counting down to Christmas, only I had three more sleeps until I got rid of the tent in the front yard. And it's occupants.

"No, until we try. You know." Sookie looked over at me.

"Oh, yeah." I did know. And I was really fucking looking forward to it.

**Tama is pronounced Tar-mar and Aroha A-row-har.**

**Koroua is pronounced Core-roo-ah and means grandfather.**

**Koretake is pronounced Cor-ah-tar-kee and means useless.**

**Hori is pronounced Hor-ee. It's the Maori version of the name George and a derogatory name for Maori generally.**

**But of course I am in no way an expert on the Maori language.**

**And for those of you who don't really get what Wayne (and his siblings) might sound like, try watching the trailer for the NZ film Boy. **

**http:/ www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=RwqfR8g-Qow**

**Thanks for reading!**


	28. Chapter 28

**A/N I was going to try and do all of Christmas day, but thought I might split it up so I can post this bit now while it's finished. And before my now cruising baby is successful in getting her hands on the laptop. If there are any typos, blame her!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I only own stuff the baby is trying to steal.**

SPOV

I was happily asleep, enjoying lying in a bed in which I didn't rock about every time Eric decided to shift his weight around, when the whispering woke me up.

"Mum…Mum!" Amelia hissed, near my head.

"What?" I asked, a bit confused. I expected shouting from Amelia, but not the whispering. Usually if it was up time, it was up time and she expected us all to get with the program.

"Santa's been" Amelia whispered, "but he brought stuff for the other kids too. Why?"

"Oh, because they're here. You know. Santa can figure out where you are so he can deliver the presents." I sat up, having thrown Eric's arm off me. He was managing to sleep through the conversation again. He was really good at that.

"Yeah, but it doesn't seem…right. There isn't room for us all. Can we make them go back to the tent?"

Amelia looked at me expectantly, and I registered that I could hear excited noises from the living room. OK, I thought, so Crystal's kids had got there first and Amelia felt pushed out. It was hard, it was her house of course but we had guests. And sometimes you just had to put up with stuff, in the knowledge that they weren't here forever.

But when you're four, of course, a few days seem like forever.

"No, sweetie" I said in the end, "They're having Christmas with us and this is part of it. They'll be off on holiday in a few days."

Amelia just frowned. Felicia had been quiet but she was busy trying to haul herself onto the bed using Eric's leg as a handle. It wasn't easy as she was clutching Sockie as well. Eventually he rolled over and held out his hand to her so she could get on the bed. "Santa!" she said cheerfully, sitting down on Eric's chest. She didn't seem to be as worried about the situation in the living room as Amelia did.

"OK, well let me just get myself a bit organised then and we'll go out and open some presents!" I said trying to be upbeat.

Amelia climbed onto the bed as I climbed out and as I walked to the bathroom I could hear her saying to Eric "They didn't leave us any room! Go out there and tell them." Poor Eric, he'd spent all morning the day before negotiating the finalisation of the advent calendar, and now Amelia wanted him to go and petition for her rights to a piece of the living room floor.

I briefly wondered if, when she saw the playhouse, she'd expect Eric to draw up a time-share contract for her and Felicia.

Once I'd finished in the bathroom, I pulled on a t-shirt and some yoga pants and Eric had his turn. Amelia was still sulking on the bed, while Felicia was now hanging around the door, curious about what was going on elsewhere in the house. I didn't think she was quite as worried about the intrusion as Amelia was.

We finally made it into the living room to find it awash with wrapping paper and Crystal's kids all looking a bit hyped up. Jason looked a bit grumpy. 'Oh, there you are, eh" he said. "You guys sleep really late around here. And it's Christmas too."

"Jeez, Jason! It's only, what? Quarter to 7" I said, glancing at the clock. Jason didn't look appeased by that, but didn't say anything else.

Wayne waved at me though. "I saved you a seat next to me, eh Auntie" he said, trying to push Tama out of the way.

"Watch it!" Tama said in response.

"Um, I'm good" I said. I turned to Amelia and Felicia who were lagging behind me "Hey, let's see what Santa brought!" I said, trying to muster up some enthusiasm.

Felicia headed over to the piles and looked at them. "That's yours" Amelia said, pointing to her pillowcase. Felicia shrugged and sat down and started ripping off the paper. She was a lot better at it this year, I suspected she wasn't going to be left behind by Amelia at all.

Amelia frowned at her pile, and then started moving it towards the door, so she was further away from everyone else. I noticed that as Felicia was better at unwrapping this year, Amelia was getting more careful about the whole process. And after she unwrapped each thing, she'd run off to her bedroom and pile it on the bed, far away from prying eyes and sticky fingers.

Felicia reached the bottom of her pillowcase and pulled out a key. She glanced at it briefly, then put it on the ground and went back to the toolset. Eric and I stood watching and waiting for Amelia to get to the same point. Crystal was trying to clear up the wrapping paper from earlier and Jason had gone to put the jug on as he was, apparently, parched. Crystal's kids seemed to be having a fight by the Christmas tree, except for Wayne, who was just watching me. Maybe Eric was right about him.

After a few more trips to her bedroom to stash her loot, Amelia finally dug around the bottom of her pillowcase. "A key?" she asked, pulling it out.

"Yeah, maybe it opens something" Eric said.

"What?" Amelia looked confused.

"Did you get a key?" I asked Felicia.

"Huh?" she said, looking up from her toy drill. "A key" I said again.

"Oh, OK" Felicia said, going back to more exciting things.

"I don't know what it's for" Amelia said, completely confused now. She ran off to her bedroom to obviously try to work it out. "Oh, uh…" I said, but she was gone.

I looked at Eric. "You get that one" I said, pointing to Felicia, "And I'll get the other. I'll see you on the deck."

"Hey Amelia" I said, walking into her room where she was re-arranging presents in search of whatever it was that needed a key. "I think the key might fit something outside."

"No. No why would that be? Santa put my presents in the living room. It must be here somewhere." She kept searching.

"Well, shall we look outside?" I asked.

"You go, I'll stay here and look."

I sighed. "It might be more fun if we go together."

"Oh, alright then" Amelia huffed. "But I don't want anyone to touch my presents while I'm out there."

"They'll be fine" I assured her.

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Maybe I should take them with me?" she started scooping things up.

"No, they're fine! Just leave them and come with me" I heard a squeal from the family room and I guessed that Felicia has spied the playhouse. If Amelia wasn't careful Felicia would get there first. "Come on" I said, walking out of the room and hoping Amelia would follow me.

Amelia trudged down the hallway after me, but sped up a bit when she could see Felicia squirming in Eric's arms on the deck and shouting "'ouse! 'ouse!"

"What's she doing?" Amelia asked, pushing past me. "OH!" she shouted. "It's a house! Is it mine? Did Santa bring it? For me?"

"Santa must have brought it. For BOTH of you" Eric said, putting Felicia down on the deck.

Amelia took off down the steps and across the lawn with Felicia in hot pursuit. Amelia yanked the door open and there were general excited squeals from inside the house. Calvin had made a couple of little chairs and a small table for the inside and apparently it met with the kids' approval.

"Well, that was a success" I said to Eric.

"Yeah, Calvin did a good job…I think" Eric said, looking at it critically. It was only a playhouse so I figured it would do.

The other three kids drifted out onto the deck to see what was going on. "What's that?" Aroha asked me.

"A playhouse. Santa brought it for them" I replied.

"Really?" she asked. "Santa brings big stuff like that?"

"Um, sometimes…" I said, realising that my kids were quite spoiled compared to Crystal's.

"It wouldn't fit though, eh?" Tama said.

"Don't be a dumb-arse!" Wayne said from behind Tama. "Santa didn't bring it, eh?"

"He didn't?" Tama asked.

"Nah, it was that other fulla, eh? The one that was here last night…" Wayne stopped talking and I followed his gaze to where Eric was staring him down. Eric's face was thunderous.

"Wayne, what did you and I discuss last night?" Eric said, very slowly and carefully. Yeah, he sounded really pissed off.

"Oh yeah, I forgot. Sorry, eh?" Wayne said, looking suitably chastened.

"Well please try very hard to remember from now on" Eric said, looking down at Wayne until Wayne decided it was better to look at the deck. Eric turned to me "Come on, they're happy, let's go and get you your gifts now."

"OK" I said. Eric walked back into the house and I glanced back at Wayne just in time to see him stick his tongue out at Eric's back. He saw me looking and grinned at me.

I stuck my head into the kitchen to check that Crystal and Jason were finding everything for their own breakfast. Jason had the container with the chopped up pineapple open and was picking at it. "No!" I said to him. "Put that back, it's for the fruit salad."

"Jeez Sook, I just had a bit" Jason put the lid back on the container and returned it to the fridge. Crystal, who'd been busy buttering some toast was chuckling to herself. She was probably glad Jason was raiding someone else's fridge for a change.

Jason was still peering into the fridge though. "Hey, Sook" he said. "Where's the pav?"

"What?" I asked.

"The pav" Jason repeated, shutting the fridge door. "Where's the pavlova? There has to be one and you won't really have time to make one today."

"What's wrong?" Eric asked, having come to find out why I wasn't in the living room.

"There's no fuckin' pavlova, eh?" Jason said. "It won't be Christmas."

"No pavlova?" Eric asked me, frowning.

"Oh, for goodness' sake you two! The world doesn't end if we don't have pavlova at Christmas" I said.

"It might, you don't know" Jason grumbled. "Do you think they'd have one at the dairy?"

I sighed. "Judith is bringing the pavlova. She's making it."

"Oh. Oh well that's alright then" Jason said, looking relieved. I glanced at Eric, he looked a bit relieved as well. Then Jason frowned again. "But does she make them properly, Sook? Like not too soft or anything? 'Cos it has to be crunchy, eh?"

"Jason, you'll take it how it comes and like it, OK? And no more pinching the fruit out of the fridge."

"OK" Jason said.

"Don't worry, I'll keep an eye on him for you!" Crystal said cheerfully, passing him a cup of tea.

"Come on, presents while it's quiet" Eric said, grabbing my arm and dragging me back to the living room. It looked like a cyclone had hit it, and that was with most of the wrapping paper having already been cleared away.

Eric dug around under the tree and made me a little pile of gifts. "You first" he said.

"Can't we open them at the same time?" I asked.

"No, I want to watch you."

"OK."

I opened the first gift. It was some kind of carving with fantails in a tree. "Oh, it's lovely" I said.

"It's a jewellery stand" Eric said "You know, for your necklace and stuff. When you take them off at night."

"Oh, it is too, that's really clever." It was beautiful just as an object really. Next up was a whole bunch of shower gels and moisturisers, most of them labelled things like Cinnamon Buns, Sugar Frosting, and Vanilla Spice.

"Do I smell?" I asked Eric.

He shrugged and then chuckled, when I pretended to look grumpy. I guess I was going to smell like food then.

I reached for another present, but didn't open it. "I feel like it should be your turn now" I said to Eric, and I crawled over to the tree and grabbed one of his presents. "Open this" I said to him.

I'd bought him one of those desktop weather stations. He was always moaning about the weather and the inaccurate forecasting, so I thought it would keep him occupied. I tended to just look out the window to get my weather information, but that was me. Eric seemed pleased with it, and got it out so he could push all the buttons and change the temperature to Fahrenheit so he could understand it.

Next up was something for my new kitchen. I'd said to Eric that now that I had nice new painted walls I wanted something to hang on there. So he'd bought me an art print that said 'Home is where the Heart is'.

"That's very cool" I said, when I opened it.

"You like it?" Eric asked. "I wasn't sure. I was tempted by the one that said 'If life gives you lemons, make a gin and tonic'. That seemed like you too."

I laughed. "Yeah, not far off. Well, it used to be. I'd kill for one about now, but I can't…you know."

Eric frowned. "Yeah, I guess you can't."

Eric opened his next present which was some New Zealand CDs, and then I handed him the final present. "A t-shirt?" he asked, pulling it out.

"Yep" I confirmed.

"Do I have to throw out an old one?" Eric asked.

"Um, well that's _always_ an option" I said. "Some of those t-shirts of yours are a bit cruddy."

"They are not…cruddy" Eric said, pulling a face at the term I'd used. "They're fine, Sookie."

I rolled my eyes. "So anyway, this is an additional t-shirt then. To add to the collection."

Eric held it up, "Is that a weta?" he asked me.

"Yep, you're the one that likes them. And it's made of merino so you can wear it in the winter, although how you can do that I don't know. I would freeze if I didn't wear long sleeves."

"You guys and your fascination with merino. It doesn't get that cold" Eric assured me.

"Well now you can figure out just how cold it is. Your new gadget will tell you. In whatever weird measurement you want to use."

"Thank you" Eric said, leaning over to kiss me.

I had one more present to open. It was a couple of the wedding pictures that Eric had had printed onto canvas. One was of us with the girls, and the other was a candid shot of Eric and I, just after he'd said something that I was laughing at. It probably wasn't the most flattering shot I'd ever seen of myself, but it was lovely all the same.

I crawled into Eric's lap and kissed him for a bit. That was nice. But then everyone started drifting back into the living room to join us. Crystal's kids had toast now and Amelia and Felicia were looking for breakfast and Amelia was keen to lay down some rules about the playhouse. "So, I can use it by myself, sometimes, can't I Mummy?" she asked.

"Well, only if no one wants to join you. Otherwise you have to share it. It's Felicia's too."

Amelia didn't say anything else, she just looked grumpy.

Eric went to make toast for us and we did the present-exchange thing with Crystal and Jason. It was getting kind of exhausting handing all this stuff over. I had bought them a basket of fancy food items, figuring they were going away and could use it, and some vouchers for Westfield shopping centres. Crystal looked pleased at those and tucked them away safely. The kids seemed pleased with the stuff I'd bought them, and Wayne came over to give me a hug, glaring at Jason who laughed at him as he did so.

They'd bought me some coffee mugs. They were nice enough, but they were a tiny floral pattern and had really thin handles, which I couldn't see Eric holding successfully. To be honest, they looked more like Gran's, or even Mum's taste, than mine. I suspected that Jason had bought them. He looked chuffed when I said how lovely they were.

I didn't see what they'd bought Eric as I wolfed down my toast and headed to the kitchen. I really needed to get a start on the food before the guests started arriving or I was going to be way behind. However, Eric called me back because there were more presents to open. He'd dug out the ones from the 'kids' now they were back in the room.

I'd had Amelia and Felicia make new pictures for Eric, which he liked, even though Amelia had written on hers 'My new daddy is very tall and talks funny sometimes. He is nice.' I'd helped her write it and just bitten my tongue, it was her story to tell.

In addition I'd let them loose in Kmart with some money each. Felicia had picked a socket set for Eric and couldn't be persuaded to change it. Eric was never going to need a socket set, but he was appreciative all the same. Amelia had initially wanted to buy him some socks, arguing that he needed to replace the pair that had become Sockie, but I'd talked her out of that. In the end she'd bought him some new barbecue tongs, which at least went with the present I'd got him.

I had new artwork as well, plus some new planter pots for the front door step, which was what I'd asked them for. I'd kind of thought I might get a matching pair, but I'd got one round blue one and one square red one, so I guessed Eric had let the kids pick themselves. They were nice though. I said thanks to everyone, and headed to the shower. I really needed to get a wriggle on.

I was about half-way through my shower when Eric appeared in the bathroom. "Are you hiding from the horde?" I asked him, and I came up from under the water.

"Yeah" he said. "Kind of. That Wayne kid keeps staring at me. It's a bit disconcerting."

"Mmm" I said, thoughtfully. "I don't think he means to be rude…"

"Yeah, not to you. He's fucking taken with you. Me, he hates."

"Well, hate is a strong word."

"He'd like me out of the way then. I'm just lucky he's not older" Eric grumbled.

I switched off the water and grabbed a towel. "What? You think I'd run off with Wayne?"

"I think Wayne thinks you'd run off with Wayne, and that's where the problem would lie."

I couldn't think what to say to that. He was 10. I felt Eric was reading a bit too much into it. I decided to change the subject. "So what did Crystal and Jason get you?" I asked.

"A shirt" Eric said, still sounding grumpy. "It's, um, a bit weird though."

"Weird in what way?" If Jason had picked it, it would be black I could tell that much.

"It's made out of the stuff you make sweats out of. And it's brown."

It dawned on me what they'd bought him. "You mean beige?" I asked, starting to get dressed.

"Whatever you call it, it's ugly" Eric said. "And it looks fucking small."

"Eric, it's supposed to be tight. It's a beige brigade shirt."

"A what?"

"A cricket shirt. Like our team used to wear, in the early 1980's."

"Why would I want a cricket shirt?"

"Um, so you can support the team. And anyway, it's a retro classic."

"So…it's an old shirt?"

"It's a replica."

"But it looks like an old shirt? An old, tasteless shirt?"

"It looks like a classic cricketing uniform, and don't insult it please." Eric just stood there looking at me. "I hope you said thank you" I said.

"Of course I did! I'm not a moron. It's just the…weirdest shirt I've ever owned."

"Well, at least it doesn't have holes in it. Now I have to dry my hair, so can you, um…" I tried to think of something for Eric to do, "Go and make sure that Jason isn't eating any of the mince pies? I need them for when Aunty Linda gets here."

"Yep, I'm on it" Eric said, leaving the bathroom in a hurry.

I got my hair dry and some makeup on in record time and then I yelled at Eric that it was his turn in the bathroom, before I tried to get Amelia and Felicia dressed. Amelia had, however, dressed herself. She was wearing a t-shirt with ladybugs all over it, in pastel shades of green, pink and blue. She'd teamed it with a skirt that had a large floral pattern in the same shades. It kind of matched, although the overall effect was a bit busy. I decided it would do.

Felicia wasn't buying a skirt. I managed to talk her into leggings and a t-shirt. That would have to do.

I was trying to get into the kitchen where Jason was currently making himself another cup of tea. It would have been useful if he didn't use a new, clean cup every time. I was going to have to wash a few before the rest of the guests got here. I wondered if that was why he'd bought me cups for my present.

Just as I got to the kitchen bench Wayne appeared at my side. "I got these for you, Auntie" he said, holding up a small bunch of flowers. Oh crap, I thought, those were the ones from Amelia's garden. She was going to be ropeable when she found out.

"Uh, thanks" I said, taking them off him. "They're lovely."

Wayne beamed at me. "I thought you'd like them, eh? Chicks always do. You want me to make you a cup of tea, Auntie?"

"No, I'm good" I said, poking a chicken to check it was defrosted.

"Oh, you, uh, want anything else?" Wayne asked hopefully.

"Nope, you can go and play, thanks" I said, getting out a roasting dish.

"I don't play, eh? I'm over that kid's stuff. I'm going pig huntin' when we get back home."

"No, you're fuckin' not" Jason muttered from the corner. "You're too young. Now bugger off and leave Sookie alone, she's busy."

Wayne glared at Jason, but did as he was asked.

Jason took a sip of his tea, but he seemed firmly entrenched in his spot in the kitchen. I pushed him along the bench, but he didn't take the hint and leave altogether. "You've got a fan there, eh Sook?" Jason said, grinning at me. "He's really sweet on you. It's fuckin' cute."

"It's, um…well it's a bit worrying" I said, tipping potatoes into a saucepan.

"Nah, it's nice. Wayne doesn't have a lot of friends, eh? And now he has you."

"Jason, I can't be friends with a 10 year old boy. Plus I think he's trying to get rid of Eric."

Jason laughed. "No chance. He spent ages trying to get rid of me, eh? And I didn't go." And then he stopped laughing and thought of something. "Although maybe he'll be better at it this time. Hope not for Eric's sake, eh?"

"Yeah…well. I think it would take more than Wayne to run him off. After all, Eric's used to you now."

"Ha ha, Sook." Jason just stood there watching me for a bit. Then we heard something outside. "Can you go and see if that's Aunty Linda?" I asked Jason. He didn't exactly seem to have anything else to do.

"Alright" Jason said reluctantly. He walked into the living room to peer out the front window. "Yeah, they're here" he yelled back. "I think it's still the same caravan too." He came walking back into the kitchen. "I'm surprised that thing hasn't fallen apart by now, caravan's are fuckin' notorious for being cheap and nasty" he continued.

"Yeah, um, do you want to let them in?" I asked him.

"Oh yeah, OK." He disappeared again, only to be replaced by Eric who suddenly appeared at my elbow. "There's a caravan outside" he said.

"Yeah, that's Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev" I said.

"Oh OK" Eric looked confused. He was really not coping with the invasion of the Stackhouses. I heard Aunty Linda at the front door saying "Merry Christmas, Jason love! Where's Crystal and the kids?" and washed my hands before going to greet her.

I noticed Eric didn't follow me. He busied himself with the coffee maker and to be honest, I couldn't blame him. I had a brief moment of wondering what the hell I had let myself in for and then I stepped forward to find myself enveloped in one of Aunty Linda's hugs.

**Links (I'll put them on my profile too)**

**Sookie's jewellery stand - **

**http:/www (dot) kina (dot) co (dot) nz/product (dot) asp?id=7814**

**Sookie's print - **

**http:/www (dot) kina (dot) co(dot) nz/product (dot) asp?id=8156**

**Eric's weta t-shirt -**

**http:/www (dot) billitees (dot) co (dot) nz****/mens/merino-and-sweatshirting/wlygdteeweta (dot) html**

**Beige brigade shirt -**

**http:/www (dot) beigebrigade (dot) co (dot) nz/catalog/popup_?pID=28**

**The Beige brigade shirts are replicas of those worn in the early '80's when NZ cricket was doing really well. Tradtionally NZ national teams in any sport wear white or black uniforms, but all cricket teams, regardless of nationality wear white for test matches. So when we had to wear national colours for one day matches we needed something else. In those days you couldn't make a black fabric that would be cool enough (these are basically towelling) so we got beige. It was ugly. But in 1999 a bunch of guys made homemade replicas and started the beige brigade and it took off, and now nearly everyone has the replica shirts. It's a Kiwi thing, we like the retro stuff.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	29. Chapter 29

**A/N So here's more of Christmas. It's kind of a big day, so there's more to come after this. It's a bit of a monster to write. But I love the reviews, and the fact that you guys are reading it, so thanks for that! Hope you enjoy.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

It felt a bit like we were under siege. Everywhere I went at the moment there was Jason, or Crystal, or one of her kids. Usually it was Wayne. He was a fucking weird little kid. When he wasn't following Sookie around inappropriately, he would just stand there and stare at me. Or, worse, he'd try to tell me that the cars were most definitely better in the States. Like that was suddenly going to make me move back there.

When Sookie had said they were coming for Christmas I hadn't quite realised what that was going to mean. I couldn't remember ever having houseguests before. We didn't have any when I was growing up, only the various slutty step-moms that appeared from time to time. No one else wanted to be within 10 feet of my dad, I sure as fuck didn't. So I'd had nothing like Sookie's family descending on us with their tents and their caravans like they were all part of some big fucking circus. It was really fucking odd.

And now I could hear that aunt in the hallway. She was really loud. They were all really loud. I kind of wanted my house back, where I only had to live with Amelia and Felicia yelling. There were just a few too many people yelling at the moment for my liking.

Sookie appeared in the kitchen with the aunt and her…whatever the fuck he was, trailing behind her. "Oh good" she said to me, "You've started coffee." She sounded way brighter and happier than her face looked. Maybe she wasn't enjoying this much either.

"Oh, Eric! Merry Christmas!" the aunt squealed, grabbing me from behind in a hug. I saw Sookie sort of roll her eyes as she gathered up some cups and put them in the sink.

"Yeah, Merry Christmas" I said, trying to gather up some enthusiasm. After what seemed like hours, the aunt finally let go. "So, um, does anyone want coffee?"

"I could murder a cup of tea, love" the aunt said. "Trev? Trev? Do you want a cup of tea?"

"Yeah" the guy lurking in the doorway replied. "That'd be nice"

"OK, I'll put the jug on, then" Sookie said, reaching past me to grab it. Fuck, if she just gave me a minute I could have done that.

"Oh, we've got the cake. Trev, give me the tin."

I watched as Trev gave the aunt some kind of container which appeared to be decorated entirely with pictures of fluffy kittens, and she then handed it to Sookie. "Oh, is this Gran's cake?" Sookie asked.

"Yep, it's not quite right, eh? But it's close."

Sookie took the top of the container. "Look, Eric! Aunty Linda brought the Christmas cake."

"Oh, nice" I said. Maybe this would stop Jason eating all the mince pies.

Sookie made cups of tea and put out slices of cake, while simultaneously watching some potatoes boil, putting peas into a bowl, and chatting to Aunt Linda about whether or not they should take the new toll road when they head off later this morning. It was exhausting just watching her. I got myself some coffee, but no one else seemed to want any. They were all waiting for the tea.

Jason appeared just as the tea and cake was ready. "Where are Crystal and the kids, love?" Aunt Linda asked.

"Oh, they're out on the deck, eh? Well, some of the kids are in the playhouse, although Amelia is trying to sweep it and keeps yelling at everyone to bugger off and stop tracking dirt through the place."

I glanced at Sookie and she did at least look a little sheepish at that description of Amelia's behaviour. She didn't catch my eye, and just tried to busy herself with arranging cups, but I think she was trying to avoid me. Although, of course, Amelia didn't sound ANYTHING like Sookie.

"OK, well let's take this out to the deck then" Sookie said, loading everything onto a tray. It took me a minute or two to get her attention so she would stop trying to balance it herself and let me do it. And then I followed Sookie out to the deck, with the rest of them trailing behind me, and Aunty Linda still chatting to Jason.

Once out on the deck I set the tray down on the table and Jason called Crystal's kids over to come and meet Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev. As they all arrived on the deck it was a bit over-whelming with the noise and the commotion, and it only got worse when Aunty Linda started handing out gifts. Amelia and Felicia drifted over as well, somehow realising that there was more stuff on offer for them. Although Amelia did come over to me and whisper "Those kids are very loud!" I just nodded. Amelia didn't say anything else as she spied Aroha with her broom and had to go back to the playhouse to reclaim it.

About five minutes after we'd gone outside, Sookie came over to me and said "Get the barbecue started, I need to move the Christmas pudding out here and get the lamb on" and then she disappeared back inside again.

I sighed. I guessed I wasn't going to be seeing much of Sookie today then. I did as I was told with the barbecue, and half-listened to the conversations of everyone else on the deck. Sookie brought out the big pot with the pudding, turned around before I could even really say anything to her, and then came back out with a lamb roast. And Calvin.

"Hey, Eric man!" Calvin said. "Merry Christmas!"

"Yeah, same to you" I said, as I watched Sookie disappear back into the house, after assuring Aunty Linda that there wasn't anything she could do to help. Aunty Linda didn't look particularly like she wanted to help, given she'd just lit a cigarette and helped herself to another piece of cake, but I guess she had at least made the right noises.

I tuned back into Calvin. "So how's your morning been?" he asked me.

"Um. Chaotic. There's, um, a lot of people here."

"Yeah, there are" Calvin said, surveying the lawn which seemed to be swarming with kids.

"I guess I'd better introduce you then" I said, and I took him over to the rest of the people on the deck. As soon as I'd finished the introductions, Judith, Lorena, Jessica and the baby appeared and I had to start again. Although Aunty Linda seemed to know who they all were. "Lorena!" she said, "I haven't seen you in…well, bloody ages anyway. God it was probably…" she stopped, and I could see the moment when she realised that it was Bill's funeral. At least, that's what I assumed from the look of discomfort on Lorena's face. Although maybe that was just because she didn't want to be here at all.

"Hello Linda" Lorena said coolly, pulling a face as a puff of smoke blew past her.

"For God's sake Mum, sit down" Judith said, from behind Lorena. "You watch Thomas and I'll go back and get you a cup of tea, alright?" Lorena did as she was told and Judith put the baby capsule next to her mother's feet, before going back inside.

Jessica meanwhile had drifted over to stand beside Calvin. "Look Jessie" he said, bending down. "Amelia and Felicia got a playhouse from Santa too."

"Huh" Jessica said, still clinging to Calvin.

"Do you want to go and look at it?" Calvin asked her.

"Nuh."

"Amelia might like you to."

"Nuh. Wanna stay here. With you." Jessica just clung tighter to Calvin's leg and he sighed.

"She's been a bit clingy since Thomas was born. She's not really sure about the whole baby thing" he explained.

"Oh, right" I said, wondering if that happened to all kids, and especially wondering how Felicia might cope. She'd be fine, I thought. She was pretty laidback about stuff.

Calvin admired the barbecue and made small talk while Jessica clung resolutely to his leg. Judith arrived back with Lorena's tea and was chatting to Crystal. Linda was talking at Lorena, who looked like she was barely tolerating the experience. Jason was encouraging Tama to see just how high he could jump on the trampoline and Wayne was still just sitting on the steps to the deck, staring at me.

Fucking weird kid.

SPOV

Everything seemed to be going OK on the deck. Eric had had to go and round up Amelia and Felicia so they could get their presents from Calvin and Judith. I could see that Amelia wasn't keen on leaving the playhouse in Aroha's control because she didn't hang around long. I stuck my head outside long enough to see Eric open our present from them, which was a rather lovely frame into which you could put several individual photos, and then I went back to the kitchen.

I could hear bits of conversation going on. Mostly I could Aunty Linda who was talking to Lorena and loving the catch-up. I'm not sure Lorena was so enthused. Aunty Linda was currently waxing lyrical on how well Hunter was doing at university and how proud she was of him.

"Hunter's very bright" Aunty Linda said "He's like our Sookie, of course."

"Mmm" Lorena said, obviously casting around for something to say. "Of course, Bill did a business degree, but then he was always very good with computers…"

"Oh, well they all are, aren't they?" Aunty Linda said. "All the young blokes are these days. You should see the phone Hunter's got himself, it's so bloody fancy. I'd be lost if it was mine, it's all I can do to send a text, but not Hunter. He showed me how the bloody thing took pictures. So I said to him, 'why do I need it to take pictures?' But they all do these days. And then the kids they're all putting them on that Facebook thing, aren't they? That's right, isn't it Trev? Trev's on Facebook, but I can't be arsed. Seems like a bloody waste of time. It's like Trademe. My neighbour spends half her bloody life on Trademe, and I said to her that surely she couldn't find that much to bloody buy on there. Half of it's tat, isn't it Trev? Although I did get myself a nice sideboard from there once. It was from a lady in Westmere who died and the son didn't want it. He was a nice bloke; he even brought it round for us. But anyway, my neighbour she said it's the talk-rooms that she goes to on Trademe. So why doesn't she just hang over the fence and talk to me? I can't bloody understand it. You tried, didn't you Trev? You went on that talk-room thingee about fishing that time?"

"Chat-room, love" Uncle Trev corrected.

"Yeah, same bloody thing. I can't see the point anyway. It's not the same, is it Lorena? No one just rings any more." Aunty Linda finally paused for breath.

"Mmm" Lorena repeated again. I felt kind of sorry for her, but she had wanted to come here. Or hadn't wanted to be left out anyway. At any rate, she didn't have to be sitting out there on my deck.

I walked out to check that no one wanted another cup of tea. Of course Aunty Linda did. I was starting to worry they weren't going to go. She'd said they weren't staying for lunch, but time was marching on.

When I got back with Aunty Linda's tea, she was cuddling Thomas and Lorena was staring daggers at her. "Oh, I love them like this!" Aunty Linda exclaimed. "I was always sad that I didn't have any more kids, but, well, it never happened. You were so lucky Lorena, because how many did you have?"

"I had five children. I was very lucky. And all my girls are doing so well…"

"I've been lucky of course that Hadley's had four kids. And soon Hunter might have some of his own and I'll be a great-granny! That'll be a hoot, won't it Trev? He's got a lovely girlfriend. She's from over on the Shore. Her parents are very well-off, nice house in Takapuna. Bach at Matarangi. He's really done well there."

Poor Hunter, I thought, I'm not sure he'd really want to be married off just yet.

"D'you need any help, Sookie?" Judith asked. She didn't really look like she wanted to help, she had her sunglasses on, her feet propped up on the ottoman and she looked to be enjoying the fact that Jessica was hanging out with Calvin, Thomas was being fought over by Aunty Linda and Lorena, and she didn't have to do anything for anyone else.

"No, I'm good. I think it's all under control." Mostly it was. Well, there was stuff in the oven, stuff on the table. It was getting there.

"Are you sure? 'Cos I feel a bit bad about just sitting here, eh?" Crystal added.

"No, I'm good." I went over to Eric to check on how he was getting on. There wasn't much to do with the things he was cooking, just keep an eye on it. He and Calvin seemed to have that pretty much under control.

"You guys alright?" I asked the pair of them.

"Yeah" Eric said, eyeing me up and down. "You?"

"I'm OK" I said.

"You picked a good barbecue, Sookie" Calvin said.

"Oh, yeah. Well let's see if it cooks the stuff OK." I was a bit distracted by think about whether or not my vegetables needed turning.

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "How do I know when the lamb's done?" He looked a bit worried.

"Oh, I'll get you the meat thermometer. Hang on." I walked back inside the house and pretended I couldn't hear Aunty Linda going "Trev, I think we need bubbly. Go and get the Asti out of our chilly bin, will you love?"

I was starting to suspect that Aunty Linda had no intention of leaving before lunch.

When I got back into the kitchen I checked all the things in the oven and got side-tracked by pulling out enough serving dishes for the veges. I had just remembered the thermometer for Eric when Wayne appeared.

"I picked these for you Auntie" he said, holding out his hands. Shit, I thought, the tomatoes. The kids and I had been growing some cherry tomatoes, which meant that I had to remember to water them every night and the kids picked them and ate them as soon as they ripened. Wayne, however, had picked all the ones that were left, including all the green ones.

"Um, those weren't ripe yet…" I said.

"They weren't? Oh. What are they?"

"Tomatoes" I said, taking them off him and stashing them away before Amelia saw the latest desecration of her garden.

"Oh, shit. Sorry, Auntie." Wayne did look really apologetic.

"Oh, that's OK. But hey, um, can you do me a favour?"

Wayne's face brightened. "Yeah, 'course I can."

"Can you take this out to Eric?" I held out the meat thermometer.

"Oh. OK then." He looked at me sadly, and he ran off to complete his task. I went back to setting places at the table. I had it all worked out. The six kids could eat at the outdoor table on the deck under the sun umbrella. That meant they could drop as much food as they wanted. Bob would love them, although he had been conspicuously absent today. I guessed he wasn't keen on all the extra people around.

The seven adults would all fit around the dining room table. Unless of course Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev were staying, in which case we'd need an extra chair, but we could squeeze around. It was OK, I thought.

And then Judith arrived inside. "How's it going out there?" I asked.

"Oh, you know. The blokes are busy watching the food on the barbecue, somehow they all have to stand around it, just in case…hey, um, Sookie?"

"Yeah?" I said, a bit distracted by wondering where the carving set had gone.

"Um…well, Portia just rang and she was a bit upset."

"Oh, was she?" I wasn't really in the mood for Portia's dramas at the moment, I mean, she wasn't here so surely we didn't have to put up with her being overly-dramatic and ruining the day.

"Um….yeah. Apparently there was some sermon at her church about forgiveness, and she rang me in tears saying she felt terrible that she wasn't speaking to Mum when it's Christmas and she couldn't possibly go to Christmas lunch with her friends when she felt this way…so, um, she's on her way round here…" I looked up from the serving spoons I was counting and stared at Judith. "Sorry" she said in a small voice. "I didn't know what else to do…"

"Oh, that's OK. We'll cope" I said while thinking, shit, shit, shit. It was OK though, I could kind of squeeze them in. Maybe. Even though I didn't really want to.

"Oh, good, I hoped you wouldn't mind. I mean, I know its Portia and she's a pain in everyone's bum, but still…she is family." I wanted to point out that she wasn't my family, really not in the least, but I guessed she was kind of Amelia and Felicia's family. Even though they weren't all that fond of her, either. And neither of them seemed impressed with Glen.

"Yeah, that's fine. I think we'll be OK. There should be enough food." Although I started to worry that maybe there wouldn't be. I decided I'd do some boiled potatoes as well as roasted ones. That would fill everyone up. And leftovers were always good.

Judith walked out saying "Sorry" again, and Aunty Linda breezed in carrying a plastic champagne flute. "Have some Asti, love" she said, handing it to me.

"Oh thanks" I said, taking it from her and putting it down on the bench. I'd learned along the way that no one really paid attention to whether you were drinking or not if you have a glass of wine in front of you. Most people are actually far more interested in themselves.

"So, um, Aunty Linda" I said, as I put the ham on a carving board. "Would you like to stay for lunch?"

"Oh, that would be lovely. Thanks, love. I don't think I'm quite ready for the drive up to Pakiri, eh? Although at least it's fine. Nothing's worse than setting up in the rain, is it?"

"No. No, we did that a few times with Mum and Dad…"

"Yeah, its worse in a tent, though, isn't it? You can't keep anything dry."

"Oh, well the tent was OK…"

"Mmm, it's not the same though."

"Um, no." God, I thought. Poor Mum. It was bad enough that Dad wouldn't consider buying a caravan but now I could bet that Aunty Linda took every opportunity to rub her nose in it.

"So, can I help you love?"

"No, I'm good, thanks. We're nearly there."

"Righto. I might just go and text Hadley then. She said something about calling in later on after they were through with Tony's family."

"Oh." Shit, were they coming for lunch, I thought? I couldn't fit them in as well. Not with all the will in the world.

"Yeah, probably they'll be here later on sometime. That's OK isn't it? Hadley wanted to see Crystal again, they really hit it off. And she hasn't met Crystal's kids yet either."

"Oh, yeah. That's fine." I heard myself saying it, but I didn't really feel it. I was starting to feel a bit put-upon to tell the truth. Why was my house suddenly Stackhouse central for Christmas day? Not to mention the random Comptons who kept turning up as well.

Just then Portia and Glen breezed in. "Merry Christmas Sookie" she said "I'm just here to see Mum. Mummy!" she cried and then she was off to the deck, Glen just trailing in her wake.

Aunty Linda just stared at her. "Shit" she said, "What's that all about?"

"Reconciliation, I think" I said, pulling a chicken out of the oven.

Aunty Linda looked thoughtful. "There's um, a lot of Bill's family here today, isn't there?"

"Yeah, I guess…" I wasn't sure what she was getting at, I hoped she wasn't going to moan at me that they were here. After all, they were actually invited for lunch. Well, apart from Portia, but still. Aunty Linda had just said she was 'calling in'. I hadn't realised that was code for staying all day.

But instead of moaning about the Comptons, Aunty Linda smiled, and then reached over and patted my arm. "You're like Mum!" she said brightly.

"Gran…?" I asked, wondering what she meant.

"Yeah, you're far too bloody kind-hearted. Mum could never resist any waifs or strays either. Especially not at Christmas. God, she used to invite that old bloke from up the road, the one who used to just sit at home with the curtains pulled and the piles of Best Bets everywhere. Ugh. Corbett and I used to hate the fact he'd be sitting in the living room, smoking his roll-ups, but Mum, well, she hated the thought of him being alone at Christmas. God, if it was me, no way would I have my ex's family. I would have sent the lot of them packing! So you're much nicer than I am."

"Oh, yeah. Well, some of them are nice…" I said, feeling a bit taken aback. Who knew I was like Gran?

"See? Just like Mum" Aunty Linda patted my arm again. "Right, better go and text Hads and see where she's at." With that she walked back to the deck, only to be replaced a minute later by Eric.

"You know" I said to him, "Sometimes I'm really glad you don't come with any family. How's it going out there?"

"There's, um…crying" Eric looked uncomfortable.

"Portia?" I asked.

"Mmm-hmm" Eric confirmed. "I don't know what happened, but she seems to be clinging to Lorena like there's no tomorrow."

"How's Lorena coping with that?"

"Um, she looks pretty pleased with herself."

"Yeah, she would. She'll like the attention."

"How's the lunch going, anyway?" Eric asked, surveying the kitchen.

"Oh, OK. Although Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev are now eating with us, so I need you to get some more chairs out, and we need an extra one for the kids too. Possibly Hadley and her family are coming sometime, but I'm hoping not for the food, because I don't think we'll have enough. Unless…maybe if I got those chicken pieces out of the freezer and roasted them. Do you think I should do that?" I looked at Eric expectantly.

"Um. No, I think we'll be OK…"

"Mmmm, I think I might anyway. Can you run out and get them?"

"Sookie, I really don't think it's necessary…"

"No, no, I think I need to. I'll just put them in the electric frypan and roast them in there" I said, taking the frypan out of the cupboard. "You go and get them."

Eric sighed, but he did at least go and do what I'd asked. I was pretty sure I was under control. As long as no one else showed up, I'd be fine.

EPOV

I'd left Calvin in charge of the barbecue and gone to see how Sookie was getting on. She was looking a little bit manic and it seemed as though more guests were arriving. I was dispatched to find more chairs and some chicken pieces from the freezer. I really didn't think we were going to need extra chicken. I thought we had enough food, but somehow Sookie didn't.

And sometimes it's better not to share my thoughts but just go with Sookie's plan.

I headed out to the shed to look through the freezer, hoping that the chicken pieces wouldn't be hidden under 10 pounds of ground beef or anything like that. I passed Wayne who was hanging around by the front steps.

"You, uh, alright?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said, sighing. "I just don't want to hang out with those other kids, eh? They're all just being stupid and stuff." He stopped, and looked at me. "What are you doing?"

"Um, just getting some food out of the freezer…"

"For Auntie?" he asked. I nodded. "I'll help then" he said.

"Oh, I don't know that it needs two of us…" but Wayne had already taken off towards the shed.

"Wow, that's a fuckin' big freezer, eh?" he said, when we got inside.

"Um, yeah" I agreed.

"You could fit, like, three pigs in there. D'you think Auntie would like a pig? If I shot one for her?"

"Probably not." I lifted up the lid and started looking for the chicken pieces.

"Oh. Really? I thought everyone wants a good pig. Well, that's what my Koroua says, eh? He's a good shot. He's teaching Jason to hunt."

"Uh-huh" I said, moving some frozen peas out of the way and discovering that we had…five different types of ice cream. Why did we need all the ice cream? And where the fuck where the chicken pieces?

Wayne peered in the freezer too. "So what'cha lookin' for?" he asked.

"Chicken. Pieces. Apparently" I said, moving some stuff around.

Wayne lent over the edge and I was worried he was going to fall in. When he righted himself he was holding a bag aloft. "Like these?" he asked.

I looked more closely. "Probably."

"Sweet. I'll go give it to Auntie." With that he ran off. I shut the freezer lid and followed him. When I got back to the kitchen he was standing close to Sookie, telling her about how he could kill a pig for her and she could definitely fit in the freezer.

"Yeah, that sounds great Wayne" she said, with an air of distraction, as she tipped the chicken pieces into the frypan. Fuck, there was so much food, it wasn't funny.

She turned to look at me. "Do you want to go and check on thefood on the barbecue?" she asked me.

I shrugged. "I think Calvin's got it under control." Calvin had practically pushed me out of the way to get to the barbecue. I'd always thought that Sookie was making weird cultural judgements every time she pointed out that South African's love barbecues, but I was starting to think she wasn't wrong. "Can I help here?" I asked.

"No, I'm good" Sookie said, without looking at me. "You can go back out and make sure everyone's OK." Then she turned to Wayne. "Wayne, can you move that gravy boat over there please?"

"Sure, Auntie. No worries, eh?" Wayne beamed at me. Fuck, I'd just been replaced by a 10 year old.

SPOV

There wasn't much more to do. I got everything out and got it served. Wayne actually turned out to be a bit of a help. He was kind of sweet, in a way that was slightly misguided sometimes. At least if he was hanging out with me then he wasn't out there trying to stare Eric down. Eric managed to find enough spare chairs for everyone and I got him to grab the lamb off the barbecue and start carving it. I had to send Wayne out to bring everyone in to the table as I didn't think Eric really needed him standing there going "I don't think you do it like that mate, eh?"

I served everything up, and had several trips back to the kitchen for things like mint sauce and salt. It was only when I sat down to finally eat, that I realised Amelia was missing.

"Have you seen Amelia?" I asked Eric.

"What? No. Where is she?" he asked, looking around.

"I'll go find her." I tracked her down to her room. "Hey, hon. It's lunchtime" I said.

"Don't want any" Amelia pouted.

"Come on! There's Christmas crackers to pull. You need to come and find out what you've got in yours." She was four, how could she resist the lure of the plactic crap that came in Christmas crackers?

"I don't want any!" Amelia shouted. I sighed, and then I sat down on the bed next to her. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"It's not fair" Amelia grumbled.

"What isn't?" I prompted.

"Everything!" Amelia said dramatically. I waited, but she didn't elaborate.

"Such as?" I prompted.

Amelia sighed, and looked at her hands. "I just want to have my playhouse to myself. Its bad enough I have to share with Felicia. Jessie doesn't, she got one to _herself_. And Aroha is a…a…pain! She keeps telling me what to do, and I don't like it at all. And she says the playhouse is stink, and she has a better one at home."

Oh. Yeah. Little girl games. They were never fun. "Um, well you don't have to share it with Aroha forever, just while she's here."

"But I have to share it with Felicia forever!"

"Well, she's your sister. It's nice to share with her."

"Do you mind?" Amelia asked me.

"What?"

"Sharing. You know. With Eric and stuff."

I decided truth was the best policy. "Sometimes. He takes up a lot of space. You guys at least got your own airbeds when we slept in the tent, I spent the night getting bounced around every time Eric moved."

"Mmm. Felicia's only little though" Amelia said.

"Yeah, she doesn't take up as much room as Eric does."

Amelia thought for a minute. "I still don't like Aroha though."

That one was trickier. I could see what was going on, but how did I explain it? "Sometimes" I began, "when you feel jealous, it seems like a good idea to make the person you're jealous of feel bad."

"Jealous?" Amelia asked me.

"Yeah. I think she's a bit jealous of you, sweetheart. Of the playhouse."

"But she has a better one! She told me. She said it's got five rooms and proper furniture. And a kitchen!"

"No she doesn't." I felt bad exposing Aroha's lies, but I'd heard Jason and Crystal discussing whether they could do something for her, once they saw the playhouse. Jason thought he maybe had a toolshed he could convert. I doubted it was going to be quite the luxury palace that Aroha was describing to Amelia.

"She doesn't?" Amelia asked.

"No. She's just pretending to have one."

Amelia took a big intake of breath. "She's _lying_!" she exclaimed, horrified at the thought.

"Well, she's only doing it because she's jealous. So…well, probably the kind thing is not to tell her you know she's lying. Just let her pretend for a bit. And remember that you're a very lucky girl who does have a playhouse that she'll get to have forever and forever, even when Aroha leaves."

Amelia sighed. "But I have to share it with Felicia."

"But one day Thomas will share Jessica's."

Amelia looked horrified again. "But he's a boy! He might… he might…want to play pirates in it!"

"Yeah, he might."

"Poor Jessie. And poor Aroha. We should be nice to them." She looked at me solemnly.

"We should. Especially because it's Christmas day."

"And there's crackers. Oh! Do you think anyone pulled mine?"

"No, I think you're OK. Hurry off to the table though, and eat your lunch."

Amelia took off and I went back to see whether I had any lunch left, or whether it had been divided up between Eric and Jason. However, I was waylaid by the knocking at the door.

It was Hadley, accompanied by Tony and her youngest three kids Samson, Israel and Lita. "Great" I said, "You're just in time for lunch". Fuck, I thought, where are they going to sit?

"Oh, no. We already ate, so we're fine thanks Sook."

"I'm hungry Mum" one of the boys said.

"You're always fuckin' hungry. Honestly, Sookie. You wouldn't believe what these two eat, eh? My grocery bill is through the fuckin' roof. And I only shop at Pak N Save, I can't afford to go anywhere else. I'm telling you now, never have boys, they're just a nightmare."

"Uh-huh. Well come in and I'll find you something to eat."

"Choice!" the boy, whichever one he was, said enthusiastically, nudging his brother.

Hadley and her family trooped in and greeted everyone and I went to the kitchen to rustle up some more plates. Hadley said she only wanted a drink, and took it onto the deck so she could smoke as well. The kids and Tony loaded up some food and sat out there on the sunloungers and the ottoman. They didn't seem to feel too ostracised.

I finally got to sit down to eat.

"Everything OK?" Eric asked me, while keeping his eyes on what Jason was piling onto his plate.

"Yeah" I said, "everything's fine. Hey, pull my cracker?" I held it out to Eric.

"I thought you'd never ask, Sookie"

"Oh, shut up and behave."

Eric laughed, but he pulled the cracker with me. I put my sad paper hat on. I noticed Eric wasn't wearing his. In fact the hats seemed to be a Stackhouse thing, I noticed none of the Comptons were wearing their hats either.

I picked at my lunch. To be honest, I was kind of over the food by this stage of the day, I'd been dealing with it for so long. And I was hot, really hot.

The kids table was noisy, and the adult's one wasn't much better, although most of the adults at least stayed seated. At one point Tama got up and started bouncing around and Crystal had to yell "E noha, Tama!" at him, which made him sit down pretty smartly. She had a good scary-mum voice, I'd give her that. Wayne seemed to have forgotten to stare at me, or Eric and was eyeing up Hadley's sons. I tried to remember how old they were. I thought maybe 12 and 10? Something like that. But they were big kids, really big kids. I guess they took after Tony.

I was bloody glad I'd made that extra food, despite Eric's objections. And certainly from what I could see he was putting a fair amount of it away himself.

I got lots of compliments on the food, and lots of thank-yous. And a slightly rambling toast from Uncle Trev, which praised my culinary skills. Lorena looked like she'd swallowed something particularly bitter during that. She never did eat much, as far as I could tell. Or maybe she just really hated my cooking. Either way, I was passed caring.

I cleared away as much of the first course as I could and served up dessert. We had the Christmas pudding, pavlova and fruit salad. And a selection of ice creams, which had been on-sale during the week. When I sent Eric out to get the ice-cream he asked if he was bringing all five tubs back. I said no, two would be sufficient, and he laughed at me.

I guessed he hadn't found all of the ice cream stash on his previous trip to the freezer. There were actually seven tubs. But I wasn't telling Eric that.

Wayne kept telling me the freezer was choice though. "Oh" I said, scraping food off a plate into the rubbish, "Eric picked that."

"He must be rich, eh?" Wayne commented. "To get you stuff like that."

"Um. We're OK." It was all relative. I didn't exactly feel rich, but we probably were by Wayne's standards.

"I guess that's why you like him, eh?" Wayne said. "'Cos he can buy you stuff?"

"No, I like him for more than that" I said. "I like him for lots of reasons."

"Because he's tall?" Wayne asked. Boy, he was really pushing this point.

"No…just because." I straightened up and looked at Wayne. "Because he's Eric, I guess."

"Oh" Wayne looked thoughtful. "Mum says she likes Jason, despite the fact he's Jason."

"Yeah. Jason's like that. He's, um…well, he's quite a personality." I shrugged. I wasn't quite sure how I ended up being the person to explain attraction to Wayne. "I guess there's all kinds of things that make you love someone. It could be because of all sorts of reasons. Or in spite of them."

Eric arrived back with the ice cream and I kissed him, briefly. "Thank you" I said. "Now you can go and get some pavlova before it's all gone. Apparently, it has the Jason Stackhouse seal of approval."

"OK, I might do that" Eric said, wandering off back to the table, while I hunted round for the ice cream scoop.

I was going to give it to Wayne to carry to the table, but when I turned back, he was gone too.

EPOV

I was fucking lucky to get the pavlova before it all disappeared. Fuck, there were a lot of people here now. The addition of Sookie's cousin and her monster-sized children just added to the general chaos that was going on. I couldn't keep track of half the people here, and they were everywhere. Linda seemed to be a permanent fixture on the deck, mainly so she could smoke countless cigarettes, I figured.

Lorena had retreated to the living room, citing a need to keep out of the hot sun. That meant Portia and Judith had gone that way as well, taking the baby with them. Calvin decided to hang out with me, which was OK, except that we somehow attracted Portia's weird son. It was a contest between him and Wayne to see who could be more annoying, really. Although at least Wayne spoke. Portia's kid just sat there. It felt like he was judging us.

I couldn't wait for the day to be over really. I just wanted Sookie back. I'd barely seen her all day. She was constantly in the kitchen, refusing all offers of help. It was kind of painful to watch. I'd tried to tell her that she didn't have to be such a martyr, but she just gave me such a fucking dirty look, that I didn't even wait for the reply, I just got the hell out of there. Fuck, I figured I was just going to have to wait for Christmas to be over and done with.

Jason had decided he was organising a game of cricket and tried to get Calvin and I to join in. He said I could field. Really, standing around in the hot sun didn't sound like much fun, but I didn't seem to have a choice. "Come on, Eric" Calvin said, standing up. "I'll show you how to bowl."

"Yeah, like you'd fuckin' know how to bowl properly" Jason yelled at him. "I've seen South Africa play. Sookie can probably bowl better than you can."

Calvin didn't say anything, just motioned for Jason to pick up the bat. I so didn't want to be part of this. "I might get my hat" I said, to no in particular, and headed inside.

SPOV

I was standing in the kitchen stacking the plates that hadn't made it into the dishwasher when Eric appeared looking perturbed. "You didn't tell me" he said "That Judith was in our room."

"Oh, well I didn't know" I said, perplexed as to why that was a problem. I started washing some cups so we'd have enough for another round of teas and coffees. No one seemed to want to go home in a hurry. Not even Lorena who had now taken up residence in the living room and had a deeply penitent Portia waiting on her hand and foot.

"She's feeding the baby" he hissed at me, still looking at me like it was my problem.

"Oh. Didn't she want to be disturbed?" She should have said something, if that was the case I thought.

"No. She wanted to have a conversation. Said she was lonely. But she was feeding the baby." Eric looked at me meaningfully, and I finally clicked. Oh.

"Well, that's fine. You couldn't see anything, could you?"

"No, the head was in the way…but still. It felt odd." Poor Eric, he looked uncomfortable now, God knows what it was like when he was actually in there with Judith. I patted his arm.

"It's quite normal you know. I've done it."

"What…nursing?"

"Yeah, and, you know, talking to Calvin while feeding Felicia…" I looked at Eric's face, he looked really worried. "Don't worry, I put a muslin wrap over us, but still, it is pretty normal when you have a baby."

Eric just said "Mmmm" and kind of looked into the middle distance. I guess we'd put that on the list of things he might have to get used to if we had a baby. At that point Calvin himself appeared. "Eric" he said "It's your turn to bat."

"Fuck" Eric muttered under his breath.

"Go on" I said, "It'll be fun!" Eric looked at me in a way that suggested it was going to be the opposite of fun for him. But then Calvin turned to me and said "And Jason says you're bowling Sookie."

"Oh, cool" I said, putting the teatowel down. "Come on we'll go together." I held my hand out and Eric took it, and I dragged him out to the lawn.

It was kind of fun, until Eric got the hang of it and hit the ball into Mr Dearborn's place and had to give Jason a leg-up so he could climb over the fence to retrieve it. At that point I threw the ball to one of Hadley's sons and walked back inside.

I went back to the kitchen and Judith came wandering in to get a glass of water for herself. "It makes you bloody thirsty, doesn't it?" she said.

"Yeah" I agreed.

Just then Amelia and Jessica appeared. Amelia stomped over to me. "Jessie won't play nice" she said.

"Meela's bossy!" Jessica whined.

Judith surveyed the pair of them. "You know what, I don't care" she said to them. "It's Christmas, play nice or play with someone else, OK?" I just stood behind Judith and nodded.

Sensing a complete lack of sympathy from the adults, Amelia and Jessica wandered off, no doubt to complain to each other about how terrible we were.

"Christmas. It's dreadful for kids. Gets them all rarked up and they're little stinkers for the whole day" Judith commented.

Portia arrived. "I said I'd get Mum a cup of tea" she announced, "and some cake."

"Fine, help yourself" I said. I was over getting stuff for people.

"I was just saying to Sookie, that Christmas is dreadful for kids" Judith said.

"Well, no one remembers the true meaning of Christmas, now. That Jesus died for us" Portia said piously, while filling the jug.

"Hey, remember the year Sarah got up early?" Judith asked. "And got to the stockings first?"

Portia looked thoughtful. "Yeah" she said slowly, "Yeah, she took all the best stuff out of ours, didn't she?"

Judith nodded. "And when we got up, there was only a few things left for us to open."

"But she insisted that that's how Santa had left it" Portia added.

"I know!" Judith continued "I couldn't figure out how she'd been good enough to get _four_ dolls, and none of us got any." She laughed, and so did Portia. "And Mum had to say she was ringing Santa to check, so Sarah would confess. Poor Sarah, she never realised that Mum would know the truth."

"Yeah, she's um. She's one of a kind" Portia said.

"Yep, Bill was _horrified_, remember? He kept lecturing her and lecturing her until in the end Mum told him to keep quiet, he wasn't her dad and if he didn't watch it, she'd be ringing Santa to tell him to come and take Bill's presents back." Judith laughed, and then looked at me and stopped. "Oh, sorry Sookie" she said.

"No, it's fine" I said, and it was. "I was…well, I hadn't heard that bit of the story before." And I hadn't. It was weird to think of Bill being in Lorena's bad books, but I guess that's a family, and everyone annoys everyone else at some point.

"Yeah, I guess Bill's version was a bit different" Judith commented.

"It was, it really was."

EPOV

I was starting to think the only people really enjoying the game of cricket were Jason and Calvin. The ball kept going over the fence and I had to help Jason over to get it back. Most of the kids had drifted off at some point and I was trying to do the same. One of Hadley's fucking large kids wandered over and said to me "Hey, fulla! You know how to play basketball, eh?" in the hope of a game, but I had to point out we didn't have a hoop.

We just had a cricket set, apparently. Calvin hit the ball around the side of the house and I jogged around to get it, when I spied Wayne sitting by himself again, beside the old barbecue. He was a weird kid, but I did feel kind of sorry for him. I grabbed the ball, threw it back to Calvin and walked over to Wayne.

"Hey" I said.

He didn't say anything, he just looked at me. "She likes you" he said in the end.

"Sookie?" I asked, sitting down, and he nodded. "Well she's my wife, so I would hope so" I said to him.

"My dad wouldn't marry Mum. He left, eh? Fucked off back to Aussie. He's got a new girlfriend now."

"Oh."

"And Tama and Aroha's dad? He went back to Hawera. He had some other kids there, eh?"

I wasn't sure where this was really going. Or what I could say. In the end I went with "My mom left."

That piqued Wayne's interest. "Really?" he asked. I nodded. "Fuck, I don't know of any mums that left, eh? It's usually just dads."

I shrugged. I wondered if it would have made much difference if it had been my dad that left. Too late to worry about it now, I decided.

"I don't think Jason's going to leave" Wayne said in the end.

"Well, that's…good? Isn't it?"

Now Wayne shrugged. "I guess. If he goes Mum'd be sad, eh?"

It was hard to imagine, but I guess someone had to miss Jason when he wasn't around. "But he's not going" I said.

"Yeah, I just wish…I dunno. I just wish I was a bit older."

"You will be. Soon enough."

We sat there for a bit longer and then I stood up. "I'm going inside" I said, "You coming."

"Yeah. Yeah, maybe Auntie needs some help."

"Maybe she does."

Wayne took off around the side of the house and I followed. I still thought he was a weird kid, but he was a pretty mixed up one too. And I didn't think there was much I could fucking do about that.

I walked around to the back yard in time to see Jason jump over the fence again. Fuck, I hoped that old guy over the back wasn't getting fed up with Jason jumping into his garden all the time. Pissed neighbours were the last thing I needed.

Speaking of neighbours, I saw Andy waving at me and coming over to the fence, with a beer in his hand. Oh fuck it, I thought, what's one more person at this stage?

**A/N**

**Takapuna - Tack-a-poo-nah**

**Matarangi - Mar-tar-rung-ee**

**Pakiri- Park-car-ree**

**E noho - Eh no-ho (sit down)**

**Hawera - Har-wear-ah**

**Koroua - Core-roo-ah (Grandfather)**

**And, as always, I don't speak Maori so the pronounciations are my best attempt at showing the way these words commonly sound.**

**Best Bets are the racing magazines which tell you all about the horses. Beloved of old blokes with betting habits everywhere.** **In NZ betting is regulated and you can only do it through the TAB and until fairly recently you could only bet on horseracing, although now you can bet on most sports. There used to be a saying that NZ men had three main interests - rugby, racing and beer!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	30. Chapter 30

**A/N Glad you all liked the mayhem of Christmas day in the last chapter, here's some more.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Wayne came running into the kitchen and asked if he could help me. He looked at me expectantly while I tried to think of something he could do.

"Um…Oh, I know! Take some of these out and see if anyone wants them." I piled some of the mince pies on a plate and handed them to Wayne.

"OK, Auntie" he said wandering off into the living room. I could hear him say, "Hey, youse fullas want one of these?" I wished I could have seen Lorena's face at that moment. She'd spent most of the day trying to distance herself from Crystal's kids; I'm not sure how she was coping with having Wayne right there, pushing a plate of Christmas mince pies at her.

I started emptying the dishwasher so the next load could go in and that kept me occupied for a while. I wondered vaguely what was occupying the rest of the family; I hadn't seen them for a while.

Crystal came in and started helping me, although I had to keep telling her where stuff went. It's always the problem with strangers in your kitchen, although Eric was fond of just piling the stuff up on the bench when he couldn't find a home for it and leaving it for me. I guess he'd only been here a year, but still. We didn't have that many cupboards.

I was just putting the last things into the dishwasher while making small talk with Crystal, when Tama came running in. "Mum!" he wailed, looking around for Crystal.

"Here" she called back, looking over the kitchen bench at him.

"Hey, Mum that kid bit me!" he cried. Oh bugger, I thought. That doesn't sound good. Please let it be one of Hadley's kids.

"Which kid?" Crystal asked.

"The little one. With the sock." He walked over to Crystal, holding his arm out so she could inspect it. We both peered at it, there was a very tiny red mark, but you couldn't really see any teeth marks. Still, it wasn't good.

"It was Felicia?" I asked.

"Guess so" Tama said grumpily. "She's bloody vicious."

"I'm really sorry…" I said to the pair of them.

Crystal glanced at me. "No she's not vicious" she said. "She's just a bubba. What were you doing?"

Tama looked defensive. "Nuthin'" he said.

"What were you doing?" Crystal asked again.

This time Tama looked down at the ground. "I said! Nuthin'"

"Really?" Crystal asked.

Tama sighed. "I just wanted to look at the drill, but she wouldn't give it to me…" he muttered, grumpily.

"So did you ask?"

Tama didn't say anything to that; he just looked at the floor. "So next time" Crystal continued. "Ask nicely! You're lucky she's only little. Now bugger off outside and find something to do that doesn't bloody annoy anyone else." Tama ran off and Crystal turned back to me.

"Sorry" I said again, feeling really bad. "Felicia seems to bite when she's upset. We're just hoping she grows out of it." Surely she would, I thought. After all, you didn't see adults who settled things by biting each other, did you?

"Oh yeah, lots of them do, eh?" Crystal said breezily. "Don't worry about it, it's not the first time Tama's been bitten. He'll live. He should have bloody left the poor kid alone. Right, I'm going to see what the rest of them are up to." With that Crystal headed back onto the deck.

Wayne arrived back with the empty plate and I put that in the dishwasher. "Tama got bitten" he said to me.

"Yeah, I heard." I didn't want to go over who had bitten him.

"She's fuckin' tough, eh? That baby."

"Oh. OK." I think he'd meant it as a compliment but really, she was a 22 month old little girl, I really didn't need her to be tough. Not yet anyway.

"She's alright though" Wayne continued.

"Yeah, she is" I agreed. Wayne just stood there looking at me. "So, um, you can go off and play now…or, whatever…" I said, at a loss.

"Oh, OK then. See you Auntie!" and with that he ran outside.

I was suddenly aware there was some kind of commotion in the living room. Well there were excited voices at any rate. I stuck my head in the door to see what was going on. Lorena had Judith's cellphone clamped to her ear and Portia and Judith were talking animatedly.

"Everything OK?" I asked.

"Sarah called" Judith said, rolling her eyes.

"She's still in Whangarei, isn't she?" I asked, probably a bit sharply but I was over surprise guests for today.

"Yeah, but she and Matt had a HUGE fight, and she's sat in her car crying. Which is why she's talking to Mum now. I had a go, but I can't be bothered with her any more, she never listens to me."

"I've been telling her for years to leave him. She is hopeless with men. Absolutely hopeless" Portia added. She'd conveniently forgotten about Charles, I thought.

"What? I don't think you should be telling her to leave him. It's not your business" Judith told Portia.

"Well it's my business when it ruins my Christmas day. Every single year she does this, there's always a fight and she spoils it for everyone!" Portia obviously didn't think the fact that she got insulted and ended up crying in a corner every year spoiled it for everyone.

I just snuck out of the room and left them all to it.

I headed out to the deck to see what everyone out there was doing. Aunty Linda and Hadley were drinking and smoking and ignoring Uncle Trev, so that was kind of standard. The kids were doing random things around the back garden, although Jason seemed to have gone missing.

Calvin and Eric were standing by the fence talking to Andy, who'd decided to join us. Oh well, I thought. What's one more?

Just then I heard Jason yell "Thanks mate! See you!" and then a plastic shopping bag got hefted over the fence, followed by Jason climbing back over from Mr Dearborn's place. I wondered how many times he'd been over there to get the ball now. I really hoped Mr Dearborn wasn't getting annoyed with the intrusion. And I was really curious about the contents of that bag.

Lorena appeared at my elbow, "Sookie" she said.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, keeping one eye on Jason who was heading this way across the lawn.

"Do you have anything for indigestion? I'm just feeling a bit…well, that lunch was very rich. I'm not used to that sort of food anymore."

"Oh, sure. I'll get you some in a minute."

"You having a good afternoon, Lorena?" Aunty Linda called out. Lorena just turned in her direction and gave her a weak smile.

Jason arrived in front of me and held out the shopping bag. "Present for you" he said. "From that old bloke over the back. He's a nice old joker, eh?"

I looked in the bag. "Rhubarb?" I asked.

"Yeah" Jason replied. "Said he had tons of the bloody stuff and needed to get rid of it, eh?"

Lorena peered at it as well. "You'll need to cook that up, Sookie" she said. "Make a crumble or something."

"Yeah…" I said staring at it. There was an awful lot there.

"That'd be great, Sook!" Jason said enthusiastically, "I'd love a good crumble."

"Oh, um…" I wasn't sure how I'd got roped into making crumble.

"Add some vanilla to it" Aunty Linda called out.

"What?" I asked.

"When you stew the rhubarb, add vanilla to it." She took another puff of her cigarette.

Lorena screwed her face up. "No, I don't think you'd need vanilla, Sookie. Just lots of sugar will be fine."

"You use less sugar if you add the vanilla" Aunty Linda called out again.

Lorena pursed her lips. "Sugar will be fine. It's how I always did it and no one ever complained. Bill loved rhubarb, of course." That seemed to settle the matter in Lorena's mind, we were doing it how Bill liked it and that was it.

"I'll take it however it bloody comes, eh?" Jason said. "I fuckin' love crumble." He was completely oblivious to Lorena's exaggerated wince at the swearing.

Eric came up the steps to the deck, carrying some empty beer bottles. "If you're going that way, I'll have one" Jason said to him.

"Yeah, sure" Eric said, peering at the bag of rhubarb. "What's that?"

"Rhubarb" I said.

"Sook's going to make crumble, eh?" Jason added.

"Are you?" Eric said, looking at me. "I don't think I've had that."

Jason patted Eric on the shoulder. "Don't worry, you'll hate it."

Eric looked at me and frowned, but carried on inside. I was still holding my bag of rhubarb. And then something occurred to me. "Was Mr Dearborn over there by himself?" I asked Jason.

"Nah, there were a couple of old biddies fussing over him. He said they were his sisters. I think he was bloody glad to have me to talk to, eh? That'll be us though, won't it Sook?"

"What?" I asked.

"You know, when I'm an old joker. You'll look after me won't you?" I just looked at Jason dumbly. "Ha! You should see your face right now, Sook! It's fuckin' priceless! Don't worry; I'm not going to be moving in. Not anytime soon. Oh, cheers mate!"

Eric had arrived back and had handed Jason a beer. Before Eric could get any further though, there was a cry of "Daddy!" and Felicia started to climb the steps to the deck, only her arms were full with Sockie, her toy drill, a hammer and a plastic tea-cup. She got part-way up the steps and dropped most of her load. "FarFARKsway!" she shouted.

Jason doubled over laughing. "Oh, Christ Sook! I fuckin' love it that your kid keeps saying fuck like that."

Eric was helping Felicia to pick up her stuff and get up the stairs, and he turned and glared at Jason. Lorena just pulled a face, and then put her hand up to her chest.

"I'll go and find the Gaviscon" I said to her, and walked back inside.

As I was coming out of the bathroom Hunter walked past me, holding the hand of some girl with absolutely dead straight, glossy brown hair. It was the kind of hair that looked really expensive. As did the rest of her outfit.

"Um. Hi Hunter!" I said. I tried to remember if my family had always been this bad at just showing up. I'd remembered Mum complaining to Dad a bit, but I hadn't really paid attention. I obviously should have.

"Oh, hi Sookie" Hunter said. "This is my girlfriend, Maddy."

"Hi Maddy" I said. Maddy just blinked a couple of times and then managed to re-arrange her face into a smile.

"Where's Mum?" Hunter asked.

"On the deck, with Aunty Linda" I said, pointing.

"Cool" Hunter said, and took off in that direction.

I went into the living room to deliver the Gaviscon to Lorena and discovered they were all still involved in a post-mortem of the phone call with Sarah. Although they were now re-hashing all her past mistakes. "She shouldn't have got herself pregnant to that other bloke. Jacob's father, the druggie one" Portia was saying. "That was her first mistake."

"Well I don't think you should judge others for getting pregnant. What about Glen?" Judith asked.

"That was completely different" Portia sniffed. "I was older. And anyway, Glen isn't a mistake; he's a gift from God. And you're no better; you and Calvin weren't married when you had Jessica."

"No, but at least Jessica has a dad" Judith muttered.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Portia asked, sharply.

I left them to it.

I wandered out to the deck again, managed to dodge the Stackhouse reunion that was taking place and made my way to where Eric was. It felt like I'd barely seen him all day.

"Hey" I said, putting my arms around his waist.

"Hello" he said back, kissing my head. I didn't reply but just stood there and listened for a bit. Calvin was asking Andy about the requirements for joining the police, he was thinking of getting out of building as the money wasn't great and with Judith not working things were a bit tight. I wondered how Judith would feel about the shift work though; I knew Halleigh wasn't keen on it.

Jason had now organised a game of touch rugby on the lawn. That seemed to suit Hadley's sons a bit better, although I noticed he did have to stop a punch-up between Wayne and Samson at one stage. They were taking it a bit seriously. Glen was hovering on the sidelines and Jason noticed him. "Come on, mate" he said. "You can join in."

Glen blinked a couple of times. "Um…" he said.

"You'll be alright, I'll look after you. Come on." Jason jerked his head to the side to get Glen to come over to him. After a couple of moments of thought Glen jogged over. Jason had his faults, but he was usually pretty good at including people. As long as they were happy to go along with the Jason Stackhouse program that was.

I glanced over at the playhouse. It seemed to be OK in there. Well, I couldn't hear any crying or screaming, so I decided not to investigate further.

At that point Portia came flying down the steps of the deck. "Have you seen Glen?" she asked us. "We need to get going."

I guessed all the screaming and crying had been going on in the living room then. "He's over there" Calvin said, pointing to where Glen was running with the ball while trying to evade Samson and Israel. He was little, but he was actually quite fast.

Portia looked shocked. "He'll get _killed_!" she cried. "Who let him go out there? Who?"

"Well I think it was really his choice…" I said, not wanting to blame Jason for just trying to let the kid enjoy himself.

"I'm his mother! I should have been asked. You can't just let someone else's child play a sport like that without checking first. He could have any kind of…of…medical condition."

"Yeah, but he doesn't. And it's just touch rugby" Calvin said. We all turned to look at him. Had he not learnt to just shut up when Portia was in a strop yet? I figured he was used to dealing with Judith though, and probably had to listen to dramatic outbursts on a regular basis. I couldn't decide whether he was brave or stupid.

"That's not the point, Calvin, and you know it. The point is that you need to ask the parent. And I'm the parent. And no one asked me. And…"

"Oh, shut up Portia" Calvin said mildly. Portia looked shocked and just stood there with her mouth open. I doubted anyone had told her to shut up since Bill died. Go Calvin, I thought.

"Well, if you'll all going to treat me like that, then we're definitely going. I don't believe this. You always have to ruin my Christmas!" Portia turned around. "Come on Glen!" she yelled, and Glen dropped the ball and immediately trotted over and followed his mum up the stairs.

"Poor fuckin' kid" Andy muttered, having watched the whole episode.

"Yep" Calvin agreed. "You sure you don't want to follow them and see how many leftovers she's taking with her?" he said to me.

"No I think we'll be fine" I muttered, knowing that she probably had stashed something away. She was dreadful, and thought the world owed her something. I was glad she wasn't my sister.

Although somehow I still ended up with her at Christmas.

EPOV

The afternoon seemed never-ending, it really did. I had thought that after lunch people would start to leave, but instead they just settled in more. And then more people showed up. When I looked up at the deck there was a new kid up there, dragging a girl around by the hand and talking to Linda. Fuck, who were all these people?

Jason insisted on organising a constant stream of sporting events in the back garden which just made all the kids hot and sweaty and fucking annoying. Amelia came running over in tears because it seemed as though Aroha and the other kid that arrived with Sookie's cousin had staged some kind of coup and Amelia felt pushed out.

"It's not fair" she wailed, as Sookie bent down to cuddle her. "No one listens to me!" Her little face was red and tear-stained and she looked miserable. I could kind of understand why. There were far too many people for my liking.

Sookie took her inside to calm down and I was left with Andy and Calvin again. And Felicia, who came over to join us. She looked pretty miserable too. I picked her up and she put her head on my shoulder and just sucked Sockie dejectedly. She'd missed her nap and it was showing.

Finally, everyone started to drift away. Andy jumped back over the fence, Judith came out and told Calvin that Lorena wanted to get going, and he left. The Stackhouses looked like staying put, until Trev said something about setting up the awning in the dark, and Linda suddenly shot out of her seat and headed for the door with another round of hugs and goodbyes. Once they'd gone their other family members left too. Tama and Wayne didn't seem at all sad to see the bigger boys go, but Aroha was upset to lose her new friend. She kept telling Crystal that she'd have 'no one to play with now'. I guessed Amelia and Felicia didn't really count then.

And then all of a sudden we were almost alone again. Almost, because we still had Jason, Crystal and three kids, but after the numbers we'd had earlier in the day, it felt like the place was pretty much empty.

I found Sookie back in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher.

"Where are the kids?" I asked.

"Watching TV in the living room. They just needed to blob out a bit I think."

"Yeah, they've had a big day. We all have." Sookie looked up at me from the dishwasher.

"Are you OK? I mean, did you cope alright?" she asked.

"Me? Yeah, I'm fine. It was just a bit…busy."

"Yeah, it was. I mean half of those people I wasn't expecting. I didn't even really realise I had such a big family." She shrugged and went back to taking plates out and putting them in the cupboard.

"You look tired" I said.

"Yeah, I am. I feel like I just did a triathlon or something."

I looked at her face again. "But you look…sort of, happy?"

Sookie thought for a moment. "I guess so. I mean, it was a lot of work, and half the time I was annoyed with everyone arriving, but, you know…it was kind of nice…" she trailed off. "I guess it's OK, sometimes. Having a big family."

"Yeah. I just wish I knew half their fucking names."

Sookie laughed. "That's because you just don't listen when I tell you."

"No, I think it's because you've got a funny accent. Has no one ever pointed out that it's actually pronounced Jason not Jesen?"

"Oh ha ha! Did you see what Amelia wrote on your picture? About her daddy who talks funny?"

"Well I can't help it that I'm the only one here who actually enunciates vowels."

"Yeah, vowels aren't everything you know Eric." Sookie straightened up and dusted off her hands. "OK, well go and start the barbecue back up."

"What are we doing now?" I asked.

"Dinner. We'll just chuck some sausages on and use up the cold meat. There weren't as many leftovers as I thought there might be. I'll just get some bread out of the freezer." She started to walk out of the kitchen.

"I'll get Wayne to do it" I said.

"Yeah, good point. He keeps asking if he can help."

SPOV

Wayne arrived in the kitchen with some loaves of bread that Eric had sent him to get out of the freezer. "Here you go, Auntie" he said cheerfully.

"Thanks Wayne" I said, taking them from him. "So, did you have a good Christmas?" I asked him.

"Yeah, it's OK, eh? Better without those other kids, though. They were bloody dicks, eh?"

I couldn't really comment on that, so just stayed quiet. "He's alright though" Wayne said.

"Who? Jason?" I asked, slightly distracted by the sight of exactly how much leftover chicken I had. I'd really thought there was more than that. Bloody Portia.

"Nah. Your old man." With that Wayne ran off.

Dinner was a much quieter affair. The kids were exhausted and the adults were tired too. And no one was that hungry. I put the food on the table and everyone picked at it. Jason introduced Eric to the joys of hot English mustard in your ham sandwiches, and the kids mainly ate sausages wrapped in bread with lots of tomato sauce.

Crystal helped me clear up and then Jason arrived in the kitchen carrying a whole watermelon. "I got this on the way up here, eh?" Crystal said cheerfully.

Jason called out to the kids "There's watermelon. Everyone on the deck!", and then he shepherded them all out there. Sometimes it was nice to have family around, because they knew the rules. And eating watermelon on the deck was Mum's rule, and one I still liked to enforce. Sometimes Eric forgot that rule and you ended up with sticky kids sitting in puddles of watermelon juice in the middle of the family room.

Once the watermelon was eaten people started drifting off. Eric bathed Amelia and Felicia. He'd learnt by now that in the summer it was easier if he took his shirt off when they got in the bath, because he was going to get drenched anyway. I tried not to hover too much as it was difficult not to just hang around and enjoy the view. Although Eric learned not to accuse me of perving at him after Amelia spent half an hour asking both of us what perving was. We did not need that one to come up at pre-school.

Jason got Tama and Aroha bathed and into bed in the tent, and then the four of us and Wayne sat around and watched Love, Actually on TV. Well, I half-watched, half-dozed. I was pretty shattered, really. Wayne seemed to enjoy being one of the adults, especially when I broke out the box of chocolates someone had given me earlier in the day. There weren't many left by the end of the evening.

When the movie was over Jason, Crystal and Wayne headed out to the tent and it was just Eric and I.

"Bed?" he asked.

"Yeah" I said, standing up from the couch. And then Amelia stomped in. "I forgot" she wailed.

"Forgot what?" I asked.

"I forgot and now it's too late!"

"Forgot what Ames?" Eric tried again.

"Your presents! But it's not Christmas anymore!"

"Yeah, it is. It's still Christmas day" Eric assured her.

"Really?" Amelia said. "But I went to bed." The concept of life carrying on after she was asleep was a novel one.

"Yep, but it's not morning yet. So it's still Christmas."

"Oh, OK" she ran off and we heard her running down the hall to her room, and then running back again. When she appeared back in the living room she was carrying the envelope she'd brought home from pre-school on her last day there.

"This is for you" she said, handing me something, "and…this is yours" she said to Eric. I looked at my present; it was a bracelet, made of pink, purple and silver beads.

"It's lovely. Thank-you" I said, kissing her, and then putting it on.

"I made it myself" she said proudly. "Do you like yours?" she asked Eric, worriedly.

"It's very nice" he said, showing me. It was keying with a random selection of beads and buttons attached to it.

"I made that too!" Amelia said beaming, as Eric gave her a quick squeeze.

"You're very clever" I said to her. "But now, back to bed because you had a long day."

"It's not morning?" she asked. I guessed that a couple of hours of sleep had perked her right up.

"It's not morning" Eric said.

"OK. 'Night!" she took off down the hall.

I went into the bathroom and got ready for bed, and then Eric did the same while I put my pyjamas on and climbed under the covers. "I am shattered" I said to Eric, as he slid in behind me.

"Yeah" he said. "I'm kind of tired too. Christmas is exhausting."

"Yep. Let's not do it again for at least a year."

"Mmm" Eric agreed, and then he started to rub my shoulders. "Oh. That's nice" I said, appreciatively. I just lay there and let my body relax and my mind drift off. It had been a pretty good day. Well, we'd coped with most of the stuff. We were actually OK at this hosting thing I thought. But maybe next year it could be someone else's turn.

I was feeling nice and relaxed when Eric said to me "There is one thing I'm curious about, after today."

"Mmm? What's that?" I asked.

"What the fuck is crumble?"

I rolled over to face him. "Seriously Eric? That's the one thing that you've taken out of today?

"I just wondered. I'm not sure I believe Jason when he says I wouldn't like it."

I sighed. "It's like a pie kind of thing…crossed with a cake."

"Really? That sounds awesome."

"Well if you're good, I'll make you and Jason one tomorrow."

"One each or one between us? And does it matter if Jason's good as well, because I don't know if he can be?"

"Eric, go to sleep and stop worrying about the crumble."

"I'm not worried; I just don't want it to be like the mince pies. You know there's none left, don't you?"

"Yes there are, I hid some."

Eric laughed. "You're fucking sneaky, aren't you Sookie?"

"Yep, I am. And I know Jason. And I love you, so I hid the pies."

"I love you too. Goodnight." Eric kissed me and I snuggled further into his arms.

"Yep. 'Night."

**Thanks for reading!**


	31. Chapter 31

**A/N And here's Boxing Day! Many thanks for all the reviews for the last chapter, hope you all enjoy this one!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

I woke up and realised I was hot. Really, really hot. Somehow I was still jammed up against Eric from where I'd gone to sleep the night before. I could hear him making that snoring noise above me; the one that he kept saying wasn't really snoring. But I couldn't see him that well as my face was currently smushed into his armpit.

Aside from the heat, it wasn't unpleasant being all squished together like this. It was kind of comforting, and I quite liked the nice Eric-y smell. I was just a bit hot. I managed to wriggle one leg out and move it on top of Eric's. He didn't stir and I felt a bit better now at least one part of me was feeling cooler.

I couldn't hear anyone else moving around the house so I thought I would just lay there for a bit. I ran a hand down Eric's side. He snorted slightly, but didn't wake up. His skin felt nice. Firm and smooth and warm.

All this warmth was making me feel quite drowsy. I kissed Eric's chest and then I tried to adjust the way I was laying slightly. In the process my breasts got dragged across Eric's chest a bit.

And then I realised I wasn't feeling drowsy anymore. I was feeling…well, I was feeling turned on. It occurred to me that this is what happened when you stopped taking the Pill, all of a sudden you got hit with the hormones you were supposed to have, when you were supposed to have them, and my body was telling me that about now was a really good time to have sex because I might get pregnant. I thought it was still a couple of days early, but really, who was I to argue with my hormones? That would be churlish.

"Er-ric" I whispered. "Wake up."

Eric didn't move, and the non-snoring snoring noise kept going. "Eric!" I tried again, jiggling his calf with my foot. This time there was a bit of movement and a snort. "It's mor-ning!" I said, in a sort of sing-song voice that I thought might suggest nice things.

Eric rubbed his face. "Wha'?" he said, not really sounding awake.

"Sshh!" I whispered. "Not so loud."

"What's happening?" I couldn't see Eric's face very well, but he sounded confused, and still half-asleep.

"Everyone's asleep. I think, anyway. And we're having sex."

"We are?" Eric patted me down with one hand. "But you're wearing pyjamas, Sookie. And I think I would have noticed if we were having sex."

I sighed. "Well not _yet_. But we could."

Eric rolled onto his back and stretched out. Then he turned his head to the side and looked at me. "You want to have sex?"

"Of course I do" I whispered, ghosting a hand up his stomach. "Don't you?"

Eric looked at me and blinked a few times. And then he smiled. "Well I do now I'm awake." He rolled on top of me, pushing me onto my back on the bed. He nuzzled my neck.

"Scratchy" I commented.

"Sookie if you're going to make me get up and shave, then everyone else is going to be awake by the time I get back" Eric said, before returning to my neck.

"I know!" I whispered back.

Eric moved his mouth to mine and that stopped conversation for a bit while we just kissed. The kissing was nice. The kissing was really nice. But I was desperate for a bit more contact. A lot more contact. My pyjamas were really annoying me.

I pulled back from Eric and wriggled away so I could sit up and pull my pyjama top off. I got it over my head and Eric latched onto a breast, which made it a bit hard to get my shorts off, but with a lot of wriggling around I managed.

"Pants off" I said to Eric. He looked up at me. "You didn't say we were being quick" he grumbled, as he took off the boxer briefs he was wearing.

"Well I figured that was a given, as it's morning and everyone is about to wake up."

"Yes, but I feel kind of short-changed now. I like to know these things going in" Eric said, as I slid back down the bed to lie on my back again.

"So, what?" I whispered. "You'd rather I didn't wake you up? Or that we had a really long conversation about it first? And risked running out of time completely?"

Eric looked at me. "Yeah, alright" he said. "Let's not talk." He lay on his side next to me and ran a hand up my stomach to my breast, which he squeezed appreciatively.

I threw my arms around his neck and rolled over to face him, trying to get some of that contact I'd wanted before. I rubbed my nipples against his chest. That felt so much better without the stupid pyjama top in the way.

Eric's hand was on my hip, occasionally drifting down to my bum and back up again. But we were being quick. And I was a bit desperate. And this was no time to be coy, I decided.

I grabbed his hand and moved it so it was cupping me between my legs, at the same time lifting my top leg so my knee was on top of Eric's thigh.

Eric ran a finger through my folds. "Oh" Eric whispered into my ear. "You did start without me."

I decided there wasn't much point responding to that. Really, my body was doing all the responding I needed to. I pushed my breasts harder against Eric, and then kissed him deeply.

"Unfh. Fuck" Eric muttered, as he pushed a finger inside of me. I ground my clit against his palm. "Yeah…" I moaned. I didn't really feel like talking much at that point.

Eric removed his hand, which I found kind of annoying at that moment, and then he shuffled a bit further up the bed, before I felt the tip of his penis brush my entrance.

"Oh" I said. "You've caught up."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, and he pushed in. That felt so much better, that was definitely what I'd been craving since I'd woken up. I might have said that to Eric, but I was kind of busy at that moment. I hoped he knew, anyway.

We stayed on our sides for a while, moving slowly, before Eric rolled me onto my back and then started to move with a bit more rhythm. I held onto his neck and pushed up against him. It didn't take long until I felt the tension build and build and then, finally it seemed, my orgasm overtook me. "Oh, that feels better" I said against Eric's chest.

"Uh-huh" he agreed, having stopped his movements. He braced himself and bent down and kissed my nipple, and then kissed me, and then he started to move again.

I was heading towards a second orgasm, when I heard the front door open, and then close. I could hear footsteps in the hall and the bathroom door opening and shutting. The toilet flushed. Someone walked past the bedroom door. There was whispering, although I couldn't make out what was being said. It was kind of distracting.

Eric didn't seem particularly distracted. He sensed my change in mood though. "Just…ignore it" he said, in between thrusts.

"Mmm…" I said. It was easier said than done. I wondered how long before Amelia and Felicia got wind of the fact that people were up and about. I needn't have bothered, just then I heard Amelia say "Are you still here Uncle Jase?" so loudly she might as well have been standing in the room with us.

It was all kind of off-putting. I'd really kind of lost the place I was just a few minutes earlier. "Sookie" Eric said, "Sookie just…just…fucking stay with me."

I really did want to. But there was a part of me that was really worried about my guests, and my kitchen, and what my guests were doing to my kitchen. Not to mention the loose cannons that were my own kids. I was pretty sure the thud I'd heard before had been Felicia getting out of bed. Despite the fact she was no longer in a cot she still felt the need to jump out of bed rather than just climb down in the mornings.

Eric was doing a much better job at ignoring all the distractions than I was, he really was. But we'd said we'd be quick, and really…well. Really it was time for him to be quick, I thought. I was about to say something to that effect when he suddenly dropped down onto his forearms and laid his torso against mine. Yeah, that felt nice I thought. And being this close to Eric did kind of block out the noises from the rest of the house. And if I held on really tight to his back and kissed his chest it was easy to pretend that there was nothing going on out there at all. At all.

And then I even lost most of my powers of thought because I finally found that other orgasm, the one that was proving so elusive after my house got invaded.

Eric moved one hand to my breast, before thrusting hard a few more times and finishing himself, with a shudder and a rather strained "Oh, fuck" which he managed to keep relatively quiet.

After a moment he rolled off and lay on his back beside me. "So was that quick enough?" he asked, turning his head to look at me.

"Well, no one came banging on the door or broke in, so I guess it was."

"So that's the test then? Being able to have sex before there's some kind of crisis?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Eric sighed. "You're a hard taskmistress, Sookie." He was quiet for a bit. "So is this what it's going to be like then? You demanding sex all the time until…you know, you get pregnant?"

"I didn't demand sex. I just suggested it!"

"Yeah. Semantics Sookie. You didn't answer the question."

"You'll have to wait and see" I said airily. There was a shout of "Felicia! No! Leave that alone!" from Amelia. I sighed. "I'll go and sort them out. I rolled out of bed, grabbed some clothes and headed to the bathroom.

When I got out of the bathroom, I found Amelia and Felicia in Amelia's room. There'd been an incident with Felicia trying to drill into the side of the Barbie's car. Luckily her toy drill couldn't really do any damage, but Amelia had taken offence at the whole incident and wasn't impressed with her sister at all.

Sometimes I started to wonder if the whole third baby thing was really such a good idea.

Eric arrived and took them into the kitchen for breakfast and I went back to the bathroom for a shower. After the previous day it was nice to have the alone time. I was kind of over people shouting and crying and fighting and just generally being around me. Sometimes it was nice to have a large family, but it was lovely when they all went home.

And Jason and Crystal wouldn't be here for much longer. This was probably a good thing, because I was running out of things for Wayne to do.

When I got back to the family room, Eric and Jason were sitting in there alone, reading the newspaper. I surveyed the pair of them. They were kind of scruffy looking. Eric hadn't dressed yet and Jason was wearing what I thought was a t-shirt, but it was hard to tell. There were a lot of holes in it.

"So…you've both given up shaving then?" I asked them.

"I'm on holiday" Jason said grumpily, at the same time Eric said something about vacation.

"You're both as bad as each other" I said. Then I looked around. It seemed kind of quiet, and empty.

"Where's Crystal and the kids?" I asked Jason, picking up a discarded section of the paper off the floor and re-folding it.

"They've gone to the mall, eh?" Jason said. "Crystal said she wanted to go to the sales seeing as she was in the big smoke." He laughed. "Poor fuckin' Wayne, he looked really pissed that he was going too." Jason laughed again, and Eric joined in.

"What about our two?" I asked Eric.

"Playhouse" he said, without looking up from the paper.

"Yeah, that's really fuckin' popular, eh?" Jason said. "If you guys moved their beds out there, you could pretty much get rid of them."

"I don't want to get rid of my kids!" I said to him.

"Huh" Jason said. "Thought you guys might appreciate the privacy for your lie-ins, eh?" He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I opened and closed my mouth, thinking of how to respond without giving anything away, and Eric turned to glare at Jason, who giggled to himself a bit. The silence was broken by Amelia shouting "Daddy! Daddy, come HERE!" from outside somewhere.

Eric sighed, then stood up and headed out the door. I gave up on glaring at Jason as he'd gone back to reading the paper, and didn't seem particularly affected by my annoyance.

I was in the kitchen making myself some toast when Eric walked in with something in his hand. He put whatever it was in the bin. "Fucking Bob" he muttered.

"What?" I asked.

"There was a dead bird in front of the playhouse. He obviously thought they needed a housewarming gift. Amelia was upset it was dead, and really upset that Felicia kept trying to pick it up and make it fly again. That cat is a fucking nuisance."

"He's just a cat" I said quietly. It wasn't Bob's fault. He was just trying to be nice, and considering the fact he'd been pushed out of his house by all the visitors I thought it was really nice of him to still bring us stuff. Unless you were that waxeye of course. Then the whole episode probably sucked. A lot.

"He's a cat with a fucking deathwish" Eric said, pouring himself another cup of coffee. We were down to having only the new coffee cups left clean, the ones Jason had bought me with the tiny handles. Eric peered at the one he picked up, sighed, and muttered something else under his breath.

"Why are you in a mood?" I asked him, feeling a bit annoyed. "You got sex this morning; you're supposed to be all happy!"

"Hah! I fuckin' knew it!" Jason's voice said behind me. I whirled around to face him. "Are there any more mince pies, Sook?" Jason asked, completely unconcerned.

"Oh…bugger off, Jason!" I said. Jason ignored me and started to head towards the pantry, however Eric was glaring at him too, and apparently that was a bit more worrisome, because he stopped. "Oh…well, fair enough then" he said, starting to retreat.

I looked at the pair of them. They were welcome to each other. "I'm going to the fruit shop" I announced and I left them to go and get ready.

EPOV

The morning had started kind of nicely, but had quickly deteriorated. I blamed fucking Jason. I tried to like him, I really did. But he just had no fucking clue. I was starting to think that I actually liked Wayne more than I did Jason. Wayne at least had an excuse for most of the stupid shit he did. For one thing, he was 10. And it sounded as though he hadn't had the easiest start in life.

But I had no fucking clue what Jason's excuse was. It seemed like every fucking time he stayed here, he upset Sookie. I really wished he would pack that fucking tent up and just leave. But we were stuck with him for one more night.

Sookie said something about a fruit shop and then took off, leaving me alone with her mentally challenged brother. "Fuck, Jason" I said. "You really don't know when to leave it alone do you?"

He shrugged. "It's Sook. She takes a joke, eh? She always has."

"She didn't fucking look like she was laughing to me."

"Well she looked like she was pretty pissed off with you as well, so I don't think it's all my fault. She's probably annoyed about Bill's sisters anyway. Fuck, that mouthy one was fuckin' annoying. Her poor son is fuckin' doomed. Thank fuck I never took her home that time she asked me."

I just looked at him. If he wasn't going to admit to any fault, there was no point me pushing him. "Whatever, Jason" I muttered. "I'm going to shower."

After the shower I checked on Amelia and Felicia. Things seemed to be going slightly smoother in the playhouse, but there was still an underlying air of tension. In fact we were all on edge. Christmas day had been long and tiring for everyone.

"Will they go soon?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah. Tomorrow" I replied. I was sitting outside the playhouse, and they were passing cups of tea out to me in an attempt to play café. I tried ordering coffee but apparently they didn't make that. I had been invited into the playhouse, but it wasn't that big and I didn't fancy being inside a small, hot, hut just at the moment.

Fresh air was much better. Fresh air and imaginary tea.

"I don't like Aroha" Amelia grumbled.

"I like 'ama!" Felicia said brightly. I had a feeling that was the kid she'd bitten. Fuck, I thought, I hope she's not biting the kids she likes. Surely no one in their right mind would like Mickey.

"It doesn't matter if you don't like her" I said to Amelia. "She's a guest and you have to be nice to her."

"Yeah" Amelia sighed, handing me another cup. "That's what Mum says."

"Well, she's right."

"Mmm. Still don't like her" Amelia muttered.

"She's not here now, so you don't have to worry about it, Ames" I said, lying down on the grass and closing my eyes. That was kind of restful. Well it was until Felicia decided she might stand on my chest as though I was some kind of surfboard.

SPOV

I actually enjoyed my sad little trip to the fruit shop on Dominion Road. It wasn't a particularly nice fruit shop, and there wasn't a lot to look at. But it was good to be out of the house and on my own and just be for a bit. I wandered around picked lots of stuff up. Strawberries were a good deal so I got some of those. And some leeks. And the apples I needed for the crumble, plus a big bunch of flowers from near the checkout.

By the time I got back home I didn't even mind that Jason was still there. He was making himself scarce though, and was out in the tent. Hopefully he knew he wasn't my favourite person.

I started the fruit stewing and figured I might as well start on the crumble I'd promised. Or been talked into. That was always the problem with Jason, even when you knew all about his charm, you still somehow ended up doing what he wanted you to do.

I blamed my mother. She was the one who'd started it, after all. If she'd just left Jason to fend for himself a bit more he would have been fine. Absolutely not a problem.

Oh, who was I kidding? I thought, as I peeled another apple. He'd still be Jason.

EPOV

Sookie busied herself in the kitchen when she got back. "You OK?" I asked her.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just a bit tired and grumpy really."

"Mmm. Lot's of us are, I think. Amelia just burst into tears because the sun was coming through the window of the playhouse and making it too hot."

Sookie nodded. "I can kind of understand how she feels."

Jason walked in from the front door. "Hey, Eric" he said. "Help me pack up the tent?"

"Oh" I said. "You guys are going today?" I thought it was the next day, but maybe I was wrong. I could hope.

"Nah, but we're leaving really early tomorrow. It's a six hour drive, eh? So we'll leave about 6 in the morning. It's easier if we pack up today and sleep inside tonight. You don't mind, do you?"

"Uh…no." Fuck, I thought. That's all we needed.

"Right, come on then. Let's take it down." Jason started to walk off.

"Do we have to time this?" I asked.

"No" Jason replied. "But points are awarded for how neatly we can get it all folded up."

Fuck they were a competitive family.

By the time we had the tent down Crystal had arrived back with the kids, and a whole heap of plastic shopping bags which she dragged out in order to show Sookie and Jason. Jason looked vaguely interested, Sookie asked lots of questions about prices.

I went back outside. I was going to check on the girls but I noticed that Wayne was sitting by himself down the side of the house again. I didn't particularly want to talk to him, but...well I went anyway.

"Hey" I said. "How was the shopping?" I sat down next to him, leaning against the side of the house.

"Fuckin' stink, eh? I hate shopping."

"Me too. Unless it's for something I really want."

Wayne looked at me. "Yeah" he said slowly, "Yeah…it must be nice to have money?"

"Yeah" I said. "But I didn't always have. And I have to work hard for it."

Wayne nodded. "I wish I had money, eh?"

"Well, one day you will. If you work hard. Do you like school?"

"School fuckin' sucks." I nodded, I could kind of relate to that. I didn't remember liking it all that much. "Did you go to university?" he asked me.

"Um. Yeah. I did."

Wayne nodded. "Mum said I should, eh? She says that's the best thing to do. Even Jase said he wished he'd bloody gone when he's up to his arms in fuckin' cowshit."

I could understand how that would get old really quickly. "What would you do?" I asked.

"Dunno. Don't really know anyone who's gone, eh?"

"Well…there are lots of things you could do." I was totally out of my depth here. I had no idea how it worked in New Zealand.

Wayne was quiet for a while. Then he turned and looked at the old barbecue. "Still, it'd be pretty sweet to have money, eh?"

"What would you do with it?" I asked.

"Buy stuff. Like a car, one with a really awesome stereo system. And an Xbox. And an electric guitar, with a really big amp. And…and…I'd buy stuff for Mum, eh?"

"For your Mum?"

"Yeah, she'd like that, eh?" He looked at the barbecue again. "I'd buy her a barbecue" he said quietly.

"A…barbecue?"

"Yeah. That's what he was supposed to get her, he promised."

"Who? Jason?" I had the feeling I'd missed a bit of the story.

"Nah. Tama and Aroha's dad. The fuckwit from Hawera. He said he'd get her one. They drove in to The Warehouse and picked it out and everything. And she found the docket for it and showed me. But then he fucked off. And we thought he'd taken it with him, the fucker, although Mum said he couldn't fit it in his car. But we saw it. It was at my Auntie's house. Auntie Te Hana." Wayne paused. "Fuck, Mum wanted to give her a hidin' eh? But my uncle, he told her not to be so bloody stupid. Te Hana was hanging around with that pakeha cop and Mum'd just get done for it." Wayne stopped again, and just shrugged. "So I'd buy her a barbecue, to make up for the one that fuckin' slut got, eh?"

"You can have that one" I said. It wasn't much good to us now.

Wayne looked at the ground "I don't have any money, eh?" Well, not much. Jase pays me for helping him sometimes, but I spent most of it."

"What have you got?"

Wayne screwed up his face and thought for a bit. "Um…dunno. Maybe, like, five bucks or something?"

"You can have that for a dollar."

"Really?" he asked me.

"Yeah. It's second-hand. Well third-hand really. It belonged to some other guy before me."

"Choice!" Wayne looked really excited. He took off running around the front of the house calling out "Mum! Hey, Mum!" I stood up and walked inside. Whatever Sookie was making in the kitchen smelt fucking delicious.

SPOV

It was hot in the kitchen again. But I got the crumble made. Eric hovered around wanting a taste, but I told him he had to wait until after dinner. He grumbled a bit at that but didn't push it.

We spent the afternoon on the deck, chatting to Crystal and Jason. I was starting to relax knowing they were going soon. Well, tomorrow. I loved Jason, but living with him was hard work. The kids were pretty good, there were a few more fights amongst the girls, but mostly they all behaved. And Felicia didn't bite anyone, which was nice.

Wayne was buzzing, having apparently bought our old barbecue off Eric. "Did you really charge him for it?" I asked Eric. That seemed a bit mean. Really, we should be paying them for disposing of it.

Eric shrugged. "I charged him a dollar, Sookie. Otherwise it's just charity."

I didn't think there was anything wrong with charity. It was more like a gift. If I'd known Crystal wanted it she could have had it, but Eric and Wayne were happy with their scheme so I kept out of it.

I tried to do the Jamie Oliver bubble and squeak for dinner, to get rid of the leftover potatoes and veges from the day before. Eric had said he would find it on the internet for me, after he didn't let me write the recipe down, but he hadn't been able to. Apparently it was a really shitty website with a really fucking useless search function. I didn't like to say he was wrong, but...maybe I wouldn't listen to him on that one again. In the meantime, I did what I could from memory.

It turned out alright, and everyone filled up on crumble anyway. Luckily I had made three, although I was only serving up two. Eric looked pretty pleased there was still a small one left over, and helped himself to seconds. And thirds. Jason was putting a lot of it away as well, it had his seal of approval as apparently I had hit the right 'crumble to filling ratio' which meant that there was more crumble than fruit in there.

But after dinner I went over to Jason. "Come on" I said, holding the extra crumble and the flowers. "We're going out."

"Where are we going Sook?" Jason looked up from the game of Trouble he was playing with Amelia, Tama and Aroha. He seemed a bit confused.

"Well first we're taking this crumble around to Mr Dearborn to say thank-you for the rhubarb and sorry about trampling all over his garden yesterday." Jason looked a bit sheepish. Eric looked annoyed that 'his' crumble was walking out the door. "And then" I continued, "we're going to the graves."

"Oh" Jason said. "Oh yeah. Good idea, Sook."

Mr Dearborn was very appreciative of the crumble. He promised me more rhubarb, which would please Eric. And then Jason and I drove to the cemetery in Otahuhu which held everyone's graves; Mum, Dad and Gran and Granddad. Jason and I were both kind of quiet there; it was always a sad place as far as I was concerned. But it felt good to be there with Jason. We were the last ones left of our branch of the family. And sometimes you just had to suck it up and face the fact that it was your job to remember those who weren't here now.

And one day I guessed I'd have to take Amelia and Felicia to see Bill's grave. But I hadn't quite got to that point yet.

Afterwards I took Jason for a drink at the pub in Mt Eden. Well, a drink for him. I begged off saying I was driving and the checkpoints would be everywhere. Jason didn't even bat an eyelid. Sometimes it was good that he was mostly interested in himself.

We had a chat about life in general, and it was nice. It was so nice we made plans to go to the cricket when Jason was on his way back through to the farm. Eric would love it, he'd never been. It would be a good day out.

Sometimes you have these great ideas in the heat of the moment.

When we got back most of the kids were in bed. Well, mine were. The living room was full of airbeds for Jason, Crystal and her kids and it was like a big slumber party in there. I said goodnight and headed into the bedroom.

"Hey" Eric said when I walked in. "How was it?"

"Good" I replied, kicking off my shoes, and putting my bag in the wardrobe. "Good, but sad, you know?"

Eric looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything. I didn't know about his grandparents, and whether he'd known any family that had died. I wanted to ask, but thought maybe we'd leave it for another time.

I put my pyjamas on and climbed onto the bed, snuggling into Eric's side. "Nearly over" I said.

"Yeah" Eric agreed. "They're going in the morning."

"They are. Although… um, Jason's going to call in on his way back down in a few weeks. We're going to the cricket."

"Are you? That'll be nice" Eric said absentmindedly, while still looking at his book.

"Yeah, well you've got the shirt now. It'll be a fun day out!" I said brightly.

"Oh. I'm going?" Eric asked, looking at me.

"Of course you are. You know it's in the rules!"

"What, for being married to you?"

"No! In order to get residency. I'm sure they'll check."

"That I've been to the cricket?" Eric asked slowly, frowning.

"Yep!" I said, nodding vigorously.

"Are you bullshitting me, Sookie?" Eric asked.

"No!" I said, getting up and walking towards the bathroom. "Would I do that? I'm sneaky, but I'm not _that_ bad."

"Mmm" Eric said, sounding as though he was reserving judgment.

When I came out again Eric was still frowning. "It's OK" I said. "I'll explain all the rules to you."

"Yeah, that's what worries me. I don't think you realise just how many sacrifices I have to make for you Sookie."

"What sacrifices?" I snorted. "The cricket is a fun day out watching sport. You're a bloke..."

"Guy."

"Whatever! You like sport. It's definitely NOT a sacrifice."

"Yes it is. Between that and having to wake up and service you and having all my mince pies eaten by Jason. Fuck, its hard work being your husband you know."

I giggled. "Yeah, poor you."

"Poor me, indeed Sookie." Eric reached over and turned out the light. "Just wake me up when you need sex again" he said cheerfully.

"Yeah, you wish. Not with the house-full we've got tonight."

"It didn't stop you this morning, Sookie."

I wanted to say something smart back, but I was stumped on that one. In the end I just said "'Night, Eric"

"Goodnight Sookie." He kissed my shoulder. "I love you. Even though you do make me perform with an audience sometimes."

"Shut up"

"But I cope, because it's for you."

"I will explain all the fielding positions in cricket if you're not careful, Eric!"

He laughed, but didn't say anything else. And then, after a while, he made some snoring noises. But he wasn't snoring of course. And then finally, I fell asleep as well.

**A/N I had some questions about the Christmas mince pies. Here's a link to a fairly basic recipe. Even if you don't want to make it yourself, if you read the ingredients it'll give you an idea of the taste. **

**http:/www (dot) stuff (dot) co (dot) nz/life-style/food-wine/recipes/4457944/Feeling-fruity-Mince-pie-recipe**

**And for anyone interested in the rhubarb and apple crumble, here's a recipe for that.**

**http:/ www (dot) foodlovers (dot) co (dot) nz/recipes/rhubarb-and-apple-crumble (dot) html**

**Thanks for reading!**


	32. Chapter 32

**A/N Hello! Back for another week. Thanks for all the lovely reviews, and thank-you to everyone who's just reading this as well. You guys are fantastic.**

**Disclaimer: Nope, nothing's mine.**

SPOV

I woke with a start, hearing people moving around the house. I wriggled free of Eric and peered at the clock. It was 4.45am. I sighed. My bloody dad and his stupid insistence on always beating the traffic had a lot to answer for. For some reason the need to leave at an ungodly hour if you had a long drive was the only lesson Jason seemed to have absorbed from Dad.

I climbed out of bed, threw on a cardi, and headed out to the kitchen, first making a brief stop in the bathroom.

"Morning" I said to Jason, realising as I said it that I sounded pretty grumpy.

Jason turned and looked me up and down. "You look like crap" he said.

"Well, that's because it's the middle of the bloody night Jason."

"Jesus, you're soft these days Sookie. Dad used to make us get up at 4am, remember?"

"Dad had an exaggerated sense of the traffic on the Harbour Bridge. And you…well, you're used to this. Cows and everything." I leaned on the kitchen bench and folded my arms.

"Yep. Gotta get up and keep the cows happy. Cup of tea, Sook?" I looked at Jason to see if he was trying to compare me to the cows, but he wasn't giving anything away. He just stood there, holding a cup aloft and waiting for me to reply.

"Yeah, go on then" I said.

Crystal came into the kitchen just as Jason was handing me my tea. "Morena Sookie!" she said, kind of brightly. I guess living with Jason had made her used to getting up early too.

Jason pushed a cup of tea in her direction. "Oh. Ka pai, Jase" she said happily, taking a sip. OK, I decided, Crystal was definitely a morning person too. Maybe this was why she and Jason worked so well.

Tama wandered in. He didn't look like a morning person, he looked really sleepy. "Go and get dressed, I put your clothes out on the couch" Crystal said, turning him around and pushing him back out of the kitchen. "Kids, eh?" she said to me. "You have to tell them the same thing 10 times until it sinks in."

"Yeah. They're…um. Hard work sometimes." I was struggling to make conversation now. I figured that I probably needed coffee, not tea. I wondered if it would be mean to go and wake Eric up so he could make me some.

I didn't have to wonder much longer because just then Eric arrived in the kitchen as well. I realised that four adults, one of them Eric-sized, made the kitchen look really, really small. Still, I thought, it looked better now it was yellow than it had when it was that terrible dark blue.

I'd kind of drifted off I figured, when I noticed that Eric was peering at me closely. "You alright?" he asked.

"Yeah, just tired."

"So, um, anyway" Crystal said "Thanks so much for everything, for letting us stay and have Christmas. Even if I did bring Jason!" Eric and I laughed at that, and Jason just pulled a face at Crystal, who swatted him on the arm without turning to look at him. "And, um, thanks for…you know, sorting Wayne out with that barbecue…it's really great. Are you guys sure you don't want it?"

"Oh, no. No, Wayne's bought it now. We don't really need two of them" Eric said, putting his arm around my shoulders so I could lean against him. That was nice, but it was also a bit dangerous as there was every chance I might just nod off.

"Well, if you're sure…" Crystal said.

"Completely" Eric assured her.

"Choice" Crystal said, enthusiastically. "It's nice isn't it Jase?" Jason nodded but didn't say anything as he had a mouthful of marmite toast. "I think it's better than Te Hana's isn't it?"

Jason nodded again, and swallowed his mouthful. "Yeah, probably" he said. "Don't know if I've ever been to her house."

"No, you wouldn't bloody want to. She's um, she's a bloody man-eater. Remember? That night in the pub? She tried to get you to take her home?"

"What? Oh yeah, she's pretty full-on, eh?" Jason took another sip of his tea.

"She's pretty fuckin' gross. You wouldn't want to get anywhere near her." Crystal seemed to think that settled the matter and just went back to drinking her tea. "So thank-you, anyway. For putting up with us. All of us" she said to Eric and I.

I was feeling pretty drowsy, so I nodded and then I just stood there and sipped my tea. Eric lent over and sniffed the contents of my cup, but wrinkled his nose in disgust when he discovered it wasn't coffee.

Aroha came in at that point. "Mum" she said. "Mum where's the hairbrush?"

"In my bag" Crystal said.

"No, it's not. I looked" Aroha grumbled.

"I'll show you" Crystal said, walking out of the kitchen.

Jason finished his tea. "Cheers, Eric. For that barbecue, eh?" he said. "Wayne's so fuckin' pleased he could buy it for Crystal. I dunno why he wanted it, eh? I mean, the one at my place isn't that shit-hot, but it's OK. And it's not like Crystal spends a lot of time at her place anymore. But Wayne gets ideas in his head sometimes. So I'm sorry if…well, if he pushed you into giving it to him, eh? He can be a pushy little bugger at times."

Eric shrugged. "It's fine. I offered it to him."

Jason nodded. "Thanks, mate" he said, giving Eric a pat on the arm, before putting his cup in the dishwasher. I wasn't going to miss Jason using all the cups when he'd gone.

Wayne burst into the kitchen next. Yeah, he looked pretty wide awake for just after 5am too. Although he still seemed to be wearing his pyjamas and he obviously hadn't been anywhere near the brush that Crystal had gone to look for.

"Hey, Jase" he said, excitedly. "Can I drive with you? In the ute? Mum said she was going to be a mental case by the time we get there with three of us in the car. Me too. Bloody Tama, eh? He never shuts up. And Aroha just moans all the bloody time. So can I go with you? Please?"

Jason frowned while rinsing his plate. "I don't know" he said, "Do you think you can behave?"

"Yeah!" Wayne said, defensively. "I'm not a bloody kid, eh?"

Jason sighed. "Fine" he said in the end. "But you have to fuckin' behave, eh? Or else I'll bloody leave you on the side of the side of the road for your mum to collect."

"Choice!" Wayne said, running off. I could hear him saying "Tama! I don't have to go with you fullas in Mum's heap, eh? I'm going in the ute."

Jason sighed, "Everything's going to get fuckin' sticky, eh?" he looked at me pointedly.

"What?" I said, "My car wasn't that bad!" Jason had spent a long time listing all the things that were wrong with my car when we'd been out in it the previous night.

"The raisins, Sookie. There were fuckin' raisins everywhere. The door-handles were sticky and that was fuckin' awful music you were singing along to."

"The Wiggles aren't _that_ bad" I grumbled.

Felicia walked in at that point, carrying Sockie and looking pretty bright. "Wiggles?" she asked reaching for Eric's hands.

"Mummy likes the Wiggles, doesn't she?" Eric said, picking her up.

"Yeah. Where's Amala?" Felicia asked, looking around the kitchen as though her new vantage point would enable her to find her sister.

"In bed" I answered.

"No, I'm here" Amelia's voice said from the hallway, just before she appeared. "Everyone is really loud. I could hear Tama and Aroha having a fight in the bathroom. It's naughty to fight like that, isn't it Mummy?"

"Well, it's not good…" I agreed, thinking that knowing it was naughty didn't stop Amelia doing it herself.

"Is it breakfast?" Amelia asked.

"No, it's too early. We're going back to bed soon" Eric said.

"But we're up now!" Amelia tried to argue. "Everyone's up, so it must be up-time. Isn't it Mummy? It's up-time?"

"Um…" I looked at Eric who was shaking his head rather violently. "It's not up-time" I said.

"You lot are bloody soft" Jason said, and he walked out of the kitchen.

"What did he mean, Mummy?" Amelia asked frowning.

"Um, he thinks we're silly for not wanting to get up now" I said to her. Felicia was now trying to bend backwards so Eric would be encouraged to swing her around a bit. She was definitely wide awake. I was feeling a bit more awake, but not much.

"Well, he's right" Amelia said. "We should get up now. I want peanut butter toast."

"Not yet, Ames. It's not breakfast-time" Eric told her.

"Oh! You suck!" Amelia said, and then she stomped out of the room.

"Well, I guess there's worse things she could have picked up from the other kids" I said to Eric.

"Mmm" he agreed, trying to manage Felicia's contortions.

About fifteen minutes later we were standing by the front door saying a final goodbye to Jason, Crystal and the kids. Tama and Aroha dutifully said goodbye to everyone, after much prompting from Crystal. Amelia required the same amount of prompting as she was still upset she couldn't have breakfast and we were all going back to bed soon. There'd been a lot of muttering about how 'everyone else' had eaten without her. I'd just ignored it, I really wasn't equipped to deal with Amelia when half asleep.

"Bye!" Felicia said brightly, holding out Sockie to Tama. He just frowned at it and curled his lip. Yeah, no one else much understood the appeal of Sockie. It didn't seem to upset Felicia at all.

Jason hugged me. "Bye Sook!" he said, "Thanks for having us. See you in a couple of weeks, eh? You'll get the tickets?"

"Yeah, I'll organise the cricket."

"Choice. I'll owe you. See you, Eric. Good luck with this lot, eh? You're fuckin' out-numbered. You're even starting to dress like them."

Eric shrugged, and just shook Jason's hand. In my sleep-deprived state it took me a moment to catch on to what Jason was on about. I looked at Eric and realised he'd thrown on the pink t-shirt I'd bought him. I felt like it was my job to say something smart back to Jason about his dress-sense, but I couldn't think of anything. I was way too tired.

Crystal gave it a go though. "At least it isn't more hole than shirt Jason. Fuck, some of yours are fuckin' shredded, eh?"

Jason ignored that comment. I just muttered "Yet" under my breath, which made Eric turn to look at me, but I ignored him. Honestly, I didn't see either of them making any best dressed lists anytime soon.

"Bye Sookie" Crystal said, hugging me. "Thanks for everything, really. It's been fun, eh?" She smiled at me, and I did at least manage to smile back. "Yeah, it's been nice having you guys around" I said.

Crystal shook Eric's hand and then looked around. "Where's Wayne?" she asked Jason. Jason just shrugged, "Dunno" he said.

Just then the horn on Jason's ute blasted. Bloody hell, I thought, please don't wake up all my neighbours. We walked outside to find Wayne already sitting in the ute, with his head out the window. "Come on, youse fullas!" he called. "You're bloody takin' ages, eh? What's the hold-up?"

"Jesus Christ" Jason muttered.

"Be nice!" I warned Jason, nudging him. "You were just as annoying at that age. You still are most of the time."

"Yeah? And you're still as fuckin' bossy, eh?"

"Oh, I am not! Now go and get in the ute! And drive sensibly."

Crystal was getting Tama and Aroha organised, and climbed into the driver's seat of her car. "Nga mihi o Te Tau Hau ki a koutou katoa" she called out.

"Um, bye!" I yelled back.

"She said Happy New Year" Jason translated for me.

"Oh. Oh, yeah. Happy New Year to you too!" I called to Crystal, and then she started the car and drove off.

"Have they gone already?" Wayne asked, looking worried.

"Yeah, but we'll catch up, eh mate?" Jason said, walking around to his side of the ute.

"See you, Wayne. Be good!" I said through the window to Wayne.

"Yeah, see you Auntie! Its choice here, can I come back?"

"Um, maybe. Sometime."

"Cool." Wayne looked thoughtful. "Bye, Eric" he said in the end.

"Bye, Wayne" Eric replied.

Jason started the ute. I leaned in and whispered to Wayne "If he gets annoying, just change the temperature for the air-con." Wayne didn't reply, but just grinned at me as I stood back.

"See youse!" Jason said, and then he gunned the engine and roared off into the early morning. I looked at the house across the road. I really hoped that light I just saw switch on over there was coincidence. In case it wasn't, I decided I didn't want to be standing on the footpath looking guilty if they looked out the window, so I turned and hightailed it back into the house.

Eric caught up to me in a couple of strides. "Are you that anxious?" he asked.

"What?" I said, confused. "I don't think they'll _do_ anything, but I don't want there to be proof that it was my rellies that woke everyone in the neighbourhood up."

Eric sighed. "No. I meant to get back to bed. I figured now we were awake you'd be all over me." He gave my backside a rub, which suggested that maybe it was more about him being all over me.

I snorted. "Yeah, you wish. I'm tired. I'm going back to sleep." I stuck my head into the family room. "Back to bed, please" I said to the kids.

"But it's up-time!" Amelia argued. "Look! The sun is coming up now!"

"Bed" Eric said over my shoulder.

Felicia scuttled past him giggling and he turned to chase her down the hall and put her back to bed. I escorted Amelia back to her room and tried to ignore all her arguments about how it was really morning and she wasn't sleepy. In the end I did agree that she could look at some books if she really couldn't sleep. I really hoped she could.

When I got back to our room Eric was already in bed. "So" he said, putting his arms behind his head. "Just tell me what I have to do. You know, to service you this morning."

I climbed in next to him. "Go to sleep Eric."

He sighed. "But I'm awake now."

"You sound like Amelia. That argument didn't work for her either."

"How about this one?" Eric said, leaning over to kiss me. Yeah, that was nice. Maybe it wasn't such a stupid idea, I thought. We were awake now, after all.

And then a pair of small feet skittered into the room. "Bed!" Felicia yelled happily, throwing herself at the side of the bed and trying to scramble up. After a few seconds she finally got her legs up and onto the bed.

Eric sighed and rolled over to look at her. "What are you doing here, Leesh?" he asked.

Felicia looked thoughtful, and sucked Sockie for a bit while she was thinking. "Snuggles?" she asked.

"OK then" Eric agreed, and Felicia climbed over Eric to wriggle in between the two of us, pushing us apart in the process.

"Do you think she's trying to tell us something?" Eric asked.

"Yep" I agreed. "It's a wonder anyone ever has more than one child." I lay on my side and tried to ignore the fact that Felicia was playing with my hair, and then I dozed off again.

When I woke up again for the second time that morning I felt really, really groggy. Amelia was standing next to the bed. "Sun's really up now, Mum!" she said plaintively.

I looked over at Eric and Felicia. Felicia was sprawled out on her back, with one hand half across Eric's face. Neither of them were stirring. I sighed, and swung my legs out of bed. I guessed I was getting up to keep Amelia company then.

Amelia and I had finished breakfast and two games of Trouble by the time Felicia and Eric emerged. Eric didn't say anything, just looked at the coffeemaker and sighed, before he opened the pantry door and pulled the coffee out.

Everyone was a bit quiet and subdued. It was very quiet now with just the four of us. Even Amelia and Felicia's arguments seemed less enthusiastic today.

It was so quiet that I just about jumped when the phone rang. It was Tara, inviting us around to see the new swimming pool they'd had installed. I had been looking forward to a quiet day at home, but, well, it was a hot day. And it was a swimming pool. I loved swimming pools.

I put down the phone and headed off to round up the family.

It took a while to get everyone organised. It wasn't easy to put sunblock on both kids, who were now squirmy and excited by the prospect of going swimming. It was worse trying to get the sunblock on Eric, who really didn't like the spray stuff with the cooling effect and made me chase him around the house while the kids watched us.

I probably didn't have to chase him, of course. I probably should have just decided that he was old enough to sort it out for himself and it was his own fault if he got sunburnt and spent the night in agony. But it was kind of fun. Even if Amelia did stand there going "What are you _doing_ Mummy?" And it felt quite good when I actually managed to corner him in the living room and shove the hand that was holding the can of sunblock up under his t-shirt so I could spray him.

I'm pretty sure Amelia was shaking her head at that point.

So we eventually got to Tara and JB's. Walking around the side of their house I could hear Charlotte and Lachlan yelling and splashing. "Hi" I called out, as we opened the gate to the deck.

"Oh, hi there" Tara said. "Merry Christmas." She and JB were sitting under the sun umbrella.

"Yeah. Same to you. So the pool's a success then?" I asked, putting my enormous beachbag down on a sunlounger. I had a lot of stuff. And that was for only four of us. I hoped that one more kid wasn't going to mean travelling with too much more. My shoulders wouldn't take it.

"Yep. They've barely been out of there since it was finished last week. It's brilliant! It's the best thing for entertaining them, and they're both fast asleep by about 8 o'clock at night."

"Sounds great" I agreed, kicking off my jandals and turning around to take Amelia's top and shorts off, as she had her swimsuit on underneath. Eric had put Felicia down and was trying to do the same to her. She was staring a bit worriedly at the pool. She hadn't been swimming very often in her short life and I wasn't sure how she was going to take to this.

I clipped Amelia's backfloat around her chest and pushed some armbands onto Felicia. She just continued to stare at the pool. "Sockie?" she asked.

"He'd get wet" I explained.

She nodded and frowned a bit.

"OK, everybody set?" I asked. Amelia nodded. Felicia looked worried and Eric looked, well he looked a bit worried too. "How deep is it?" I asked Tara.

"Um. About here?" she said, holding a hand in a line just above her bust.

"Right" I said "Come on." I held Amelia's hand as we walked over to the pool and Eric carried Felicia. "Hi, Charlotte. Hi, Lachlan", I called out to Tara's kids, but I didn't get a lot of response as Charlotte was currently jumping into the pool and trying to knock her brother off a lilo in the process. There was a lot of splashing.

Eric stopped at the top of the steps down. "Wait here" I said to Amelia, getting her to stand next to Eric. I walked further down the side and jumped in. Yeah, it was a bit chilly, but it was better to just get these things over with. I walked over the steps. "Come on, Amelia" I said. She stepped down a couple of steps and then jumped into the water, before doing a very inelegant doggy-paddle to me, grinning all the way. The backfloat was great for keeping her head above water, but it left her basically vertical and meant she had no style. She was mostly just treading water. But she was happy.

Felicia was not so happy. Eric was standing on the second step down, and she was staring at the water. He stepped down another one, wincing as he did so, and Felicia's eyes got even wider. "Nooo, Daddy!" she whispered.

Amelia seemed OK splashing around so I held out my arms to Felicia. Perhaps she'd be better with the parent who wasn't scared of the water himself I thought. Felicia wasn't buying that though, and clung to Eric.

"Come on" I said to her. "I won't drop you." I walked up a couple of steps and took Felicia out of Eric's arms. He promptly sat on the edge of the pool and gave up all pretence of getting in. Felicia wriggled around and tried to get back to Eric.

"Look, its just water. Like the bath" I said to her as we went down a step and I crouched down a bit so her feet could touch the water, but she kept looking over at Eric.

I looked over at him. "I think she wants you to get in too" I said.

"Really?" Eric asked, like I was making this stuff up.

"Really. Go on, be a role-model for not being scared of a swimming pool."

Eric snorted. "I'm not scared, Sookie. It's just…well; it's not that warm is it?"

"It's fine Eric. Just get in and you'll warm up soon enough." Eric looked like he really didn't believe that.

"Daddy?" Felicia asked, looking at him pleadingly.

"Oh, alright." Eric said in the end. He walked down the rest of the steps and just stood there, screwing his face up.

"See!" I said to Felicia, "Daddy got in!"

"I'm in too!" Amelia said, paddling around me. Her little arms and legs were working overtime; this was going to wear her out.

It took me a bit more persuasion, but I managed to get Felicia and Eric all the way into the water. Once Eric was under, Felicia cheered up immensely, although she wasn't letting go of either of us anytime soon. Amelia invented a new game which involved repeatedly jumping off the steps into my arms and before I knew it we'd been in the water for about 40 minutes and I hadn't managed to swim at all myself yet.

"OK, my two. Inside!" Tara yelled, which caused a fair amount of whinging from the other end of the pool. "You've been in there for an hour and a half, it's time to get out" Tara said. Reluctantly Charlotte and Lachlan swam over to their mother and got out so she could hand them both towels and send them inside to get dressed.

"It's probably time for us to get out too" I said to Amelia.

"Nooo!" she protested.

"You'll start to look like a fish if you stay in any longer" Eric said to her.

"I don't want to be a fish!" Amelia said, looking horrified.

"Do you want me to take the pair of them in and get them dried while you two swim for a bit?" Tara asked me.

"Oh yeah, that'd be great" I said. "Go on, you guys go in with Aunty Tara."

Amelia sighed, but did as she was told. Felicia looked a bit worried, but accepted what was happening. They disappeared into the house and then it was just Eric and I.

"Finally" I said, as I allowed myself to sink under the water and then come up again. I swam a length while Eric just watched. And then I swam another. I was really enjoying this. We'd had a pool when I was a kid, not a very big one, but still. It was lovely on a hot day.

Eric was just standing in the centre of the pool and I wondered idly if I could pull him under like Jason and I had always tried to do to each other as kids. Might as well have a go I thought. So I tried swimming down and grabbing his ankle so I could pull his leg out from under him.

It was harder than I thought it would be. I came up for air and Eric was just looking at me. Bugger, I thought, he was kind of on to me. But I thought I might give it another go. I tried again, but Eric just kept moving away, slowly, in much the same way that Bob could side-step Felicia when she was just learning to crawl. In the end I had to come up for air.

When I surfaced Eric just looked at me with his arms folded. "What are you doing, Sookie?" he asked.

"Um. Having fun" I replied, diving under for another try. Nope, I still couldn't do it. If he would just stand still it would be a lot easier.

"You're not very good at this, are you?" he said, smirking.

"Oh…shut up" I said to him. I swam over to the edge of the pool and leaned against the edge. Eric walked over to stand beside me. "I don't know what you were trying to achieve there" Eric said, "but whatever it was, I don't think you succeeded."

"You know, you can be really annoying sometimes" I said, turning to look at him.

Eric shrugged. "You like me really" he commented.

"I like you _mostly_" I said, a bit grumpily. Eric just moved to put a hand either side of me and pin me to the side of the pool. However, for once, I saw that one coming and ducked under the water, pushing off from the side to get away. That'll fix him, I thought. I swam around behind Eric and jumped on his back. "Got you!" I cried.

Eric just swung me around to his front, managing to sandwich me between him and the side of the pool. "What was that?" he asked. Bugger, I thought. That didn't work either. Eric chuckled. Yeah, he was pretty convinced he'd won.

Still, I reasoned. It wasn't too bad being pinned up against Eric in the pool like this. I was kind of enjoying it. I just leaned against him, and put my head on his chest. OK, I was enjoying it a lot.

Perhaps I was even enjoying it too much. After a few moments Eric whispered "Sookie! Sookie, can you please stop rubbing yourself against me like that?"

I frowned at him. He had such an imagination; of course I wasn't doing anything like that. Except that then I realised that maybe I was. I wasn't really rubbing myself against him, it was more like a gentle…um, well I didn't think I was being that crude anyway. But I was definitely doing something.

Stupid, stupid hormones.

"Sorry" I whispered back.

"Yeah, sure you are" Eric said, giving me a stern look. "I won't be safe until you're pregnant, will I?"

"Shut up."

"It's getting so I'm scared to walk around a corner of the hallway in case you jump me." Eric adopted a martyred air as he said this. Yeah, he had it tough.

I was trying to think of a good response to that, when Amelia appeared by the edge of the pool, dressed but with wet hair. "Are you still in there?" she asked us. "Aunty Tara says there's nibbles."

"OK, we'll be there in a minute" I called back as she disappeared from view.

"I suppose I should be pleased you're prepared to nibble on something other than me for a bit" Eric said, with another mock-sigh. He let go of me, but not before he had a good feel of my bum, and started to walk towards the steps. I figured I had one last chance. I pushed off the wall, dived under and grabbed his ankle one last time.

I'd obviously managed to distract him before because this time, he actually slipped under the water. He emerged just after I did, spluttering a bit. "Yay!" I said, throwing both arms in the air.

Eric just shook his head. "I'm just not safe, am I Sookie?" he said, as he started to walk up the steps.

"Nope. Better watch out" I agreed, patting his butt. Eric turned around, but he didn't say anything. He just carried on over to the deck to pick up his towel.

**Morena - (More-ray-nah) Morning**

**Ka pai - (Car pie) Good one**

**Te Hana (Teh Har-nah)**

**Nga mihi o Te Tau Hau ki a koutou katoa (Nah mee-hee oh Teh Tow How kee ah cow-tow car-towa - with 'tow' sounded out like the first syllable of towel) Wishing you all a very happy new year.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	33. Chapter 33

**A/N It's hot here today! Seriously, I almost considered looking for a job because at least there'd be air-con. But that was just a silly, fleeting thought. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

It had been fucking nice to get rid of all the houseguests. Jason was fine in small doses. Very small doses. But it was starting to seem like he'd been there forever. It would be nice not to have Sookie disappearing off on trips to graveyards and joining Jason in drinking his endless cups of tea.

And it was very fucking nice to have Sookie feeling so frisky. She kept trying to deny it, but she was really fucking horny. It got a bit tricky when she decided to rub herself all over me when we were in Tara's swimming pool. As nice as it was, it wasn't really somewhere I could do anything about it. And it was really hard not to want to do something about it. I was pretty mesmerized by the drops of water on the top of her boobs, and the fact I could feel her nipples through her swimsuit top

She really didn't fucking play fair sometimes.

And when she wasn't rubbing herself all over me, she was trying to drown me. As nice as it was to be the focus of all of Sookie's attention for a while, I really didn't need her constantly trying to pull me under the water. The water was fucking freezing for a start, and, although it did get better after a while, I wasn't intending to be completely submerged.

Sookie had other ideas, however. And in the end it was easier to let her get her own way.

We got out of the pool and Sookie pulled a couple of towels out of that ridiculously huge bag she insisted on bringing with her. I still didn't quite understand why every time we left the house she felt the need to bring half our belongings with us. Not to mention all the stuff she kept in the trunk of her car 'just in case'. I sometimes wondered what would happen if we got stranded overnight. It would be tempting to find out just what Sookie was hiding in that car.

I wrapped the towel around my waist and picked up the bag for Sookie. She'd nearly fallen over carrying it in before. I followed Sookie into the house just in time to hear Amelia saying "She keeps chasing him around and touching his bum. I don't get it. Bums aren't nice. She should want to kiss him like they do in the princess movies. But not all slobbery. Slobbery's yucky!"

Sookie didn't say anything, but I could see her shoulders hunch and she sped up. Fucking Amelia. She didn't miss anything and she seemed programmed to want to comment on everything she saw. And just to add to it Felicia was now chanting "Bum bum bum bum" having spied her chance to get in on the act.

I was probably an idiot for wanting to have another kid. And I realised I should probably make the most of Sookie being horny at this point in time, because fuck knows what damage three kids could do. There might never be sex again. And that was a fucking awful thought.

Still, I realised, as I followed Sookie into Tara's bathroom, there might be a few months of Sookie chasing me around. As long as the kids figured out to shut up about it, I could enjoy that at least.

Sookie was still quiet as I shut the door to the bathroom. She turned her back to me and shimmied out of her swimsuit without removing the towel she had wrapped around her chest. "You OK?" I asked her.

"Yep" she replied tersely. "Yeah…I just have to...Yeah, I'm fine."

I stepped forward and kissed her shoulder and then set about getting myself dry and dressed. Sookie didn't say anything until she was completely dressed. And then she turned around and looked at me, taking my towel and swimsuit out of my hand. "Oh bugger it" she said. "I spent all those years being a third wheel for Tara and JB. We're not that bad."

I had no idea if we were bad or not compared to them. I just shrugged. And then I followed Sookie as she walked out of the bathroom.

SPOV

It was nice in the pool with Eric. And it was really gratifying when I did manage to pull him under the water. But I was starting to feel a bit, well, out of control. It was probably a bit mean to Eric to keep chasing him around like that. I needed to get a hold of myself.

After all, even Amelia was starting to comment on what Mummy was doing. I really didn't need my four year-old thinking I was some kid of sex-starved lunatic. Or telling everyone I was at any rate.

When Eric and I emerged from the bathroom, we found the kids sitting watching TV with Tara's kids and eating some potato chips. All four of them looked tired after their swim, and Amelia was probably regretting her early start to the morning about now.

Tara was in the kitchen and as I walked in she handed me a glass of wine. Bugger. This was going to be a test.

"There you go" she said, cheerfully. "Sun's over the yard-arm, so start on that."

"Thank-you" I said, picking up the glass and just holding it in front of me. Hopefully that would suffice. I could see Eric frowning at it, but there wasn't much I could do right at the moment. And I couldn't even pass it to him to drink for me without being a little bit obvious.

"What do you want to drink, Eric?" Tara asked. "Beer?"

"Anything" Eric replied.

"JB, can you get Eric a beer?" Tara asked, turning to JB. JB opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle before handing it to Eric.

"Cheers!" Tara said "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!"

"Cheers" I re-iterated. We all clinked our glasses and I sort of waved mine in front of my face. "So the pool's really good then?" I asked, trying to deflect attention.

"Yeah, it's great. Although it's going to be hard to get the kids to agree to come to Piha now" Tara said swallowing her wine.

"When are you off?" I asked.

"Tomorrow. Or the next day. Dunno. Need to check the weather forecast, it's supposed to rain soon" JB replied, helping himself to some cheese and crackers from the platter Tara had put out on her breakfast bar.

"Yeah, well there's always a good dosing of rain after Christmas. God, I remember when we were kids waking up in the middle of the night to find Dad and the guy from the next campsite digging a trench around the tent to stop us being flooded."

"That sounds like a fun vacation" Eric said.

"Eric doesn't like tents. We made him sleep in Jason's tent the other night. He hated it" I explained. Tara and JB nodded politely. He was foreign, after all. We had to make allowances.

"It wasn't that I didn't like the tent" Eric said, trying to justify himself. "It was just…fucking uncomfortable in the tent on an airbed sleeping practically on the ground."

I snorted. "You were uncomfortable! If you were sleeping on the ground I was practically up in the air the whole bloody night." I waved my wineglass around for emphasis, but then I caught Tara looking at it, and I quickly put it down. Bugger, I thought, was she on to me?

Eric sighed. "You slept through everything, Sookie. Honestly, the kids were running around during the night, Bob fucking arrived, making a huge amount of noise. You can't have had it that bad."

"No! I knew Felicia got in with us. I didn't sleep through anything, Eric. Not like you this morning." I stopped talking and went to take a sip of my wine, and stopped myself. This was hard work.

"So Jason's alright, is he? Still with the same girlfriend?" Tara asked.

"Yeah. She's nice. Her kids are a bit full-on. Well, I think it was the effect of having five kids in the house. Not to mention all the extras on Christmas day."

"Extras?" Tara asked. That gave me an opportunity to launch into the story of how Christmas day blew out completely. I was obviously way too busy talking to drink any wine and I put my glass down on the bench. Eric stood next to me, sipping his beer and making a good dent in the nibbles, and JB did the same.

When I'd run out of things to talk about I grabbed some of the food. JB said he'd better go and switch the filter off in the swimming pool and he left the room, and then there was a shout of "Mum! Charlotte won't let me watch the TV…" so Tara had to go too.

I grabbed my wine, shot over to the sink and poured most of it down, leaving a tiny bit in the bottom of the glass. When I got back to my position standing next to Eric he just looked at me. "You're fast when you want to be" he commented, helping himself to a handful of nuts.

"Yeah, thanks for your help" I said.

"What? What was I supposed to do?"

Before I could answer Tara walked back in and sighed. "Bloody school holidays" she said. "The pair of them can't be nice to each other for five minutes. And Charlotte will push and push Lachie until he blows up and lashes out and then he gets in trouble. I've tried explaining that to JB, but he just doesn't see it."

"Mmm" I said, in a way which I hoped suggested I empathised with her. Mostly I was focussing on the brie that was on the platter, having realised I should eat all the soft cheese I could before it was off the menu. Tara watched me cut a huge wedge and shove it into my mouth. She looked like she was about to say something when JB arrived back in the kitchen.

"It's still bloody hot out there" he grumbled. "And it's starting to cloud over, too. It's going to be rainy and humid before we know it."

Tara sighed. "Should I bother packing up for Piha then, or not?" she asked him.

JB shrugged. "Dunno. Let's just wait until morning I guess. It's only a short drive."

"Yeah, but I need to get all the bedding and food sorted. It's alright for you. You just pack your wetsuit and the surfboard."

I shoved another wedge of brie in my mouth and decided this was our cue to leave. I couldn't help Tara sort this one out. "Right" I said. "We'd better get going. Thanks for this afternoon, it's been great."

"Yeah, no problem" Tara said. "You'll have to bring the kids around again when we get back from Piha. If we go to Piha."

"Yeah, will do."

I collected up our togs, towels and various flotation devices, while Eric grabbed the kids. Felicia had perked up a bit now and was jumping off Tara's couches, while being egged on by Lachlan, who had started that game. It was always the problem when you visited people with different rules. Tara might not mind kids jumping around the living room, but I wasn't keen on it. Felicia thought it was great here, though, and wasn't thrilled about leaving.

Charlotte barely looked up from the iPod she was fiddling with. Amelia had been sitting next to her trying to engage her in conversation, but not having a lot of luck. Poor Amelia, she thought Charlotte was so cool, but I'm not sure Charlotte was really that taken with Amelia.

While Eric was strapping the kids into their seats I walked over to Tara to say one last goodbye. "Thanks again" I said. "And have fun at Piha, once JB decides what you're doing on that front."

Tara sighed. "He's bloody useless sometimes. Honestly if it was up to him we'd never do anything or go anywhere." She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. "So" she said, "Anything you want to tell me?"

"What?" I asked. Tara just raised her eyebrows. And then she opened her mouth to say something else, but just then Eric yelled "Sookie, do you know where Sockie is?"

"In the bag" I yelled, turning around.

"Where in the bag?"

"They're all the same!" I said to Tara, brightly. "Right, see you guys!" I headed around to the boot to help Eric search through the bag. Phew, I thought, thank goodness for that. Sometimes Tara is far too switched on for her own good.

EPOV

I felt a bit bad for Sookie that she had to dance around with the whole drinking thing. It wasn't something I'd ever really thought about. And I'd certainly never noticed the times that she had a glass of wine in social situations. It wasn't like I could fucking talk when it came to drinking.

But all of a sudden she was stuck pretending to drink. I hadn't really seen the point of it all when she explained it to me. Really, who was going to give a fuck what we were doing? And if she was pregnant, well, that was OK wasn't it? She shouldn't be drinking, anyway.

But Sookie had some weird theory that it was bad luck for people to know you were trying, and then she said you really didn't want people to know you were pregnant for the first twelve weeks or so anyway.

"But why?" I'd asked when we'd discussed it. "What difference does it really make?"

Sookie had just sighed, and looked at the ground. "Because, Eric. Just…in case."

"In case of what?" I was still fucking lost. How long you could you reasonably hide a pregnancy anyway. Surely sooner or later someone would figure it out.

"In case…in case it doesn't take. You know. In case…I…I lose it." Sookie kept looking at the ground. "I probably won't, but you know, it's not great if you have to tell everyone it's not really…going to happen."

Fuck, I'd felt so bad when she'd said that. I just hadn't got it, and then I'd made her relive what were probably some really shitty moments in her life. And now she was stuck doing the dance of the wineglasses and really having no fun doing it.

Sookie sighed as we pulled away from Tara and JB's house. "That was fun" she said. "But a bit like hard work there in the end. I'm sure Tara suspected something" she sighed again, and looked out the window. I felt bad for her, I really fucking did.

After a while she looked at me. "What do you want for dinner? I haven't really thought of anything yet. I've been so busy trying to work out what we could feed all the guests that I'm out of practice with just feeding the four of us."

"Do you want to go out?" I asked her. Maybe that would make up for it all. She'd worked pretty fucking hard over the last few days, she probably deserved a night off.

"We'll have to find somewhere that's open. Not a lot is" Sookie said. Yeah, most stuff in Auckland seemed to shut between Christmas and New Year. And sometimes for longer than that. I guessed it was the main vacation time here at the moment, but even so. Sometimes it was really inconvenient.

"We'll find somewhere" I assured her.

She turned to look at me. "Somewhere that won't require you shaving, I guess?" Sookie asked. I shrugged. "And we'll have to take Noisy and Bouncy with us" she added.

"Are you talking about me?" Amelia piped up from the back. Sookie and I ignored her. It was easy to forget she was all ears sometimes.

We arrived home and I made some calls. The Thai restaurant around the corner from us on Mt Eden Road was open so I booked and went to find Sookie and let her know. Unfortunately, she was just getting out of the shower.

"That'll be nice" she said, when I let her know where we were eating. "Oh well, your turn in the shower now, then, so we can get ready."

"You don't want to stay and try to grab me a bit?" I asked her as she left the bathroom.

"Nah" she said over her shoulder. "It's more fun when you're all jumpy."

Dinner was nice. We'd been to the Thai place a few times and they seemed to know us. Probably from the mess that Felicia made with her spring rolls. Mostly she crumbled them. She was happy chewing on pieces of beef and chicken and Amelia liked the fact the vegetables came cut into interesting shapes.

Sookie said she was happy that someone else was cooking for once. I was just glad she seemed to be enjoying herself and she didn't have to pretend to drink any wine when it was just the four of us. In fact for most of the time, it was just the four of us in the whole restaurant. It meant the girls got lots of extra attention from the bevy of Thai waitresses who all told us how cute and well-behaved our daughters were.

They had no fucking idea.

By the time we got home the kids were looking pretty sleepy. Neither of them complained too much about bedtime, but there was a lot of whining about having to have their hair washed. "I had a swim" Amelia protested.

"Yes, and you need to wash the chlorine out now" Sookie told her.

Amelia huffed and complained but relented in the end. Felicia just looked at me like I was being mean, but had obviously decided to just bear the hair-washing trial as best she could.

When they were safely tucked up in bed I thought I'd make coffee for Sookie and I. She, however, had other ideas. "Meet me in the bedroom in five minutes" she said, and then she skipped off.

Oh yeah, I thought. That's right, the whole trying thing. I guess she was really keen to get started.

After the five minutes were up I walked in to find Sookie sitting on the bed, reclining against the pillows. She was lying slightly on her side, with her knees drawn up in a way which really drew attention to how round her ass was. But I wasn't going to tell her that. I liked that it was round, but I'd learnt that if I used that word then Sookie heard fat and no amount of explaining that they weren't actually synonyms would convince her otherwise.

And that wasn't an argument I wanted to get stuck in tonight.

She was wearing the panties I'd given her for Christmas, and, although she had a magazine open in front of her and was pretending to read it, I was pretty sure she was topless. But I'd probably have to do a closer inspection to confirm that for certain.

"Hi" Sookie breathed out, in a voice that sounded quite unlike her own.

"Um, hello" I said, just standing in the doorway. Sookie continued to look at me through her eyelashes, and then she burst into giggles. "Sorry" she said. "I can't keep it up. I suck at sultry and mysterious."

"Oh, I don't know" I said, moving closer to the bed. "You do OK. I'm really quite interested in what you're hiding behind that magazine."

Sookie held the magazine against her chest as I sat next to her on the edge of the bed. "I guess that's the mystery then, isn't it?" she said.

"Yep" I agreed, trying to prise it away from her.

"Get off, you!" she said, making no attempt to keep up her former character. Unfortunately for her she decided to try to swat me away and taking one hand off the magazine made it so much easier for me to take it out of her hands. She immediately crossed her arms over her chest, in an attempt to hide her breasts. It wasn't a very good attempt.

"What's with the coy act?" I asked.

"I thought I might make you work for it" she said, kind of sniffily.

"As opposed to just chasing me around the bedroom like you have been?"

"I haven't! You just think I have. Because…you have an inflated ego." Sookie nodded to emphasise her point.

"How about" I said "You move your arms and we see what else inflates?"

"Maybe I could be persuaded" Sookie said.

"I bought you dinner" I reminded her.

She looked thoughtful. "Well, I'd better put out then, hadn't I?" she asked, putting her arms around my neck and pulling me towards her. I nodded as I pushed her further back against the pillows.

I thought I might really fucking like this whole trying thing. It was bound to mean a few good months of this after all. I'd done enough reading to know you had to be fucking lucky to get pregnant first month. Or fucking unlucky, depending on your point of view.

We kissed for a while, and Sookie helped me out of my clothes. She moved to take the panties off. "No" I said "keep them on." They felt nice. I'd made sure they weren't scratchy, they were silky and just made rubbing her ass that much more interesting.

It was getting good. Sookie was writhing and moaning and making all the fucking best noises, and dipping my fingers into her panties revealed that she was really fucking wet.

And then it wasn't good. I suddenly realised that this was something special to her. That she'd dressed up and had been trying to play out a role and I wondered if I'd been expected to do something as well? Shit. Had she wanted candles, or music, or something? Anything? Was this supposed to be some night to remember? Even though it was unlikely to result in an actual baby, did she want to look back on it as the first time we ever tried to make a baby?

And what about positions? I'd looked it up on the internet and it said it didn't really matter, but…what did Sookie want? Was there something I was supposed to do? I had no fucking clue. I hadn't done this before. She had, which was something I really didn't want to fucking think about it but there was no getting away from it now. Fuck.

Sookie sensed my hesitation. "You OK?" she asked.

"Yeah. Just um…just…"

"Just what, Eric?" she propped herself up on her elbows to look at me.

"Just...what do you want?"

"Oh, you want me to tell you? Well, you can start by putting your hand back where it was because my clit is really missing you about now."

"Yeah. More…um…" Fuck, I thought, if I actually mention the baby thing will that completely kill the mood? Live kids were bad enough at cockblocking, but what did imaginary ones do? "More for, you know, trying…" I said in the end.

"Trying?"

"Yeah, like do you want anything specific? A position or anything? That works? Fuck, I don't know." I gave up and rolled over onto my back. Fuck, I'd turned this night into a complete disaster.

"Oh" Sookie said. "Oh, um. No, I don't think positions matter at all."

"They don't?"

"Nope. I think all it requires is sex and, preferably for me anyway, orgasms."

"Oh." I waited to see what she'd say next.

"So, are you OK? Are you having second thoughts?" she asked me.

"Fuck, no. I'm not." I turned to look at her. "I want to. Try. I just. I thought about it too much, I guess. And now I've kind of fucked up our evening."

Sookie stroked my face. "I don't think so. I've think we've still got time to recover it."

"Yeah, I don't know. I think I've really crossed into thinking too much about every fucking thing." I was really fucking pissed with myself.

"Well, how about…" Sookie said thoughtfully. "How about you try thinking about something else?"

"Yeah, I've kind of tried that Sookie" I said, a bit grumpily.

"But what about if you were in charge?"

"What do you mean?"

"Of me. Like we've done before. Maybe you could be in charge of me for a bit." Her hand stopped stroking my face and started stroking my chest, ghosting lightly over one nipple then the other.

"That…might work" I said, as I started to think about it. "Yeah, OK." Sookie's hand drifted lower and grazed my cock. That felt really good.

"So what do you want?" she asked.

I moved over so my mouth was next to her ear. "Your mouth. On my cock."

Sookie didn't say anything, she just smiled. And then she put her head down and took my cock in her mouth. That felt fucking fantastic. Maybe the night could be recovered after all, I thought.

After a few minutes I was feeling pretty enthusiastic again. I rolled on top of Sookie and slipped my hand inside her panties, running a finger through her folds. She was so fucking wet. Yeah, I thought, this trying thing was fucking fantastic.

I sat up on my knees and held Sookie's hand to pull her up as well. "What are we doing?" she asked.

"I'll show you. Turn around." Still on her knees she turned around to face the wall behind the bed. I placed both her hands flat against it, so she'd lean forward in the process. Then, moving her panties to one side, I positioned myself behind her. And pushed in. Fuck, that felt good. That felt fantastic. That felt like home.

"Oh. That's good" Sookie moaned appreciatively.

"You feel fucking good" I whispered in her ear. I held onto her hip with one hand and let the other squeeze her breast before rolling her nipple between my fingers. Then I moved my hand down and slipped it inside her panties again, finding her clit. She ground against my hand and pushed back against my thrusting. And then she came, moaning "Oh God, Eric!" That finished me off as well.

Sookie lent forward and continued to brace herself against the wall. I leaned against her back and just kissed her shoulder and the back of her neck. "Thank you" I murmured against her hair, before I pulled out and lay on the bed.

Sookie lay down next to me. "Can I take these off now?" she asked.

"Yeah, go on" I said, as she wriggled out of the panties. "I do kind of like them though" I added. "It feels nice. When I'm inside you." Sookie laughed.

"I feel like I should be thanking you" Sookie said after a while. "You know…in case it worked. That might have been some of your best work yet."

"Well" I said. "Give me a while and we can probably have another go. In case the first try didn't work."

Sookie adopted a thoughtful air. "Well" she said. "I guess it might be prudent to try again. In case."

"Yep" I agreed. "Probably very fucking prudent."

It wasn't only prudent, it was hot. Fucking hot. I lay over her, just watching her face as she came. I loved the way she looked when it happened. I'd loved her all the time really. And I really fucking loved this trying thing.

**Thanks for reading!**


	34. Chapter 34

**A/N I know I keep saying it, but thanks for all the lovely reviews and for those of you just sticking around with these characters. I really appreciate it. I probably won't be back until next week. This weekend is a long weekend for us - Monday is Auckland Anniversary Day, so celebrate that with your loved ones! We normally celebrate with a nice barbecue, but please don't attempt that if you live somewhere cold. I don't want anyone getting hypothermia on my watch!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

I woke up to the sound of the rain thundering onto the roof. I just lay there and listened for a while. It was nice, lying like this with Sookie. She was still asleep and completely relaxed against me, snuffling slightly. It was easy to just doze a bit and pretend we were the only two people in the world.

Except that we weren't. That fact was made clear by the scrabbling noises I could hear coming from my side of the bed. It had never worked yet, but I thought that if I just lay here and pretended to be asleep, Felicia might give up and go away.

She didn't. "Daddy!" she said cheerfully, when she'd finally made it onto the bed. "Daddy. Poos."

Fuck. I really wanted to ignore her, but there was a distinct smell heading my way. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I sighed, and then I sat up, slowly. Felicia beamed at me from her spot on the end of the bed. I looked at her. And then I looked again. Something was wrong with the picture I could see.

"Leesh" I said slowly "Where's your diaper?"

"Wha'?" she asked.

"Nappy" I translated for her. I probably shouldn't have bothered. I didn't think her answering the question was really going to solve the immediate problem.

"Ou' dere" she said, pointing to the door. "Poos" she said again, as though that explained everything.

"Have you SEEN what Felicia did?" Amelia bellowed from somewhere out in the hallway.

"Hang on Amelia, we're dealing with it" I yelled back.

"What's this 'we' nonsense" Sookie grumbled.

"There's a, um, laundry emergency. I think that's your department" I said to her, reaching over to lift Felicia up carefully.

"What? Why do I get stuck with…oh, Good God Felicia!" Sookie said, as she sat up and saw what the problem was.

I held Felicia out in front of me and climbed out of bed. I was walking towards the bathroom, carefully, when Amelia arrived in the room. "Did you see what SHE did?" she asked.

"I've seen the bed" I muttered.

Amelia peered at the bed. "Euw! Did Felicia's bum do that? See! Bum's aren't nice Mum!"

Felicia just giggled a bit but stopped giggling when I placed her in the shower stall. "No!" she protested. "No shower!"

"There isn't a choice Leesh" I told her, pulling her pyjama top over her head.

Felicia pouted. It was the same pout they all did when they were fucking annoyed with me. I switched the water on and held the shower head away from her until it warmed up.

"You suck!" Felicia yelled.

"So I've been told" I said to her.

Sookie stuck her head in the bathroom. "Where's the nappy?" she asked.

"Hallway. I think" I said, rinsing Felicia off and grabbing some shower gel. It looked like she was going to smell like Cinnamon Buns today. Which was going to be a fucking huge improvement on what she had smelt like when I'd brought her in here.

I heard Sookie in the hall. Well, I heard her exclaim "Oh my God!" rather loudly, followed by Amelia going "See! See I told you. Poos are yucky, aren't they Mummy?"

I finished showering Felicia and switched off the water, before grabbing a towel and wrapping her in it. "Leesh" I said to her. "Leesh your diaper stays on. Especially when there's, um, poop."

"Yucky" she commented.

"Yes. But it's yuckier when it's everywhere else." Felicia didn't say anything to that, she just stood there and let me finish drying her. Sookie arrived back in the bathroom with a fresh diaper and some clothes for her. "You, madam" she said "Are getting toilet-trained."

"Really?" I asked, trying to get Felicia to stay still so I could put the diaper on her. She was quite wriggly when she wanted to be.

"Yep. I trained Amelia just after she turned two. And there's only, what? Two month's until Felicia's birthday. And Summer is always a good time for it."

"Oh, OK" I said, pulling Felicia's t-shirt over her head. As hard as it was to imagine Felicia out of diapers, it was even harder to imagine Amelia in them. By the time I'd met her she was walking, talking and taking herself to the toilet. I couldn't really imagine what she would have been like as a baby. Loud, probably.

"So with it being such a yucky day today," Sookie continued, "and trust Felicia to pick the worst day to do this, I'm going to have to put everything in the dryer, I figure what we can do is take the ornaments off the tree and then, when you put those away in the roof, you can dig out the potty while you're up there. Save you going up there twice. But we'll do that this afternoon, because we're going out this morning. OK?" Sookie looked at me expectantly.

"Yeah. OK" I agreed. Fuck. And I used to think I made a lot of plans.

SPOV

It was a less than pleasant start to the morning with Felicia deciding to wipe her bum all over my duvet cover. Not to mention the fact she abandoned her nappy and its contents in the hallway. Kids who could get their own nappies off obviously shouldn't be wearing them, I decided.

So it was now or never. And as much as I hated toilet-training the end result might be nice. Eventually.

We all had breakfast with a much nicer-smelling Felicia. She smelt suspiciously like some of the fancy shower gel that Eric had given me for Christmas, but it was definitely an improvement.

Amelia was still horrified about what had happened. And kept telling us how horrified she was. Luckily Felicia didn't seem to be at all upset by the air of disapproval her sister was giving off.

After breakfast Eric and I showered and then we all made a dash through the rain to Eric's car. It was really bucketing down out there. Luckily we were up and about fairly early as St Luke's was going to be manic. Everyone and their dog will have had the idea of taking bored kids to the shops or the movies in this weather.

We were so early we even got a carpark in the undercover bit, which was lucky as I hadn't been looking forward to all of us sharing the umbrella again. Somehow when the person holding the umbrella was holding it six and a half feet in the bloody air I just ended up almost as wet as if there wasn't an umbrella at all. And I was never allowed to hold it because Eric fretted about me poking his eye out accidentally.

I had a strategy for toilet training. Step one was buy knickers for Felicia to get her interested in giving up the nappies, although from this morning's demonstration it didn't seem as though she was that attached to wearing them. Ugh. I shuddered just thinking about that again.

"Where are we going?" Eric asked as we walked into the mall, he was gazing longingly in the direction of the coffee places.

"Kmart" I replied, trying to steer Amelia and Felicia past the ice cream shop.

Eric didn't say anything, but he sighed, pretty audibly. Yeah, he wasn't fond of Kmart. "You know" he said, as we were going up the travelator, "I'm just glad they don't have Wal-Mart in this country, we'd never fucking get you out of there."

"I'm not that bad. And anyway, I've been to a Wal-Mart. It wasn't that great."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, sounding like he really didn't believe me at all.

We got inside Kmart and ignored all the displays stocked for the post-Christmas toy sale. That wasn't easy once the kids spotted a few things they wanted. It was like herding cats, although at least Bob responded to a good shake of the cat biscuit container. I wasn't sure what I could dangle in front of these two to get them moving.

Eric solved half the problem by just picking Felicia up and carrying her off. Well that was easy enough for him, but it left me with Amelia.

"Come on" I said.

"But Mum! I'm looking!"

"We're not looking at toys today."

"I am!"

"No, come on. You can um; you can help Felicia choose some knickers."

Amelia screwed her face up. "She's too little for knickers."

"No she's not. We'll get her some and then she can learn to use the toilet too."

"But she put poo in the hall!"

"Which is the reason she needs to learn about the toilet. Come on. Or she'll choose without you."

Amelia sighed, and finally followed me over to the children's section where Eric and Felicia were waiting for us. Amelia started perusing the selection. "Right, Leesh" she said, with an air of importance. "You can have Dora, or Dorothy the Dinosaur…or Tinkerbell…or Princesses. Hey Mum? Mum can I have princess knickers?"

"Yeah, I guess so" I replied.

Felicia just stood there, staring at the packets of underwear hanging on the display. She shrugged and looked around to see if there was anything more interesting. Eric seemed to be doing much the same thing, although he had a better chance of actually finding something else to look at, given he could see over the shelves.

"I think she wants…these ones" Amelia said, pulling off a packet of Dora the Explorer knickers.

"Felicia? Do you want these ones?" I asked, taking the packet off Amelia and holding it out to Felicia. Felicia looked at them and then looked at me. "S'pink" she commented.

"I think they're all pink" Eric said to her.

"Some are purple" Amelia added.

Felicia looked around again, as though there was some other choice somewhere. "Well, how about Dorothy?" I asked her. "You like Dorothy."

Felicia looked again. "Wiggles" she said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Dorothy from the Wiggles. Do you want those ones?" Out of the corner of my eye I could see Eric starting to edge away from us. He'd obviously reached some kind of internal limit on the amount of time he could spend standing around in the Girls' department at Kmart.

Felicia shook her head no. "Wiggles" she said again. "You want Wiggles ones?" I asked her. Felicia nodded enthusiastically. "Wiggles!" she said.

"They don't have any" Amelia explained to her. "It's Dora, or Dorothy, or Tinkerbell, or princesses. Or boring old plain ones."

"Wiggles!" Felicia said to Amelia, in response.

I looked again at the displays. Amelia was right, no Wiggles ones. Bugger. I wasn't sure how to break the deadlock. I was hoping Eric had some ideas, but when I looked around for him, he'd disappeared completely. I hated when he did that.

"So the Dorothy ones?" I asked Felicia. She just looked at me sadly.

"And these for me!" Amelia added pushing a packet of princess knickers into my hands.

Just then Eric arrived back. "OK" he said. "I found the ones with the Wiggles on them, can we go now?" He showed the packet to Felicia who beamed at him. "Wiggles!" she said happily.

"Where were they?" I asked, peering at them.

"Over there" Eric said, pointing in the direction of the boy's clothes. Ah. Yeah. He still hadn't figured out about the sections in here. So Felicia was now clutching a packet of boy's underpants. And looking really happy. I guessed we were getting those ones then.

I grabbed the Dorothy ones as well, and followed Eric who'd already started walking towards the checkout.

Once we'd finished at Kmart I checked out a few shops and we had morning tea at one of the coffee shops. Eric didn't quite get the whole concept of morning tea as a sit down meal, but he was happy to have a coffee and not above eating a potato-top savoury. Or two.

EPOV

I hadn't realised that the first part of toilet training involved shopping. At Kmart. I probably shouldn't have been surprised, because, fuck knows, half the stuff Sookie does involves shopping somewhere dreadful, but it still took me a while to figure out what the point was.

The point was, apparently, to stand around discussing underwear at great length. Thank fuck I found the ones Felicia wanted and we could move on.

Sookie had more plans for the afternoon. The first one being to take everything off the Christmas tree. We'd had a lot of help to actually decorate the tree, but no one much was interested in helping pack everything away. And it was me who got stuck with trying to get the lights back into their box in some semblance of order.

And then it was also my job to get it all back into the storage space in the roof. Fuck, it was hot and depressing up there. And really noisy with the rain still beating down. Sookie stood at the bottom of the ladder asking me if I could see the potty.

"Do you remember where you put it?" I asked her.

"Well I shoved it up there, so it's probably not too far in."

"How far is not too far in?" I asked, shining the flashlight around.

"Dunno. As far as I can reach I guess." I looked down at her and she had raised one arm in the air. That really didn't help me.

"I don't think it's up here. Are you sure you didn't put it in the shed?" I asked.

"Garage" Sookie replied. "No. No I definitely put it in the ceiling because that was the time I thought I saw something move in the corner."

"You did?"

"Yeah, but that would have been, um…oh…about two years' ago now? So whatever it is has either died or keeps out of our way. It doesn't smell bad up there, does it?"

I took a big sniff. "No…no, I don't think so."

"So we're probably fine. Maybe it moved."

"Yeah, and took the potty with it" I muttered, still shining the flashlight around. "No" I said, after another good look. "It's not up here."

Sookie sighed. "Let me look" she said. I climbed down the ladder and we switched places. I should have thought of this sooner, I realised, as I watched Sookie's ass climbing the ladder.

"Are you perving at my bum?" she asked, without looking back.

"Mmm-hmm" I agreed. "It's a good view."

"Hasn't anyone told you bums are yucky?" she asked.

"Repeatedly."

Sookie giggled. Then she said "Catch" and dropped the flashlight. I only just managed to catch it before it hit the floor. She reached into the space in the ceiling and pulled out…a box. "Take this from me" she said passing it down.

"You didn't say it was in a box" I grumbled.

"I hadn't remembered it was until I saw it" Sookie said, as she started to climb down the ladder. "But I'd written potty on the side of the box," She stepped off the ladder and pointed to some fucking tiny writing.

"Yeah, good idea!" I said, a bit sarcastically.

"Oh, don't be grumpy. Now you can put the Christmas decorations away."

"Are you sure you don't want to write anything on that box?" I asked.

"I already have! Just put it away and then you can dump the tree outside."

"I am so glad" I said as I climbed back up the ladder, "That I'm on vacation at the moment so I can be your slave."

"Yeah, you love it. And you get an excuse not to shave! What's not to like?"

I didn't bother answering that one.

SPOV

Eric always grumbled about getting stuff out of the roof. Or putting it back. Luckily he's quite cute when he's grumbly so I let him off. Plus, it's like the shaving. Some things you're just not going to change.

After the decorations were safely stowed away Eric braved the rain to throw the tree down the side of the house. It could have maybe waited for a bit, but honestly, Christmas was over, the decorations were off and I was sick of trying to keep that tree alive. It belonged in a forest somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, not in my living room.

Amelia decided to put her raincoat on and accompany Eric outside. Eric of course had decided he didn't need a raincoat on so he just got wet. Really quite wet by the time he'd stood around waiting for Amelia to examine the tomato plant.

It was only when they got back inside that I found out she'd seen it. "But what happened to the tomatoes?" she was asking, plaintively. "Where'd they go?"

"Um" I said, watching Eric attempt to shake himself dry. All that did was make the mat just inside the door really wet. "Um, well…" I tried to think of a plausible explanation that wasn't going to upset her.

"Reindeer" Eric said.

"What?" asked Amelia.

"Santa's reindeer ate them. When they delivered the presents. Reindeer love tomatoes. They would have been really grateful." He patted Amelia on the head and wandered off. Possibly to find a dry t-shirt. Or just drip somewhere else.

"Really?" Amelia asked, astonished. "They really liked my tomatoes?" Of course they were her tomatoes. Despite the fact I'd been watering them for weeks.

"Yeah" I agreed. "They would have loved them."

"That's so cool!" she said enthusiastically, dropping her raincoat on the floor and taking off to her room.

I picked up her raincoat wondering why no one ever believed me like they believed Eric.

The rest of the day was fairly quiet, and punctuated only by the odd outburst of cabin-fever. I hoped the rain didn't last too long, or we were in trouble.

As Eric and I were going to bed I looked out the French doors at the sodden garden. "I hope Jason got the tent up OK" I said. "And that he and Crystal aren't currently being flooded out."

"Well" Eric said, looking over from where he was fiddling with his phone, "If he dug a trench he'll be OK."

I turned back to Eric and burst out laughing. "What?" he asked.

"You" I said, sitting on the bed next to him. "I love the way you do that. You didn't even know about digging trenches around tents until I mentioned it yesterday, but you…you take all these little bits of information and spout them back out as if you knew it all along. No wonder you're so good at bullshitting people for a job."

"Firstly, how do you know I didn't know about the trench thing? And secondly what I do isn't bullshitting. It's consulting, you know that Sookie" Eric said, putting his phone down on the bedside table.

"Yeah, yeah. That's what you say."

"That's what I _know_, Sookie" Eric said, looking me straight in the eyes.

"That doesn't work on me either" I told him.

"Hmmm, what does work on you?" he asked.

"Um... you tell me, since you know _everything_."

"I never said I knew everything. But I do know…a lot" Eric conceded, and then he ignored my chuckling.

"You do" I said, patting his arm. "You know where the Wiggles underpants are in Kmart, and that reindeer like tomatoes. All sorts of useful stuff."

"You can't deny that it all comes in handy around here" Eric said.

"No, I can't."

"You can't deny me…anything" Eric said, looking into my eyes again.

"Still not working, Eric" I said. "But I will concede the accent helps."

"What accent?" Eric asked.

"Yours."

"Yeah. I'm not the one with an accent, Sookie."

"You are in my world."

"That's because you all talk funny in Sookieville. So of course I sound…more normal…"

"Humpf."

"And sexy" Eric dipped his head down and kissed my neck.

"Well I'll give you that" I agreed.

Eric stopped kissing me, which was a bit annoying. He looked like he'd had an idea. "Shall I read to you then?" he asked. "In my sexy accent?"

"What do you want to read?' I asked, feeling a bit suspicious.

"How about…one of your little books of porn?"

Eric reached over and grabbed a book off my bedside table. I looked at the cover. "Not that one" I said. "You're obsessed with that one."

"No I'm not" Eric protested, still holding onto the book.

"Yes, you are" I argued, taking it out of his hands and putting it back. "Just because they have sex on the bonnet of a car. I am not doing that." Eric pouted a bit. "If you'd read the scene properly" I continued, "you'd know that they have sex on a car in a _garage_. And we don't have a garage."

"You tell me all the time we have a garage" Eric argued.

"But we can't fit a car in our garage. All it has is a humungous chest freezer. And I am not running out there tonight to have sex on a freezer."

"OK, so we'll save that for another night then" Eric said, reaching for another book.

"Ever. Not doing that EVER."

"First answers only, Sookie. So, this one then?" Eric asked.

I shrugged. Eric flipped through it looking for a sex scene. Somehow he had the unerring ability to find them when he wanted to. I think he put a lot of time into research.

"Hmmm" Eric said flipping through the pages. He was leaning back against the pillows so I put my head on his chest and just waited. "OK" he said, "I've got it."

"Off you go then."

"_Rayne fumbled with the lock for the hotel room door. Her head was saying this was a bad idea. She knew nothing about Brock…_ Seriously, Sookie, who names these characters?"

I shrugged. I had no idea. "I mean" Eric continued, "what kind of a name is Rayne? And is Brock a first or a last name?"

"Are you reading or commenting?" I asked him.

Eric sighed, and picked up the book again "_...all she knew was that her body was on fire, and only a night of passion with the man her father was paying to protect her was going to satisfy her…_Her father's paying him? I don't think it's such a great idea then."

"You're just doing this to annoy me."

"Alright. I'll carry on then. _Rayne's resolve faltered once they were inside the room. She looked at the bed with trepidation. She could feel Brock standing behind her, so close she could feel his breath on her neck. Her head told her to run, but she couldn't. She couldn't do anything in that moment except think of what this night could mean_…and blah, blah, blah. She does go on, doesn't she?"

"She's thinking things through" I said in the character's defence.

"Well, I say, just get on with it. I'm surprised he didn't give up and go home. And why don't we hear what he thinks, anyway?"

"Because it's written for women!"

"It's written for morons" Eric muttered.

"Well you don't have to read it" I said to him.

"No I'm hooked now. I _have_ to know what happens to these _amazing_ characters. Maybe they'll even fall in love."

"Shut up."

"And get married."

"You are not making friends. Tomorrow night we're going to read one of your books and I'll make fun of that."

"Yeah, yeah. You can try. Moving on, then. _Rayne felt Brock's strong hands on her arms. He turned her around to face him. "I've waited so long for this" he whispered. _Seriously? How long have they known each other at this point in the story, Sookie?"

"About…three days."

"Uh-huh. She was playing hard to get then. Good to know. _He pulled her towards him and their lips met in the kiss she knew she would remember on her death-bed. A kiss which spoke of all the passion and fire that had been brewing between them since the moment they first laid eyes on each other in her father's office…_and I'm going to skip a bit."

"Yeah, you would."

"Well they are taking forever. OK. _Brock pushed Rayne back towards the bed and when her knees met the edge she crumpled back onto the bedcovers…_I hope it's a clean hotel."

"Jesus, Eric. It can't be worse than what happened here this morning."

"True. _Rayne watched as Brock unbuttoned her blouse. He stared at her lace-covered breasts with undisguised longing, before he bent his head and took one nipple into his mouth, rolling his tongue over the fabric of her bra…_Seriously? This does it for you? It's very slow."

"Yeah, I guess it's not exactly like a porn movie Eric. You know all 'Hello, nice to meet you, want to fuck on this car?'" I sighed.

"Well, there's a time and a place for just getting on with it" Eric said.

"Still not having sex on a car. Or the freezer."

"Yeah, yeah. You keep telling yourself that. OK, well I'll skip a bit more then. _Rayne watched Brock gazing at her naked and spread-eagled on the bed…_OK, this is getting better then. _His gaze was dark with longing. _There's a lot of gazing and not much doing."

"There'll be no doing here in a minute, if you're not careful." Eric didn't say anything to that, he just chuckled a bit and carried on.

"_Rayne was overwhelmed with the desire to see Brock as naked as she was. She knelt on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt, pushing it off his shoulders. Then she unbuckled his belt, undoing his pants to release his…_What do you think the description will be Sookie? Magnificent? Outstanding?"

I shrugged. Let Eric worry about that one.

"_His potent manhood from his pants…_Potent? Really? She couldn't think of anything better than that?" Eric was quiet for a moment. "Pretty much standard after that stroking, fondling, and sighing. Desperate to feel him inside her. An orgasm like she's never had before. Much enthusiastic thrusting from what I can gather. Which in my experience is not the trigger for amazing female orgasms, but I'm not the expert. Then an explosion." Eric finished by making the noise of the explosion and demonstrating it with his hand in the air.

"So the hotel blows up?" I asked. I hadn't read that bit yet. I probably never would now.

"No, that's him Sookie. Brock. It's always an explosion."

"Oh. Oh yeah. The exploding hotel had sounded kind of interesting. Maybe Eric's taste in stuff was starting to rub off on me.

Eric put the book down. "Well that was all very standard I thought. Um, I give it 6 out of 10. I think we can do much better." He rolled us over so I was underneath him.

"Well it's nice you're confident I guess."

"Oh yes" Eric agreed, as he pulled down my tank top to get to my nipple.

"Do I get to award you marks afterwards?" I asked him.

"If you really want to Sookie, but only if I get something in return."

I didn't answer for a moment because I was busy helping Eric get my top over my head. "What do you want?" I asked him. He didn't say anything, just looked at me. "Not the freezer!" I said, as sternly as I could manage at that point of time.

"Not tonight anyway" Eric said. And bugger him, if it hadn't started to seem, almost, like a good idea.

**Thanks for reading!**


	35. Chapter 35

**A/N OK, so everyone likes cricket, right? Yeah, thought so. Well, um, I won't bore you with the details. One side is trying to get runs by hitting the ball, the other is trying to take wickets by bowling them out, or catching them out, or a whole host of other things I won't list. Just bear in mind that the NZ team are called the Black Caps and I'm sure the rest will be fine. I haven't gone into too much detail!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I just like to make them watch cricket. And enjoy it!**

SPOV

An American, a South African and a Kiwi were going to the cricket. It does sound as though it's a joke. The punchline was that they were all sitting in my family room complaining that I was making them walk to Eden Park.

"I think we'll be OK if we take the car" Eric tried. I just frowned at him. Really, what did he know about Eden Park's non-existent parking? Our major sports stadium was stuck in the middle of suburban Mt Eden. So it had no parking. Except for the spots provided by those enterprising souls who let you park in their front garden for $5 a time.

So it was better to walk. The traffic would be terrible by this time anyway.

"The traffic will be backed up by now" I said, looking at Jason. He'd gone out to do some errands earlier and had taken longer than expected, because he'd decided to get the ute valet cleaned while he was out, so we were going to be a bit late leaving.

"Nah. It'll be alright, Sook" Jason said, refusing to take any responsibility. "There'll still be heaps of parking, eh?"

"No, there won't be any parking, Jason. So we're walking."

Jason sighed. "Will we miss some of it?" Eric asked hopefully.

"Only an over or two" Calvin said cheerfully. Out of all of them, he was the one who seemed the most happy to be going to the cricket. Probably because he was the one who was leaving a six week old baby with a snotty nose at home in order to go. It was hard to blame him for his enthusiasm. But he was part of the deal I struck with Judith. She was looking after Amelia and Felicia overnight and in return I was taking Calvin with us. Even though he'd been saying repeatedly he was going to have a really hard time working out which team he was supporting.

Eric had tried to say the same thing, but I threatened him with immigration and he pulled his head in. He'd refused point-blank to wear his Beige Brigade shirt though, no matter how much I argued with him on that point. Eric hadn't budged and in the end I'd given up. I'd just sit next to Jason who was wearing his.

"Nothing much happens in the first couple of overs" I said reassuringly. Eric didn't look reassured.

Jason looked grumpy. "Unless there's a wicket. Then we'll miss that."

"Well let's get going then" I said, swinging my backpack onto my back. The blokes had all laughed at how much stuff I was taking but they'd be sorry later on. I was only taking half the food though, as Tara was meeting us there and she had the rest. Of course I'd been told it was unnecessary to take any food too, as they sold it there. And apparently pointing out that they only sell fast food didn't make it any less appealing.

"OK then, let's get going" I said, and Jason pushed past me muttering about missing the toss. Calvin wandered after him saying something about how it didn't matter if the Black Caps batted or bowled first, they were still going to be shit. Jason gave him a rather filthy look and I made a mental note to seat the pair of them away from each other.

Eric peeled himself up off the couch and walked as slowly as he could towards the door. "You'll like it when you get there" I assured him. "Sport's always better live. When you're actually there and you get all caught up in it and stuff." I tried to give him my most winning smile.

Eric just gave me a look that suggested he didn't think he'd ever caught up in cricket. Yeah. Of course he would. When we were there.

We walked out the door and locked it behind us. Eric was still dragging his heels, but he was at least co-operating. And he was carrying my cooler bag which had the food in it.

Outside Calvin was admiring Jason's ute. "If you put sticky fingerprints on it, he'll have a tantrum" I warned him. Calvin laughed, but Jason just tried to grab me in a headlock. I took off running down the driveway and had run past Halleigh and Andy's and three other houses before I thought to stop and check they were actually following me. Thankfully, they were, but I almost wouldn't have put it past them to get into the car and just drive on past me.

However, about five minutes later when we reached Dominion Road, I was proven right in my insistence that we walk. "See" I said, gesturing to the line of cars that was built up past the end of our road. "We would have driven down here and just got stuck in the traffic."

Jason looked thoughtful. "Nah" he said. "That's just built up now, eh? It would have been OK if we'd just left when we were supposed to."

"What do you mean?" I asked him. "You were the one who wasn't ready. Because you had to get the ute valet-cleaned. You think $3.50 for a cup of coffee is a rip-off, but you'll pay to have someone else clean that bloody ute. Honestly, Jason, Dad would roll over in his grave if he knew you'd done that."

Jason shrugged. "Well it got fuckin' dirty up North, eh? There were road works every fuckin' few kilometres and driving over gravel is no fuckin' good for the ute. And then when we got there, I couldn't give it a proper wash because they only had tank water and it hasn't rained much. And Wayne dropped ice cream on the carpet. I'd fuckin' told him to be careful. So it bloody needed a good clean, and I doubted you fullas would have anything to clean it with. I've fuckin' seen your car Sookie." Jason just crossed his arms and kept walking up Dominion Road. Calvin walked beside him making conversation about the farm and trying to cheer Jason up a bit. That left me walking with Eric. Well, trying to keep up with Eric anyway. Every so often I had to do a weird little run for a few steps so I wouldn't get left behind.

"It's...um. It's going to be quite a walk, isn't it?" Eric asked.

"Don't worry" I said, doing another one of my runs to catch up. "If you feel the need to collapse I'll pick you up on the way back in about 8 hours. I'm sure you would have recovered by then." I sounded a bit grumpy, probably, because, well I was a bit grumpy. Eric was complaining about the walk and I had to take two, maybe three times as many steps as he did just to get anywhere.

"8 hours?" Eric asked. "They play for that long?"

"Yeah, you've seen one-day cricket before." Well, I'd pointed it out when it was on TV. Maybe he hadn't really been paying attention.

"Oh. I just…um, I didn't realise" Eric said.

I ran a few steps again. "Well, that's the plan. Unless everyone gets bowled out really early. So you know, it should finish about 10pm. That's why Judith's keeping the kids overnight."

"Oh…yeah" Eric said slowly.

"What?" I asked him. "You thought we'd got rid of the noisy crew and had a nice free evening?"

Eric didn't say anything immediately, but it was pretty obvious that's what he'd thought. It was written all over his face. He shrugged. "I just thought we'd go out for dinner…or something…"

I ran a few steps again. "Or something" I repeated. And then I clicked. "Oh no!" I said. "Still not having sex on the freezer. We had sex on the deck two night's ago, that'll have to do you."

Eric leaned over. "I'd rather do…" he started to say, but I cut him off. "No, stop treating me like I'm a sure thing. It's not happening. So get over it." I ran again, but this time so I could catch up to Jason and Calvin. I really didn't need Eric trying to tell me, once again, that sex on the freezer was a really good idea. I'm sure in his head it was a brilliant plan, but he wasn't the one going to be perched on the cold top of the freezer with the edge of it cutting into his legs. So no, it wasn't happening.

We were walking quite quickly, well some of us were doing a fair amount of running, and it wasn't going to take that long to get to Eden Park. Well it wouldn't take long if everyone would stop trying to make detours. First Eric had to stop to buy coffee at one of the cafes we passed. Calvin did the same thing, and we lost the pair of them. Jason and I stood outside and Jason moaned about the price of coffee again, and then asked if I'd packed a thermos flask of tea. When I said I hadn't he got a bit shitty with me but I pointed out he could buy drinks there.

Yeah, that didn't go down well.

"Fuck" Eric said, coming out of the café, "I can't leave you two alone for a minute can I?"

"Oh, shut up and start walking" I replied.

Next up Jason thought maybe we should stop for 'one drink' at the pub we were passing. Luckily Eric just kept walking between Jason and the entrance and we didn't lose him. I didn't know how Jason could go from fretting about missing the start to wanting to hang around in a pub quite so quickly, but that was Jason for you.

Then, just as we turned into Walter's Road, I lost all three of them when they made a quick detour to Wendy's for burgers. Hopeless, they were all bloody hopeless, I decided, as I waited on the footpath while dozens of people walked past me, all on their way to the cricket. It was really no better than trying to do this with Amelia, Felicia and Jessica in tow.

When we finally made it to Eden Park there was a queue to get in, but it was moving fairly quickly. We all got searched, and the security people had a good look through my backpack and cooler bag in case we had any contraband bottles, and we were in. Now I just had to find Tara.

I rang her cellphone. "Where are you?" I asked.

"Just walking up to the gate. It was a bit of a mission finding parking. I'm way over the other side of Sandringham Road."

"Uh-huh" I said. "Well we're inside, so shall we just meet you at the seats?"

'Yeah, alright" Tara said, sounding a bit breathless.

I had the tickets so everyone followed me to the seats I'd picked out. They were right in the middle of the ASB stand. Jason had a small moan about the fact the terraces were gone, and then a nice reminisce about all the shit that used to get thrown on you during the Mexican wave in the terraces, and the fights that used to break out. Yeah, he made it all sound really appealing. Calvin and Eric kind of nodded politely.

I took my seat, which was between Eric and Jason, and started rummaging around in my backpack. I took out my hat and put that on my head, and then I took out the lifestyle section of the paper that I'd stuffed in there before we left.

Eric looked sideways at me. "You're reading the paper?" he asked.

"Mmm" I said, "Well not much is happening yet. It's only the second over." Eric didn't say anything to that, but just went back to looking at the pitch. Jason took a small radio out of his pocket and plugged an earphone into one ear.

"For the commentary" I said to Eric. "Oh" he replied.

"We won the toss and chose to field" Jason leaned over to inform me. "Which is good because our batsmen are much better at chasing a total, eh, than at setting one."

"You keep telling yourself that" Calvin laughed. I just glared at him. Yeah, we had an outside chance, but it was a chance all the same.

"Who are they...uh, we, playing?" Eric asked, peering at the field.

I tried not to roll my eyes. I think I failed. "Australia" I said.

"Are they good?" Eric asked, looking at me. It wasn't something I really wanted to answer. "Um, they're better than South Africa" I said, nodding at Calvin.

Calvin laughed. "They're better than most other teams, on the day" Calvin said. He was probably trying to help Eric out, but I just glared at him.

"We'll do alright, eh?" Jason said, obviously deciding to go for bravado.

At that point Tara arrived and sat down in the seat next to Jason. "It's manic out there now" she said. "They really need to put more security staff on; it takes forever for them to search around in everyone's bag. And I got stuck behind these idiots who wanted to argue about having their beer confiscated. You'd think they'd never been to a game before."

"They didn't bring cushions then?" I asked her.

Tara laughed. "No. No cushions. That used to work so flipping well for Dad though. God, we were suckers, weren't we?"

"We were" I laughed.

"No JB?" Eric asked. leaning past me.

Tara pushed her sunglasses up on her head and leaned over Jason to reply to Eric. "Nope" she said. "He doesn't really like cricket. And anyway, someone has to look after the kids."

Yeah, well I wasn't going to look at Eric after Tara said that, was I? I purposefully hadn't let on that JB wasn't coming today because I'd known that Eric would argue that he should therefore be let off the hook too. But I was sure he would enjoy it. God, it couldn't be worse than baseball, could it?

I glanced over at the field and watched a couple of balls being bowled. Yeah, Australia were doing OK, although they'd nearly had a run-out which would have been nice. An early wicket would be good for morale. But on the whole nothing much was happening yet, so I lent over Jason and asked Tara how their time at Piha had been.

Tara had just started telling me, when Jason said "Fuck! You chicks do nothing but bloody natter! Swap seats with me, Sook."

I stood up and swapped with Jason and then Tara and I could have a proper chat. It was nice chatting without kids and husbands hanging around. Well, I guess I had my husband, but he was currently getting a lesson in the leg before wicket rule and fielding positions from my brother so he was well-occupied, even if his eyes were glazing over slightly.

I glanced over at the scoreboard. Fuck. "Are they really 42 for 0?" I asked Jason.

"Well you'd know if you were fucking watching the game" Jason grumbled. "Eric's been paying more attention than you have."

"That's because Eric's trying to learn the rules. I know the rules!"

"Yeah? Well what position is Southee fielding in?"

"Um" I peered at the field. "Um…something out in long…um…"

"Mid-off" Tara whispered in my ear. Yeah, she was good at this stuff.

"Mid-off" I said to Jason. He eyed Tara who was laughing. "You had help!" he said accusingly.

"Yeah, whatever Jason" I said, wanting to just get over the conversation. "Who wants something to eat?" I said, digging around in the cooler bag at my feet. There was a general groan around the stadium and I looked up. "What happened?" I asked.

"Dropped catch" Tara said.

"He should have got that" Eric said accusingly.

"Oh, don't you start" I muttered, going back to pulling the chocolate chip biscuits I'd made out of the bag.

The next hour or so was relatively peaceful. Well, Jason complained bitterly that the Black Caps had no clue, they couldn't bowl, they had shit field placement and they were basically throwing it all away. But they still might win. Tara and I discussed whether McCullum was as hot as he used to be or whether he'd gone off. Eric pretended he couldn't hear me. Jason and Tara had a small argument about the merits of Vettori's captaincy, so I swapped seats with him again to sit back next to Eric. Eric seemed to be getting the hang of it and even cheered when we got our first wicket. Calvin seemed happy because he had no stake in either team and could slag both of them off with abandon.

Just then a group of people who were quite late arriving needed to get past all of us to their seats. We all stood up to let them get through. I was actually glad of the chance to stretch my legs. "There's sod all leg room in these seats" I grumbled as I sat down.

"Yes. I had noticed" Eric said, in a kind of clipped way.

"Well…I've got all the stuff packed around my feet, so that makes a difference. Want an apple?" Eric nodded and I handed him one out of the bag. And then I leaned my head on his arm. It was really hot and airless in the stand at this time of the afternoon.

When I woke up we'd got a couple of wickets and were on a roll. "You alright there?" Eric asked me.

"Yeah, fine. I was just tired. I blame Felicia running around at night."

"She hasn't done that in a while" Eric said. I didn't bother replying. Instead I said, "Swap seats so I can talk to Calvin for a bit?"

So I swapped with Eric, which gave Jason another opportunity to give him a lesson on cricket and tell him what the Black Caps were doing wrong and why they should obviously have been listening to Jason Stackhouse instead.

"So Thomas isn't well?" I asked Calvin. He shook his head. "Nah, poor guy is really snotty."

"That's no good when he's that little. Will you and Judith be OK tonight with our two as well?"

"Yeah, no problem. He's not too bad at night, he just sounds really bad. All stuffed up and snuffly. But there's nothing you can do."

"No" I agreed. "Has Jessie got it?" I asked.

"No, but it's probably coming. He got it off Sarah's kids Judith thinks. Briana was pretty bad when we last saw her and she wanted to hold Thomas all the time."

I nodded. I remembered how disgustingly germy Sarah's kids always were. Probably living with a couple of smokers didn't help them at all on that front either.

"I need something to eat" Jason announced.

"Do you want some crackers and hummus?" I asked him, and he pulled a face. "Tara's got cold chicken" I said, nodding in her direction.

"Nope" Jason said. "I need beer. Beer and a hotdog. Who else?"

Eric nodded, and pulled out some money out of his wallet which Jason waved away. Calvin said he was OK, and then when Jason checked again, changed his mind and said he would. Tara and I both declined. Jason stepped past Tara and headed up the stairs to the top of the stand. I turned back to the game and realised the score wasn't looking any better than when I'd last looked. When had Australia scored all those runs? I watched a bit of the game and then did some people-watching. That was always interesting at these things. There was a bit of shouting from the crowd, but I didn't pay a lot of attention.

Jason came back about 15 minutes later. "What did I miss?" he asked, passing out hotdogs. Eric peered at his and then looked at me, questioningly.

"Yeah, that's a hotdog" I said to him. "You were expecting an American hotdog, but that's not what they do here. You get that."

"But it's…a corndog" Eric replied, still just holding the stick.

"Just eat it" I told him, and then I tried to tune into Tara's description of the last couple of overs that she was giving Jason. "So then Vettori tried a slower ball and that bowled him…"

Oh, I thought. We got another wicket then. Well that was something.

I watched a few more overs and started to realise that I was really cramped and uncomfortable. "Hey Tara" I called to her, "I'm going to the ladies. Want to come?"

"Yeah, alright" she yelled back. I pushed past Eric and Jason and followed Tara up the steps to the top of the stadium.

EPOV

From what I could gather, cricket was the most boring game in the entire universe. Even though we were currently watching what was supposedly one of the faster and more exciting versions of the game, I kind of felt that was false advertising. A bit like the fucking hotdogs they had here.

"So how much longer to go?" I asked Jason, as I watched Sookie's ass climbing the steps on her way to the restrooms.

"Only another 6 overs or so" Jason replied, which meant fuck all to me. An over, I had learnt, was six balls. Except for the times they bowled extras and it wasn't. I sighed. This game wasn't making any sense at all.

And Sookie had turned out to be fuck-all use at helping me understand it. Somehow she'd given off the impression she was really into this cricket thing and I'd expected her to be all over what was happening. Instead she treated the whole experience like a trip to the park or a social occasion. She'd read the paper. She'd made us all do the quiz with her. She'd snacked. She'd chatted to everyone, making us all swap seats so she could get closer to whoever she wanted to talk to. She'd even fucking dozed with her head on my shoulder for a while.

What she hadn't done, was watch much of the cricket. I saw her surprise when she realised they'd taken that last wicket, the one they'd been trying to get since the start of the game. Cricket fan my ass. She was just here for the hell of it.

And now she'd fucking gone off somewhere with Tara. I wondered what was up there. And whether she'd be back anytime soon. And whether I'd be stuck here for several more hours while Jason told me what the New Zealand team should be doing, but clearly weren't, and Calvin told me that they were shit whatever they did and had no hope.

Fuck. I hoped New Zealand just folded and we could all go home soon.

SPOV

Tara and I went to the toilets and enjoyed the fact that there was a queue at the men's and not at the ladies. "It seems only fair" Tara said as we went in.

As we were washing our hands a woman with shiny brown hair came over to us. "Tara!" she exclaimed. I looked at her. She had very expensive sunglasses perched on her head, a lot of gold jewellery and even her polo shirt and capri pants looked as though she'd spent money on them. She was way too over-dressed for the cricket. I felt a bit dowdy in comparison.

"Oh. Hi McKenna" Tara said. Well that made sense. Tara was always moaning about some woman called McKenna who thought that she basically ran Charlotte and Lachlan's school. From what I could gather she certainly ran the social side of it. Tara didn't like her one bit, but I didn't think she was about to tell her that to her face, in the toilets at Eden Park.

"This is my friend Sookie" Tara said, "Sookie, this is McKenna." McKenna and I shook hands.

"So, are you enjoying the cricket?" McKenna asked.

"Yeah. Could be better of course" Tara said. "Be nice if we were getting a few more wickets."

"Mmmm" McKenna said, obviously thinking of something else. "Well, so nice to see you, Tara."

"You too" Tara said, as McKenna swept out of the toilets.

"She's, um, interesting" I said to Tara.

"She's a snooty cow" Tara said. "But she's going to be head mum for Charlotte's class this year so I'm bloody stuck with her. Honestly, if you remember the bitchiness when we were at school it's no better when you're a mum. They're bloody scary when they're all lined up at the school gate."

"I'm just glad Amelia's not going to that school" I said, as we walked out of the Ladies. "That sounds terrifying." I hadn't liked school much for that reason. I never really got what was required of me to be one of the popular girls and everyone had thought I was a bit strange because I didn't make the required effort.

Tara looked at me sharply. "Um, I don't think Mt Eden's going to be any better than Remuera for snooty mothers" she said. "You'll have exactly the same thing."

"Really?" I squeaked out. "OK, well maybe I don't want Amelia to start school this year then."

Tara patted my arm. "Yes you do." She stopped walking and looked at me "So do you want to get a drink while we're up here? The game might go better with some wine."

"Um…" I said, thinking. "Um…maybe not. I don't think alcohol in the heat is really going to be the best thing for me…"

Tara narrowed her eyes. "Are you up the duff?" she asked.

Shit. There wasn't much I could do. I shrugged. "Dunno" I said, which was the truth. I didn't know, it was a possibility for sure, but it was too early to tell yet.

"But you're trying?" Tara asked. I nodded. "I thought so" she said. "You weren't drinking but you were eating cheese, which only means one thing really. Shit, lucky you're not pregnant or you wouldn't be able to eat the cold chicken I brought and that would suck. Oh well, maybe in a couple of months?"

"Yeah, maybe" I didn't really want to discuss it all in great depth with Tara. Because. Just in case. But I'd been so distracted by the conversation that I missed seeing the person I should have seen. The one I really wanted to avoid.

"Sookie" said a voice behind me. A really annoying voice. With a really annoying Australian accent.

"Sophie-Anne" I said, turning around. "How um…well. You're here, huh?"

"Of course. I love the cricket! Don't you? And we're doing so well today."

"Yeah." There wasn't much else I could say to that. Then it was my turn to introduce Tara to Sophie-Anne. I couldn't understand why Sophie-Anne was being so bloody friendly, other than to rub my nose in it about the cricket. Surely she'd want to avoid me as well?

I guessed not. "Of course" Sophie-Anne was saying, "It's not the SCG here, is it?" She looked around and wrinkled her nose.

I was tempted to pull a face back at her. I glanced at Tara. Tara looked like she was tempted to punch her. I tried to give Tara an encouraging smile which might egg her on a bit, but she missed it.

"I went to the SCG once" I said. "With, um…with my first husband." I realised that was the first time I'd maybe said that. It felt weird. Like I was Elizabeth Taylor or something.

Sophie-Anne frowned. "First husband?" she asked.

"Yeah. Eric's my second husband" I said slowly, looking to Tara for confirmation, which was an odd thing to do because if I couldn't keep track of my husbands, I doubt she could. But it still felt odd, saying out loud that I had more than one. Even if I hadn't technically been married to Eric.

"Eric? Eric Northman?" Sophie-Anne said, a bit shrilly.

"Yep" I replied. "We got married. Well, it was a Civil Union, really, but it happened in November." Sophie-Anne was still just staring at me. I guess that had stumped her. I was about to say goodbye so we could get shot of her when a guy walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. He was huge, really, amazingly huge. He looked vaguely familiar, but what really fascinated me was he had no neck. Surely every human being should have a neck, I thought. But this guy seemed to have misplaced his somewhere along the way.

"A'right?" he asked Sophie-Anne.

"Oh. Yes. Um, Sookie and…" Sophie-Anne paused.

"Tara" Tara supplied.

"Tara" Sophie-Anne repeated. "This is my fiancé. Bert. He's over from the UK to play rugby for Auckland."

Tara and I exchanged a look. Rugby player. That totally explained the whole no-neck thing.

"Enjoying the game are you?" he asked Tara and I. We shrugged and nodded a bit. "It's a good game" he continued. "Although I'm biased of course" he beamed at Sophie-Anne. I just about threw up.

"Uh-huh" I managed to get out in the end. "Still, it's not the Ashes is it?" I said.

Neither Bert nor Sophie-Anne replied, they were too busy looking at each other. I wondered if we could just leave, but then Bert said, "Right, I'm going to get a drink, love, you want one?" Sophie-Anne nodded enthusiastically and he left after saying goodbye to Tara and me.

"Well…he seems nice" I said to Sophie-Anne. And I even refrained from screaming 'run, run for your life!' at Bert.

She nodded. "We met through his brother" she said dreamily. "You know. Andre."

Oh. Right. This was one of the brothers Andre had been trying to get into the country. Bet he was regretting that decision. Or not. She was Sophie-Anne after all. Maybe he'd foisted her on his brother.

"OK. Well, we'd better get back" I said.

"Yes. Say hello to Eric for me, won't you Sookie?"

"Mmm. Yeah…"

"And enjoy the rest of the game!" Sophie-Anne laughed, like that was the funniest thing ever. I really, really hoped the Black Caps pulled it together and actually won. It would serve her bloody right.

"She's a bitch" Tara said as we were walking back to our seats. "And did you see that guy? He had no neck! How is that even possible?"

"I know! That's just weird. Like evolution in reverse or something."

EPOV

Sookie's trip to the restroom seemed to take forever. By the time she got back the Australian innings had finished and Jason had gone in search of food.

"You were a long time" I grumbled.

"We kept running into people. Sophie-Anne is here" she said, sitting down.

"Sophie-Anne LeClerc?" I asked.

"Uh-huh. With her new boyfriend. Who's Andre's brother. Poor Andre."

"Andre's a fucker."

"Wow. What happened to your sympathy? And, you know, your feelings for your fellow men that've been treated badly by women."

"Andre's a fucker. And I'm hungry, and a little bit bored now the game's actually stopped for a bit."

Sookie sighed. "Well, let's get you some food then, before you really get grumpy."

"I'm not that grumpy."

"Calvin" Sookie asked, leaning over me. "Is Eric grumpy?"

"Fuck" Calvin replied. "I'm just keeping out of it. And watching the cricket. Even though it's only shitty old New Zealand and those annoying wankers Australia playing."

"OK, well you're no use at all then" Sookie said. She started digging around in the bag that had the food. Then she dug around a bit in Tara's bag as well, pulling out salad and chicken and some bread. It was nice to see I'd actually carried something useful all the way here, because I had my doubts about the rest of the stuff Sookie had packed.

After we'd eaten Jason arrived back with a pie in each hand, which he proceeded to eat, before also having some of the food we'd brought along. I did feel better now I'd eaten, but I was still faced with another three or four hours of cricket. Fuck.

"I'm going to stretch my legs" I said to Sookie.

"Oh, OK" she said, standing up to let me past. Yeah, there was no fucking leg-room at all in these seats. It was ridiculous.

I walked up the steps, past all the rows of seats and took a look around when I reached the top. It looked like any other sports stadium really. I used the restroom and then wondered what to do next. The game seemed to have started again, but I wasn't in a hurry to go back. I didn't think I was missing anything.

I took a walk past the various food and souvenir vendors. There wasn't much else to do. Tucked away at the end though was a cart with a coffee machine. I thought I might get some to take back, so I joined the queue.

I was nearly at the front when someone tapped me on the shoulder. "I was hoping I might run into you" Sophie-Anne said. Fuck no, I thought.

"I saw Sookie earlier" Sophie-Anne said. "She said you were…together now?"

"Married."

"Mmm. That's what she said. So I guess you've got residency now?"

"Just about." I hoped the guy in front of me hurried up with his fucking order. I just wanted to get out of here, but having queued up for a while now I didn't really want to just abandon my place in the queue.

"Well, that's nice. It's good Sookie's been some use to you." I gave her a sharp look, but decided not to bite. It was pretty fucking obvious she was trying to goad me into saying something I'd regret. I tried to ignore her but she just stood there.

"Well, it was good to see you Sophie-Anne" I tried, hoping that would encourage her to leave. Fuck, the guy in front was buying coffee for everyone he knew in the world by the looks of it.

"Yeah. It's great to see you Eric. And I guess I'll see you again soon."

"Uh-huh" I said, a bit distracted by watching the guy leave. He was balancing his drinks rather precariously and I really wasn't in the mood to be splashed with hot coffee.

"Now that I'm the Central Auckland Area Business Manager I guess I'll be seeing you quite often. All those seminars you've been giving. They've been working well for you, I hear. But I had some thoughts about some other things we could do together. So I'll give you a call."

"OK" I said, slowly, before stepping up to give my order to the guy behind the cart.

"See you Eric!" Sophie-Anne called cheerfully.

I didn't reply. Fuck. I hated the fucking cricket.

**A/N So Eden Park is our main cricket (and rugby) stadium in Auckland. The SCG is the Sydney Cricket Ground which is much, much bigger, of course. And what we call hotdogs is basically a battered, deepfried sausage on a stick, so it's like a corn dog (I think). We also have the frankfurter in a bun type hotdogs, but they are always referred to as American hotdogs and much rarer. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	36. Chapter 36

**A/N Well I'm glad no one was scared off by the cricket in the last chapter! And now we get to find out what the final result will be. Fingers crossed for the Black Caps!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I watched the New Zealand opening batsmen running between the wickets and wondered idly where Eric had gone. He seemed to have been missing for a while. I sighed, and listened to Jason and Tara groaning loudly as Guptill was bowled out. Well this sucked, I thought, we weren't doing very well and I didn't even have Eric to commiserate with. I was stuck with Calvin, who kept predicting a complete batting collapse by the Black Caps with a smile on his face.

Eventually Eric reappeared with a tray of coffee which he passed around to those who were interested. Trust Eric to find the coffee cart I thought. "How's it going?" he asked me.

"Oh, well. They got some runs, and then they lost a wicket, now it's just a matter of holding on, scoring as much as possible and trying not to be bowled out too quickly."

"Right. So we just…wait then?"

"Yeah. Well we watch too. And support."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, sipping his coffee. He seemed to be preoccupied by something, but I had no idea what.

I suddenly realised that I should ring Judith and check she was coping, so I dug out my cellphone and had a chat to her. The day seemed to have gone OK. Well, no one was currently crying. That was always a good sign. I said goodnight to Amelia and then passed the phone to Eric so he could talk to her, and then to Felicia. That seemed to be a one-sided conversation. And then we gave the phone to Calvin so he could talk to his family.

During all of that New Zealand lost two wickets, one of the batsmen was out for a duck. Jason took that particularly personally and I could tell really wanted to march onto the pitch and pick up a bat himself.

I got the chocolate chip biscuits out again and passed them around. The more food we could eat the less I had to carry home afterwards I figured. The men obliged me by finishing up the biscuits and eating the apples I had left too. That lightened my load considerably.

The next wicket was a bit controversial and had to be referred to the third umpire, so we sat and waited for the big screen to give the verdict. Jason was ropeable when it came up saying 'Out'.

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" he wailed. "They're just fuckin' cheating. They always fuckin' cheat. It's like under-arm bowling all over again!"

"Who bowled under-arm?" Calvin asked, confused.

"Jeez, Jason. Get a grip" Tara said. "You have to get past 1981 for God's sake. It was McCullum's stuff up. He shouldn't be batting that far up the order. They should have him further down so he can cut loose in the last overs."

"He's still talking about 1981?" Calvin asked.

"I wasn't born in 1981" Eric supplied.

"Shut up you" I warned him. I didn't need to be reminded of that fact.

Jason looked at Eric, having temporarily forgotten the dismal state of New Zealand cricket and the inherent inability of the Australian team to abide by the rules. "You that young?" he asked him.

Eric shrugged. "I'm not young. I just wasn't born then." I hoped I was the only one who heard him mutter "And I don't really care about the fucking under-arm bowling." I tried to give him a disapproving look, but he kept his eyes fixed on the field. Yeah, he could play at being interested when he wanted to.

"Hey Sook" Jason said, turning to me. "Does that make you a panther?"

"Cougar" Calvin corrected. I turned my glare to Calvin, because, really, he could just shut up too. He just smiled at me and then turned back to the cricket. God, they were all as bad as each other.

"Yeah, one of those" Jason agreed.

"Next time" Tara chimed in "I'm picking someone really young. So he'll do what I say. Without me having to say it, like, twenty times."

"What do you mean next time?" Jason asked her.

"Next husband. When I finally get rid of JB. And Sookie helps me bury him in the garden."

Eric decided to look back at me at that point. "Bury…JB?" he asked slowly.

"Well…we had a pact…" I said stalling, waiting for Tara to jump in and make it sound better.

"Yeah. Sookie agreed to help me if JB ever got so annoying I felt compelled to off him. She promised she'd be there with a shovel. And I said I'd do the same for her" Tara said cheerfully. Well, I thought, she jumped in but I don't think she made it sound any better.

"So…I'm in danger of being buried in the back garden?" Eric asked. "Or did that just apply to Bill?"

"Um. Either of you I guess" I said.

"Yeah, it's a fully transferable agreement" Tara said nodding. "Oh, for pete's sake, that should have been a four!" she then yelled.

Eric was still frowning. "I don't think it's really going to happen" I assured him.

"Well, I don't know. JB was pretty annoying when we went to Piha. He buggered off every morning to go surfing and we all had to hang around waiting for him" Tara said.

"How was the surf?" Calvin asked.

Tara shrugged. "Apparently it was OK. I don't know. I was stuck with the kids."

Calvin nodded. Jason looked worried. "Fuck" he said, "I hope Crystal doesn't get any stupid fuckin' ideas like this eh?"

"Oh, Jason! You're pretty annoying. I'm sure she already has" I told him.

Tara laughed. "It's just too far for Sookie to drive to help her bury you."

"I'm sure she'd have lots of friends though!" I said to Tara.

"Crystal fuckin' likes me too much to do that, eh?" Jason said.

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that!" I said, reaching past Eric to pat him on the shoulder.

"But it would take you both so long to dig the hole?" Eric said, still a bit fretful. "Just with shovels. And you'd have to avoid being seen. Surely between the house and the shed would be better than the back garden?"

I sighed. "Eric! It's not a real plan. For one thing, Tara's put a bloody great big swimming pool in her garden so that's cut out most of the space we had to bury JB in."

"Yeah, that's a point" Tara said.

"You guys have a pool now?" Jason asked. Tara nodded yes. "Fuck" he continued. "Can I stay with you blokes next time I'm in Auckland?"

Tara's eyes flicked to me, a hint of panic in them. "No" I said to Jason. "You can't, and you can't just invite yourself to stay with people."

"Oh, go on!" Jason said. "You like me really!" He patted Tara on the arm and gave her a winning smile. Yeah, she was immune to most of Jason's charms. I'm not sure if it was because familiarity bred contempt, but at any rate, she was probably one of the only women alive who didn't fall all over Jason.

"Mmm" Tara said.

"If I win Lotto I'd get a swimming pool. Or maybe a house with a swimming pool. Depends how much I win" Calvin said, looking a bit wistful. Yeah, money was a bit tight for them with Judith not working at the moment.

Eric touched my arm to get my attention and I turned to look at him. "You'd be better off" he said "to put my body somewhere away from the house entirely, somewhere where it wouldn't be linked to you."

I sighed. "We've moved on Eric. We're onto swimming pools."

"Oh" he said. "Well that might work. You know, putting the body in the hole you've dug before the pool goes in."

"Bugger" Tara said. "I should have thought of that."

"Where do you live now, anyway?" Jason asked Tara. Tara just ignored him. Mainly because Taylor had just hit a six.

EPOV

I wasn't happy about whole Sophie-Anne situation but there wasn't much I could do about it sitting here at the cricket. I gazed around the stadium. She was there, somewhere. Fuck. I really didn't want to spend any time with her again. My business was doing OK, and I really didn't need her fucking it all up for me.

I sat and drank my coffee while pretending to watch the cricket. New Zealand were batting now and they didn't seem to be doing very well. It took me a while to work out that 'out for a duck' meant the batsman hadn't scored anything. Yeah, that looked slightly humiliating.

After that it was picnic time again. I wondered briefly if there was any food left at home. Then we had to ring the kids. That resulted in me listening to Felicia breathe on the phone while I could hear Amelia in the background saying "You have to say something, Felicia! That's how a phone works. If you don't talk it doesn't work!"

Still, Felicia's breathing was preferable to some of the shit Jason talked. He did fucking go on about everything. And somehow we ended up discussing how Sookie was going to get rid of my body if she killed me. I didn't particularly want her to kill me, of course. I kind of liked to think she liked me too much to want to do that. But she had no fucking clue how to get rid of a body all the same.

And then something fucking amazing happened. New Zealand actually started to play well. The batsmen finally hit their stride and were starting to hit fours and sixes. It took me a while to figure out the difference between a four and a six was whether the ball actually landed over the boundary line or just rolled there, but at least I figured it out on my own without Jason having to lecture me on why it was that way, and all the ways the Australians found to fucking cheat by moving the boundary line or whatever. Fuck he took this seriously. It was only fucking cricket after all.

Sookie was paying more attention now though. Now that New Zealand looked like that might pull it together she was watching it all pretty fucking closely.

"We have 5 wickets in hand, and need…100 from 60 balls. So that's a run rate of…"

"About 1.6" I supplied.

"An over? That seems low?"

"A ball."

"Oh. It's supposed to be by over, but anyway, that sounds totally do-able. They just need to stick to making sure they get a run a ball at least and then take the boundaries when they can. They can do that."

"Or they could just collapse completely" Calvin said.

"Oh shut up Calvin, before I find some Australians to beat you up or something."

"Why Australians?" I asked her.

"They're far more intolerant than we are. They hate South Africans."

"They're wankers" Jason supplied. Calvin nodded.

"Are you really sure _they're_ the intolerant ones?" I asked Sookie, and she turned to glare at me. "Don't push it Eric. I'm tired, Tara's tired. We don't want to have to dig that hole tonight."

"Oh, God no" Tara said. "I'll get JB to sub in for me if we're doing it tonight."

Everyone held their breath while the current batsman hit a ball into the air. This was either very good or…yeah, it was bad. He got caught.

"Fuckin' Vettori" Jason said. "If he's going to do that he needs to fuckin' look at where the fielders actually are."

"Yeah, yeah" Sookie said. "He did alright."

"You were fuckin' slagging him off before" Jason grumbled.

"I simply said that it would be nice if they had a captain who could be bothered shaving occasionally. He looks like a homeless person. It's not just that its stubble, it's like…it's all down his neck. He looks a mess. His wife must be so embarrassed to see him on TV like that."

"Well, fuck Sook. I think they pick him for the way he plays, not the way he looks."

"Yeah, but he should care! He's captain. Even though he seems too young to be captain. It's just not right. To me he'll always be the gangly 18 year old that's just joined the team."

"How old is he?" I asked her.

"I don't know. How old is he, Tara?"

"Um. 30-something now, I think?" Tara replied.

"Yeah, that sounds right" Sookie agreed. "But I still think he's 18 and his mother should be telling him to smarten up."

I realised I should be grateful Sookie hadn't met me when I was 18, she'd probably still think I was a kid and be trying to mother me.

"He looks like Harry Potter. Still" Tara commented.

"Yeah, that's because he still looks really young" Sookie agreed. "Far too young to be captain. Plus, you know, the glasses kind of give him that effect."

"Yeah" Tara agreed, and then she eyed me speculatively. "I think he looks younger than Eric though."

Sookie turned to me, but before she could say anything Jason spoke up. "That's because Eric has a really fuckin' hard life with you two threatening to hit him with a bloody shovel all time, eh? That'd make a man age really fast."

"No one's hitting anyone with a shovel, Jason!" Sookie told him. "The shovel's for burying him. There's no condition on how I have to get rid of him. I could use a nice slow poison or anything."

"I think I've been aged just by dealing with Judith's family" Calvin interjected, before Sookie and Jason got into another argument about how she was going to kill me.

"Mmm, that would" Sookie agreed. "I wonder if I can blame all my wrinkles on Lorena?" Sookie and Calvin laughed. I leaned over and whispered in Sookie's ear "You don't have any wrinkles."

She turned to me and said "phfft" but she was smiling at least.

Everyone turned their attention back to the game. Sookie was getting really fucking carried away. "Run! For fuck's sake run!" she screamed in my ear when the batsmen decided to take a risk and go for a second run. Yeah, that didn't work out for them. Some Australian player hit the stump-things before the guy got back and that, apparently, was out for him.

"OK" Sookie said, "Three wickets left and…we need 81 off 48 balls, so that's getting heaps better, isn't it?"

"Yep, it's just over 10 an over required now, eh? Fuck, they better not fuckin' stuff this up or I am never watching the fuckin' cricket again" Jason replied.

"Yeah, you always say that Jason" Sookie said.

"It's like torture supporting the Black Caps sometimes" Tara muttered, as we watched another ball roll slowly towards the boundary. Everyone waited with baited breath to see whether it would get there before the Australian fielder who was desperately scrambling to get near it grabbed it. He threw himself in its path and it managed to evade his outstretched fingers and just push gently against the boundary rope.

The fielder wasn't so lucky; he landed heavily and bounced several times on the turf. It looked fucking painful.

By this stage the general mood in the stadium had picked up, as all the Kiwis sensed that victory was within reach. Of course the New Zealand team did their best to prove them wrong, losing some more wickets through what even I could tell were pretty reckless manoeuvres, but that didn't stop everyone celebrating. There was a lot of singing along to the songs played over the stadium soundsystem between each over and whenever a new batsman arrived. During a particularly raucous version of 'Sweet Caroline' Sookie turned to me and said "See? I told you it would be fun! It's great going to the cricket. You don't get any of this atmosphere at home."

"Uh-huh" I said. The atmosphere was quite something, but at the same time, I'd had to sit here for a long time on these ass-numbing seats watching a game I didn't really understand or care about to get to this point. I glanced at Sookie. She was leaning forward to watch the next ball eagerly. She looked really happy. I just hope they fucking won and she stayed that way. We had the house to ourselves tonight after all and I'd rather have a happy Sookie than a morose one.

And I really fucking hoped I wasn't going home with a Sookie who wanted to kill me. I figured I was best off not saying anything about the cricket.

As it was, it came right down to the wire. The New Zealand team needed 10 runs off the last over. But they couldn't let anyone else get out. At first it seemed like they would do it, one of the Australians bowled a wide which meant extra runs, or an extra ball, or something fucking good, anyway. But then, well, some dick called Southee who, apparently, is a really a bowler anyway which is why he bats almost last tried to hit the ball into the stands and it was caught by an Australian fielder instead. And that, I realised, when I saw all the players were walking off the field, meant the game was over.

"Well. That fuckin' sucks" Jason said, summing up everyone's mood. "Fuckin' Black Caps. They couldn't fuckin' keep it together for one fuckin' game!"

"They just get intimidated by Australia and lose their heads" Tara sighed. "Happens every time. On paper there's no reason we shouldn't beat them, none at all. But yet…we just fold."

"Still, it's better to lose to the Aussies than Bangladesh or something. At least you know they're better than you" Calvin said, consolingly.

"Oh, shut up Calvin. You're not making it any better. We should have won, but we didn't" Sookie said, gathering up the cooler bag and her backpack.

"Fuck that sucks" Jason said again. He seemed to be stuck on that note.

Slowly we stood up and joined the throng of people exiting the stadium. It took a while to get out of the stands. "So" Sookie asked me, as we were slowly making our way up the stairs and I was trying to stop random men from barrelling into her, "Did you enjoy your first cricket game?"

"Yeah..." I said slowly. "But I'm not sure I want to do it again in a hurry."

"I know" she agreed. "It's really disappointing when we lose like that. We were so close! Oh well, there's always the next game."

"Yeah, I guess."

"It's in Hamilton. We could drive down."

"You want to drive to Hamilton…for the cricket?" I asked her.

Sookie burst out laughing. "Oh the look on your face is priceless. No, I won't make you drive to Hamilton on Thursday. But maybe next year we can come back when they're playing at Eden Park again. We can walk here after all."

"Mmm" I said, hoping that would cover it. Fuck, I thought, maybe next summer she'll be pregnant and won't want to come. I could only fucking hope.

SPOV

Everyone was a bit quiet after the game finished. It had been really exciting at the end, and then, it stopped being exciting because we lost. It always happens that way with cricket. At least it wasn't a five day test that had ended in a draw, but still. It would be nice if New Zealand won occasionally.

Shit, I thought. I bet Sophie-Anne is really happy now. I really hoped I didn't run into her again before I left the stadium. It would actually be nice to never run into her again. She must be due to go back to Sydney soon, I thought. Surely she didn't want to stay here that long?

I told Calvin to walk Tara back to her car, given she'd parked practically where he lived, and she agreed to give him a lift home. So we said goodbye to them and that left me with just Eric and Jason.

Then we heard a voice yelling "Oi! Stackhouse!" Jason and I both automatically turned around to see who it was. It was Hoyt, Jason's friend from when we were kids. It would have been nice, I'd realised, if I'd run into him earlier rather than Sophie-Anne.

He caught up to us and walked with us along Walter's Road, chatting to Jason. When we hit Dominion Road Jason suggested a drink at the pub. Hoyt was keen, but I just wanted to get home.

"Have you got the spare key?" I asked Jason.

"Yes Mum!" he replied. "And I know the fuckin' address. I'll be fine, won't I Hoyt?" Hoyt just nodded. Yeah, I just hoped he had more sense these days. The pair of them used to get into all sorts of shit.

"OK, well have fun you two" I said, and Eric and I set off walking past the entrance to the supermarket carpark and the Asian barbecue restaurant.

It was fully dark now and as we got further and further along Dominion Road towards our street the people around us thinned out. Eventually we were pretty much alone. It was nice walking like this with Eric, holding hands. I noticed that he even made an effort to walk at my pace. I had to do a lot less running along beside him, at any rate.

"I wish we'd won" I said to Eric. "It would have nicer for your first game if there'd at least been a reason to celebrate."

"Yeah, celebrating would have been nice" Eric said.

"But that's cricket. It all comes down to who's better on the day. And, unfortunately, they were this time. Stupid Australian team."

"I'm, um, supposed to say something about the Australians now, aren't I?"

"Yeah, that would be nice and supportive."

"Um. They fielded really well…"

"No Eric! Not supportive towards them. You're on our side, remember?" In the light of the streetlight, I could see Eric was grinning at me. Yeah, he was playing dumb.

"Oh. OK then. Um, they dress funny?"

"They do. It's a terrible yellow. Everyone knows black is much more fashionable."

"Um. They, um, they…no, I'm completely out of ideas about what's wrong with Australians."

"Everything, Eric. Just everything."

"You guys take this rivalry really seriously don't you?"

"Of course we do. Jason used to have this t-shirt which said 'I support two teams. New Zealand and anyone playing Australia'. And it's true. I'd even support South Africa if they were playing Australia. But don't tell Calvin."

"No. No I wouldn't tell Calvin your dirty little secret."

We walked in silence for a while, and then, when I complained that my feet had blisters, Eric gave me a piggy-back down our street. That was kind of fun.

By the time we reached home I was feeling a bit more cheerful. The walk home had been great. It wasn't often I got that much time with Eric all to myself these days, normally if we walked anywhere we were trying to shepherd two kids as well, and Eric had at least one of them attached to him. I think this was the first time I'd actually managed to be first in line for a piggyback.

First thing I wanted when I got in the door was a cold drink. I poured two glasses of water and handed one to Eric. "Well the day wasn't a total bust, but I still think it's a shame we didn't win" I said to him, taking a sip.

"Yeah. I guess that would be a shame for you. Me, I'm OK about it."

"Hmm. You haven't invested enough in your chosen country yet, Eric. But you'll get there, in time."

"Can I be a rugby fan, rather than a cricket fan though? I don't think cricket is really me."

"I thought you weren't that keen on the rugby?"

"It's better than cricket."

"Maybe I'll show you netball."

"What's that?"

"Well, it's like basketball. Except it's not, they don't bounce the ball."

"Sounds a bit lame."

"It's played entirely by women. In short skirts. And we often beat Australia at it."

"No, you had me at women in short skirts. I think that might be my sport."

"Yeah, it would be." I finished my glass of water and put the glass in the dishwasher. Eric did the same.

"Soooo" Eric said. "You're kind of, um, disappointed?"

I shrugged. "I guess. Mainly because I wanted you to have a good time."

"And you might need, um, consoling?"

I figured out where this was going. "I might" I agreed.

"And it's a warm night, and we have the house to ourselves."

"And Jason will be arriving back at any time" I countered.

"Yes, but if we weren't technically in the house Sookie, then it would be OK, wouldn't it?"

I looked at him. "You're like a dog with a bone, aren't you Eric?"

"I prefer to think of myself as eternally optimistic. Like you know, New Zealand cricket supporters"

"Uh-huh" I said, eyeing him as he edged closer to me, so I was sandwiched between him and the dishwasher. "And, you know" he said "even the New Zealand cricket team has to win sometimes…" he dipped his head and kissed my neck.

"Well they do" I agreed. Oh, bugger it, I thought. There was no getting him past this one. I'd just have to go for it. "OK" I said in the end. "Sex on the freezer it is then."

"It'll cheer you up" Eric said.

"It'll cheer _you _up."

Eric shrugged. "I had to sit there for a very long time, you know, all crushed up in those seats."

"Fine, let's do it so we can be back inside before Jason gets home. I grabbed his hand and we headed out the ranch sliders, after a stop by the linen cupboard to get a towel. Eric rolled his eyes at that, but didn't say anything.

It was very good. And it did take my mind off the whole cricket debacle. And, most thankfully of all, we were back inside the house just ahead of Jason arriving home, because as much as I liked going to the cricket with Jason, I didn't need him to be privy to all my after-match activities.

As we were going to sleep Eric leaned over and asked "So what other sports do New Zealand do really badly at?"

"Well, that'll be your new mission, won't it? You can Google them in the morning."

"Yeah, I might just do that."

"Thank-you. For going to the cricket with me, and putting up with Jason and everyone else."

"Oh, that's OK Sookie. It wasn't quite what I expected but I enjoyed…well, I enjoyed commiserating with you."

I laughed. "Yeah, I bet you did."

"But I still think I would have enjoyed it, even if we weren't commiserating."

"Well, that's good. I'd hate to think you had sex with me on a freezer out of pity."

Eric chuckled. "No. No, it definitely wasn't pity. It might have been fear, because you keep threatening to get rid of me, and bury my body somewhere. Maybe I'm scared of being surplus to requirements?"

"Yeah, maybe" I said, laughing. "OK, well goodnight. Love you."

"Love you too. 'Night Sookie."

**A/N In case it wasn't clear Daniel Vettori is the captain of the New Zealand cricket team. He really, really needs a decent shave. It's not good. It doesn't make him look older, he just looks about 12 with facial hair. But he's one of the few professional sportsmen who wear glasses, I think.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	37. Chapter 37

**A/N I don't have much to say, other than thanks for reading my story! I really love that you do.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I guessed I was pregnant as soon as I wanted to rip the chicken McNugget right out of Amelia's hand. The four of us were currently sitting in the foodcourt at St Luke's, along with what felt like the rest of Auckland, and Amelia was so busy chatting she was just waving her food around and not eating.

And I really, really wanted that McNugget.

It was always my thing when I was pregnant. I wanted fast food, preferably deep fried chicken. Well, as close to chicken as that McNugget was. I sighed, and looked down at my sushi. If I was pregnant then I technically shouldn't be eating that…but, well I didn't know for sure, so I guessed it was OK.

The smell of the McNuggets wafted over and I felt pretty sure that I was pregnant.

I picked at my sushi, while pondering the moral dilemma that was my desire to steal the food out of my children's mouths. Although if Amelia didn't really put it anywhere near her mouth then it wasn't that bad, was it?

My period was currently about three days late and I'd been holding off thinking about it too much, but now, well now it seemed as though it might be worth investigating.

"Are you OK?" Eric asked me, looking up from the sashimi lunchbox thing he was devouring. Felicia was currently helping him eat the salmon and I think he was trying to get as much as he could before she took it all.

"Yeah. I'm fine" I said, taking another sip of my miso soup.

"What did you get before?" Eric asked, nodding at the plastic bag I'd been carrying when I met up with them all in the foodcourt earlier.

"Oh. Just a denim skirt."

"Another one?"

"Well, this one is different, it's, um, shorter than my other…ones. Definitely shorter than the really tight one."

"Shorter sounds good, but I like the tight one" Eric said, picking up some crab with his plastic fork. I took a bite of my salmon roll and wondered how much wear I'd get out of my new skirt and whether I'd be able to fit back into it next summer. Then I wondered where my maternity denim skirt and the rest of the maternity clothes were. They were all in a storage box, but I didn't quite remember where the storage box was. It had been in the study when Eric arrived, but now it was maybe in the ceiling. Or the garage. I wasn't completely sure.

"You drifted off again." Eric said, bringing me back to the present.

"What?" I said. "Oh yeah. I was just thinking. Nothing important."

"Mum, can we get an ice cream after this?" Amelia asked.

"We'll see" I told her.

"Ice cream?" Felicia asked, looking at Eric.

"Maybe" Eric told her.

"What else do you have to do?" Eric asked me.

"Oh, not much. Just the supermarket I think." It was Auckland Anniversary Day today, so it was a public holiday. But it was raining, well, pouring down really. So we'd been to the movies to see whatever the latest dire animated thing on offer was. Amelia had loved it. Felicia had lasted about an hour and then needed to wander around a bit, but luckily it wasn't too crowded in the theatre and no one minded the small child repeatedly climbing on and off her father's lap.

I'd wandered off to do a bit of shopping after the movie finished and then we'd met up for lunch. Only to find that the foodcourt was incredibly crowded and there was a bit of a fight to get a table. We'd managed to spy some people leaving a table and Amelia's excited squeal of "They're going" complete with finger-pointing had no doubt hastened their departure.

And now, of course, I was stuck here with Amelia and her McNuggets, which seemed ever more appealing by the minute. I wondered whether Amelia might actually leave some, but there was no such luck. She was a slow eater, but she was usually pretty thorough if it was something she liked.

When she'd finally finished her lunch, and her re-telling of the story of the film we'd just been to see, I sent Eric off to buy them all ice cream. Several people carrying trays walked slowly past us, in the hope we might be leaving soon, but they were out of luck. Now we had the table I wasn't in a hurry to give it up.

Luckily ice cream didn't have the same effect on me as McNuggets did and I wasn't stuck there drooling over Amelia's ice cream cone. Felicia's was dripping onto the table faster than she could eat it, but she didn't mind. She loved ice cream. I guessed we had Eric to thank for that, as he was the one who'd started feeding it to her.

I realised Eric was looking at me over the top of his own ice cream. "Want some?" he asked. I shook my head. I really didn't fancy it at all.

"I'm pretty full" I said to him.

"You didn't eat much of the sushi" he said. It was true; I'd given it to him to finish up.

"Popcorn" I replied. That was true too, we'd had one of those huge buckets of popcorn earlier, in the hope that if Amelia was constantly munching something she wouldn't talk through the movie. It didn't exactly work out that way, of course.

Eric gave up and went back to eating his ice cream.

When they were done we cleaned the kids up as best we could. I pulled a packet of wet wipes out of my bag and handed those over so Eric could try to get chocolate sauce off Felicia's face. She tried to squirm out of his grasp but didn't quite manage it. I realised that if we were having a baby I'd have to dig out my nappy bag and start lugging that around again. Still, we'd be back to using to the pushchair and it did clip onto the handle of that, which made life easier. Felicia had given up on the pushchair now and just yelled if you tried to put her in there. She was, I thought, over being the baby.

This didn't mean that toilet training had exactly been going according to plan. The first time I'd sent her to play outside, wearing just a pair of knickers so the washing wasn't bad but she'd at least feel if she was wet, she'd promptly peed on the path and then looked at the resulting puddle in confusion. "Wet" she'd commented, before moving on to more exciting things.

After that we'd had a bit more success. If I just kept putting her on the potty then I had a pretty good chance of catching something. But I wasn't about to take her outside the house without a pull-up on just at this point in time.

So when both kids were clean-ish, I took them to the parent's room so they could both use the little toilet in there. Amelia went first, to try to give Felicia the idea. I put Felicia on there, but she got bored part-way through Amelia's story about a princess whose magic was stolen by a witch, and wanted to get off and get going. She hadn't managed to produce anything, but her pull-up was still dry so that was something.

I realised I should be grateful that she was likely to be toilet-trained before I had the next baby. Assuming I was pregnant. And I was pretty sure I was. My period was usually like clock-work. And I was pretty good at working out when I was ovulating after doing it a couple of times before. I hadn't had a chance when I got pregnant with Felicia, of course, because my period wasn't even back yet after the miscarriage, so I'd just gone straight into another pregnancy.

So I was obviously pretty fertile.

"Any luck?" Eric asked, when we came back out of the corridor that led to the toilets and the parent's room.

"No, but she's dry at least. So she's getting there."

I led the way towards the supermarket and Eric followed me, holding Felicia's hand. Amelia skipped alongside. I thought about how you don't realise you're signing up for years of inane conversations about whether or not your children just peed when you have a baby. You think about the nappies and the night feeds, and forget that two year's later it's all about whether they have gone, will go, or might need to go if they don't go now. It's exhausting keeping track of someone else's toileting habits.

But at least Eric kind of knew that part, I reasoned. In fact he'd skipped right over the tiny baby stage with Felicia, and with Amelia he'd arrived right in the middle of finding out just how many ways your kids could embarrass you when they learned to talk.

Maybe the next one would be quieter.

"So what do you need to get?" Eric asked. I realised we'd walked the length of the mall and were now outside the supermarket.

"Oh. Um. Bananas. And some other stuff" I replied, as Amelia and Felicia climbed all over the digger from Bob the Builder, which was one of the many ride-ons stationed around the mall.

"Can you make it go?" Amelia cried plaintively.

I looked at Eric. "Do you need any coins?" I asked.

"No, I'm good" he said, digging around in his wallet.

"OK. I'll be back in a minute" I said, walking over to grab a basket and push through the turnstile at the entrance.

I grabbed bananas and kept walking. I remembered we were low on peanut butter, so I got some of that, spending a few moments pondering the merits of low-fat with a mountain of sugar, versus ordinary fatty stuff. I had no clue. I went with the ordinary one.

On my way through I also collected some mince that was on special, some more sandwich bags for Amelia's morning teas for pre-school, and finally, I ended up in the aisle that held all the toiletries and personal items.

Pregnancy tests were of course on the top shelf, so I had to stand on tiptoe and reach right up with my fingertips to grab one. It would have been a lot easier if I'd had Eric here to do it for me, but I wasn't quite ready to share my suspicions with him yet. For one thing, I didn't want him to be disappointed if it turned out not to be true. It wasn't the first time my period hadn't arrived bang on time. But combined with the fact I'd been having a lot of unprotected sex, it did seem to make sense that there was a reason for it to be late.

I thought I might wait to tell Eric though.

I grabbed a loaf of bread and headed to one of the checkouts. One advantage of being older and having a ring on my finger was that I didn't feel in the least embarrassed about buying a pregnancy test. I couldn't say the same about the poor kid who was working the checkout. He didn't really know where to look when he scanned it through.

I collected my shopping bags and stopped briefly to tuck the test away in my handbag, before I walked back to the join the rest of the family. The kids had moved on from the digger to Thomas the Tank Engine, which was now bobbing up and down as the tune played and they giggled. I wondered how much they'd cost Eric while he was waiting for me.

I also wondered whether you could fit a third kid in there and what you'd do if you couldn't. How likely were they to take turns nicely? And how much would that cost?

"All done?" Eric asked when he saw me.

"Yep. Let's go home." Thomas finished moving and Eric persuaded the kids to get out, to the sound of a lot of whinging. Somehow telling them that they'd already had a movie, McDonald's, ice cream and several other rides didn't appease them. It never did.

EPOV

Sookie was acting fucking weird. She kept drifting off and looking at thin air. And when I did get her to talk to me I felt like we were having a completely different conversation. There was something going on, but I had no clue what.

I wondered if she'd crack and tell me soon, but it didn't look like she was going to. She hadn't been this weird since she'd decided she wanted to try for a baby, and even then all I'd picked up on was the fact she was fucking annoyed with the freezer in the kitchen.

But this time around, she wasn't yelling at anything. She wasn't saying anything. It was fucking bizarre. I would have put it down to PMS, but, aside from the fact I'd learned not to bring that up,so I couldn't ask her outright, I did know what the signs were. There would have definitely been yelling. And maybe some stomping and pouting. Quite possibly followed by arm-waving. And then if it all really went to shit, there'd be tears. But this, this was like she went somewhere, inside her head. And I couldn't follow her.

Still, it stopped me worrying about Sophie-Anne. She'd been noticeably quiet since I'd bumped into her at the cricket. But something was bound to happen sooner or later. I kind of hoped it was later. I hadn't said anything to Sookie yet because, well. There was nothing to say really. I'd been invited to a breakfast for business customers in a week's time and I guessed I'd find out more then. There wasn't much point in telling Sookie anything before that.

And there really didn't seem to be much point when she had her own stuff going on. It was a public holiday in Auckland, and it was fucking pouring down. So we'd spent the morning watching a dreadful movie while Felicia bounced all over me, and then sometime during lunch Sookie switched off completely and just disappeared.

I found her in the laundry taking stuff out of the dryer. "Bad day to be an underpants fairy, huh?" I asked her.

"What?" she said, turning around.

"The rain. You had to put everything in the dryer."

"Oh. Oh yeah. Well, at least it wasn't a poo-covered duvet cover, but yeah. A little sun might have been nice."

"I think the kids would have liked it too. Amelia is currently annoyed because I won't let her go out to the playhouse, but she'd come back soaking. I don't think it's that water-tight, not to mention she'd have to get across the lawn first."

"Uh-huh."

"You're not really listening, are you?"

"No. No I am. You were saying Amelia's annoyed she can't go outside."

"Yeah. It's more than annoyed though. She's shut herself in her room."

"She'll come back out."

"It's what she's doing in there that worries me."

"Probably setting up a shop or something."

"Probably. Do you want me to carry that?" I asked, gesturing to the basket, which was now full as Sookie had finished emptying the dryer.

"Oh. Oh yeah. Just stick it on our bed for now. I'll deal with it later."

I carried the basket into our room still none the wiser about what was actually up with Sookie.

SPOV

Eric kept asking me if I was OK. Well I was, but I was just preoccupied. I was well aware what was sitting in my handbag and I was fighting the urge to just do the test and get it over with. I really thought it would be better to wait until the next day. Just to make sure my period didn't come. A couple of days would be ideal.

If I could just hold out that long.

I started to realise that waiting that long maybe wouldn't be fair on Eric when I told him off for eating the organic rice cakes I'd bought for the kids. It wasn't really his fault. Although I did feel kind of justified when I pointed out that it said for ages 1-5 on the bag. He definitely did not fit into that age group. And he'd eaten about 10 of them because they were so small.

Eric had just rolled his eyes and promised to check the age rating on everything he ate from now on, before he walked off.

I went into our room to put the washing away and lost track of what everyone else was doing. Amelia tracked me down though and wanted to chat about her birthday party which was still a way off. Trying to tell her that Felicia's birthday was first didn't seem to cut it. She really wanted to organise it all now.

"It's still ages away, Amelia" I said, putting Eric's underwear in his drawer. "I don't think we need to write out a guest list today."

"But Mum! I know who I want to invite. There's Maisie, and Katie, and Cooper and Billy, and Tiana, and Ella and…"

"OK, Amelia. I get the picture. But I don't think we need to do it today."

"But how will we write out the invitations if we don't know who we're giving them to?"

"Um. It's too early to give out any invitations yet."

"But how will people know they're coming to my party! What if they're busy?"

"Well. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Why don't you go and see what everyone else is doing?"

"They're playing with blocks. It's borin'"

"Well…you could colour in?" I tried to push my pyjamas into my rather over-filled drawer. I couldn't quite get it closed.

Amelia sighed. "I'll find _something_" she said, indicating just how disappointing my suggestions were.

"OK" I agreed, as she left the room and I followed her, carrying the sheets that needed to go into the linen cupboard.

I headed to the kitchen to find Eric hovering. "What's for dinner?" he asked.

"Baked beans on toast" I told him. I didn't feel like making anything much. The weather was blah, I was hot, and I was preoccupied with my thoughts. It was all I could do to keep from running to the bathroom every five minutes just to check whether or not my period had actually arrived.

"Really?" Eric asked. I don't think he meant to sound annoyed, but he did. Just a bit.

"Yes! We ate out at lunchtime. We don't need a second big meal today. And there's nothing wrong with baked beans. They're full of protein."

"Fuck! You don't have to get so upset, Sookie. I was just asking."

"Yeah, well everyone's always _just_ asking. But no one else is ever cooking. I have to come up with all the ideas for meals around here."

"Well do you want me to cook then? I will if you want?"

I sighed. "No, it's fine. I don't mind making dinner. But it's just going to be baked beans tonight. Like it or lump it."

Eric sighed then. "Fine then. Baked beans it is."

I turned to look at him. "Sorry I snapped I just…well, I think it's the weather. And the humidity. I feel a bit…grouchy."

Eric came over and put his arms around me. "Yeah, the weather is fucking dreadful. Every time I think I'm used to the humidity it gets me again."

"It was better at St Luke's. There was air-con" I said, leaning against Eric's chest.

"Yeah. Air-con is nice."

I stepped back. "So how many pieces of toast do you want with your beans?"

EPOV

Definitely PMS. The shouting, stomping and general air of annoyance with everything I said or did had started now. Sookie tried to say it was the weather, the rain and humidity combining to make her short-tempered, but I knew better. It was PMS. This happened far too regularly for it to be anything else.

She managed to refrain from yelling at me through dinner, even when I took my eye off Felicia and she put baked beans in her hair. All I got was a pointed look.

I was bathing the kids anyway. Felicia wasn't happy about the hair washing and trying to tell her that ketchup in her hair wasn't a good look didn't seem to persuade her otherwise.

Amelia just kept trying to tell me that I needed to tell Sookie to get some invitations for her birthday party. I just nodded and said "Uh-huh" to that. I didn't need two of them fucking pissed at me.

SPOV

I held out until it was nearly bedtime. I'd been as strong as I could. I kept putting it off because I didn't want to face the disappointment of having a negative result because I'd jumped the gun. But at the same time, maybe I could be that lucky? I had been before.

So I'd gone into the ensuite and opened up the test, read the instructions and peed on the stick. So far, so standard. I replaced the little cap and set it beside the sink to wait the required time. I tried to ignore the fact that even though it was supposed to take 3 minutes I could already see the second little line appearing in the screen.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face, and then I sat down on the floor to wait. I didn't want to leave it there so Eric could find it, and I didn't know where else to put it.

I checked my watch. The time was up. I looked at the test. Definitely two lines. Definitely.

Although I'd guessed earlier in the day, I was still a bit stunned. You plan these things but you spend all the time talking yourself down, saying it won't happen this soon, no one's that lucky, it's going to take a while.

But it clearly hadn't.

I wondered if Tara still had her bassinet that I'd borrowed the last two times.

I wasn't sure how long I'd been sitting there, when Eric knocked on the door. "Are you OK?" he asked me. "You've been in there forever."

"Oh." Well, it was now or never, I thought. "Come in."

EPOV

As we were going to bed Sookie disappeared into the bathroom. And then she stayed in there. Fuck, she always locked herself in the bathroom to cry. I tried to listen. I couldn't hear any crying. I wondered how quiet she could be.

I waited a bit longer. Still no Sookie.

In the end I asked her through the door if she was OK. She said come in. Her voice didn't crack as she did it, so that was good sign I thought. Also she didn't tell me to 'bugger off', so things were really promising. If a bit odd.

When I opened the door Sookie was just sitting there on the floor, holding something. She was looking at whatever-it-was so I couldn't see if her face was tear-stained or not. "What's up?" I asked.

Sookie looked up at me. Definitely no tears. "I'm pregnant" she said, in a completely neutral voice. It wasn't what I'd been expecting and it took me a while to process what she'd said.

I sat down on the floor, as near to Sookie as I could, given the ensuite wasn't big enough for both of us to fit between the shower and the bathroom cabinet side by side. "Are you sure?" I asked. It wasn't that I really doubted her, but it just seemed…fast.

"Yep. See." She held up the thing in her hand. I guessed it was a pregnancy test.

"That means you are?"

"Yep. Two lines. So I have the right hormone present. I'm officially pregnant."

"Oh. I thought it would take longer."

"So did I. I mean, I'm older than when I did this before so I figured it might not always happen really quickly."

I glanced at her. "Exactly how long did it take you to get pregnant before?"

"Um. Well…happened second month of trying with Amelia. Happened first month with…the next one. And then you know about Felicia. That happened straightaway too."

"Oh. I see." Fuck, this was kind of confusing. I was back to where I'd been in high school with the whole 'it only takes one time' thing. Although with Sookie it had been more than once, I guessed. It had been a lot of times.

"Maybe it was the freezer?" I said.

"Maybe. Or the deck. We'll never know. But I'm officially just over four weeks pregnant."

"Four weeks? That's too early for the freezer or the deck."

"It counts from your period regardless. It's always 40 weeks from the start of your last period. Unless you didn't have one, which I didn't last time. Then they have to guestimate. They hate it when they have to do that. They look at you like you're a moron."

"Uh-huh" I said. Sookie had kind of wandered off on a tangent then. Which was better than the silences. I wasn't sure what the silences meant, but it kind of made the rest of the day make a bit more sense. "You're, um…OK about it?" I asked her. I couldn't really tell.

"I am. But I don't want to get…well, it's hard." She turned to me. "I don't want to get too attached. I mean four weeks is nothing. It's early. It could be over tomorrow. Or in six week's time. That's just the way it works. So we just have to wait."

"OK. But can we wait in bed? Because it's no fun sitting on the bathroom floor. I don't know why you always do it." I stood up.

Sookie shrugged, and then took the hand I offered and got up herself. "I like the bathroom. I feel safe in the bathroom."

We walked into the bedroom and got into bed. I switched the light off and Sookie lay with her head on my chest, which was nice. "So it's really happening?" I asked her.

"Hopefully. Yeah."

"A baby" I said. Neither of us had said that word yet. But that was what it was. It wasn't just a pregnancy. It was, well, it would be, a baby. Our baby.

"Yep. It's unlikely to be a kitten."

"Thank fuck. Bob is enough. He came in fucking soaked through before and rubbed himself all over me."

Sookie laughed. "He likes you."

"He tolerates me and you know it."

We were silent for a bit. "Does it feel different? Yet?" I asked Sookie.

"No. Aside from my weird desire to eat McNuggets. I struggled at lunch because I really wanted to steal Amelia's."

"Oh, was that what you were thinking about?" I asked, putting a few things together.

"Yeah. And then I twigged. So I bought a test."

"I guess you should get some sleep then" I said to her.

"Yeah, guess I should." Sookie rolled over onto her side and I moved so I was lying behind her. I put my arm over her and it brushed her stomach. It was odd to think there was something in there. A baby. Our baby.

"Good night. I love you" I whispered to Sookie. But she'd already fallen asleep.

**Thanks for reading!**


	38. Chapter 38

**A/N So lots of you are excited about the pregnancy. Let's hope the novelty hasn't worn off for Sookie yet!**

**Disclaimer: Still not mine. Look at what I put them through? Like anyone would trust me with their characters.**

EPOV

I was met at the door by a huge pair of worried blue eyes. "What's up, Leesh?" I asked her.

"Mummy's tummy's yucky" she said, putting her arms up so I'd pick her up. I lifted her up and held her on my hip, trying to wrench my tie off with the other hand. It was fucking hot and humid and it seemed unfair that my vacation was over and I was back to having to wear these stupid fucking ties.

I carried Felicia into our bedroom and heard the telltale, and rather unpleasant, sounds of Sookie in the bathroom throwing up. "You OK?" I yelled through the door.

"Uh-huh" she managed to get out between heaves. I set Felicia down on the bed and started unbuttoning my shirt. Felicia's eyes just watched the door of the bathroom. "Mom's OK" I assured her. Well, I hoped she was. It didn't sound good.

"Mummy?" she asked.

"Yeah. Mummy."

I could hear Amelia's voice droning on and on. I guessed she was in the bathroom telling Sookie a story to cheer her up and take her mind off it. She'd decided when all of this started that her role was bathroom entertainments director. I wasn't sure if Sookie really appreciated it but I think she sensed there was no telling Amelia that she didn't need the moral support.

Although even Amelia apparently had her limits. She wandered into the bedroom as I was trying to pull a pair of shorts on. "I can see your underpants" she commented.

"Yep" I agreed, watching that Felicia didn't bounce herself right off the bed.

"Mummy's eaten some yucky food again" Amelia said. "I don't know why she keeps doing it. I don't think its right. Is it, Eric?" Amelia looked worried now too. We all were, in a way.

"It'll pass" I said to her.

"I spat up. On the deck. That was yucky" Amelia said. "Will I get sick again?"

'No. No you won't get what your mum's got."

"Oh. Why?"

"Because…um, you didn't eat what she did."

Amelia thought for a moment, and then she looked worried again. "Yes I did!" she wailed. "I did. We had cheese and marmite sandwiches for lunch and we all had them. I'm going to be sick too. I don't feel well." She looked at me and then turned around and headed back into the bathroom. "Mummy! Mummy I feel sick too! Mummy I think I might spit up!"

I could hear Sookie murmur "You're OK Amelia. You won't get this." The sounds of throwing up seemed to have stopped so I risked sticking my head into the bathroom. Sookie was sitting in front of the toilet, leaning against the wall looking pale and very, very sweaty.

"Yeah, I know. I look pretty gross" she said.

"What?" I asked, realising I'd just been standing there. "Oh, no. You're fine." I gave her a smile, which she returned, weakly. Fuck. I felt so bad about this. Sookie had it bad. Morning sickness was terribly misnamed in her case; she felt sick all day and then ended up throwing up just before dinner every night. And sometimes after dinner as well. She was exhausted and she looked it.

"I don't think I'm fine" Amelia said, from where she was sitting beside the bathroom cabinet. "I think I might spit up."

"No you won't" I said to her.

"Hungry!" Felicia shouted, bursting past me into the bathroom.

"Yep. Hang on. I have to brush my teeth." Sookie stood up from the floor slowly, shooing away my hand. Fuck. There wasn't anything I could do to help her out.

I left the bathroom, shepherding Amelia and Felicia out with me. I followed them into the family room, where Felicia made a dash for the line of groceries Amelia had set out on the floor. Santa had brought her a 'shop' for Christmas, which consisted of a pink cash register and a lot of pretend grocery items. The cash register came complete with a credit card reader and a microphone, so she could announce, in an annoyingly distorted way, that she had 'specials'. God help us if we all didn't immediately front up to buy whatever it was that was on special. And fuck knows whatever it was would be a huge special because she made you use the plastic credit card and then still gave you play money back as change. She hadn't quite worked out the principles of making a profit yet.

I was about to suggest to Amelia that she try to pack the stuff up, when my phone rang.

I took it out of my pocket and answered it, just as Amelia yelled "No! Felicia, you can't just take those!"

"Eric?" Sophie-Anne's voice questioned. Fuck. I should have paid more attention to who was actually calling. "Eric, can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Yeah" I said, while trying to catch Amelia's attention and signal for her to stop trying to wrench the basket of groceries out of Felicia's hand. She didn't see me. Or she pretended not to see me. She certainly didn't stop.

"So, I just wanted to talk to you before the breakfast in the morning…" Sophie-Anne droned on. I kind of missed the last bit because Felicia let out an almighty squeal and tried shoving Amelia away. "Hey!" I warned the pair of them.

"You'll be there in the morning, won't you Eric?" Sophie-Anne asked. "You're normally there for the monthly breakfasts?"

"Yeah. I'll be there" I replied. Just then Felicia decided to make a break for it with her groceries and tried to run past with Amelia in hot pursuit. Amelia yelled "Stop!", Felicia looked back, rather than watch where she was going and tripped over my foot, which made her yell a beautifully-enunciated "Fuck!" right underneath me. I didn't have much time to marvel at how well her speech was developing though, as I instinctively stepped back…onto something furry. That squealed. Horribly.

"Is this a bad time?" Sophie-Anne demanded, as I helped Felicia up and ignored Amelia's convoluted tirade of accusations which were being poured into the ear that I wasn't currently holding the phone to. "It's not a great time" I said. "It's kind of dinner time."

"Really?" Sophie-Anne asked. "This early?"

Sookie walked past then, and said "Don't worry, I'm on dinner it's nearly done…" she stopped suddenly, and put her hand over her mouth. "Oops, sorry!" she whispered, realising I was on the phone. I shook my head to say it was OK and she carried onto the kitchen muttering "Oh, for God's sake Bob, you do not help when you just walk in front of me like that!"

"Yeah" I said to Sophie-Anne, remembering there'd been a question, but forgetting completely what it was. Amelia had thankfully followed Sookie and Bob into the kitchen, sensing that she might get more sympathy from her mother, but Felicia was still hanging about by my feet going "Phone! Phone!" with her hand out. That was my own fault for using the damn thing as a way to amuse bored kids when we were out. Now every time Felicia saw it she thought it was there purely so she could watch another Sesame Street clip or music video.

"Look, Eric. Shall we just talk tomorrow? After the breakfast? I'll book a meeting room."

"Oh, OK. Fine" I said, thinking it sounded far from fine, but there probably wasn't much I could do about it, short of actually giving the phone to Felicia and letting her babble nonsense into it until Sophie-Anne got bored and found someone else to annoy.

"Bebemonkee!" Felicia yelled at me, still holding her hand out.

"Right. I'll see you in the morning then Eric" Sophie-Anne said, sounding thoroughly pissed with me. It really wasn't my fault she decided to call at the most inconvenient hour of the day. "Goodbye." With that Sophie-Anne disconnected without waiting for my reply.

"BEBEMONKEE!" Felicia wailed. I loaded up the world's most annoying YouTube clip and handed the phone over to her, as the sound of the song started up. Felicia was more than capable of making it play again when it finished, so I left her to it with the intention of going to see if I could help Sookie. As I reached the kitchen Amelia turned around "Baby monkey?" she asked. I nodded. She took off so she could join Felicia in dancing around my phone.

"Again?" Sookie asked me. "That song is driving me bananas…OK, that wasn't meant to be funny. But it is. And it gets stuck in my brain. Bloody Tara."

Yeah, it was Tara who'd emailed the original link to Sookie, who'd then, perhaps a little stupidly, shown it to the kids. I was probably also stupid for having let them watch it on the phone when we were out. Now half the time all that could be heard in the house was the song that accompanied the clip, and, even worse Sookie and I often found ourselves singing it at odd hours of the day or night. Fuck, it was annoying.

"Do you need any help?" I asked her, as she stopped and kind of gripped the kitchen counter.

"No. I'm fine. I just…wish I could get rid of the nausea. You'd think actually throwing up would help, but it only does for a short time. So I'm a bit behind in making dinner." She sighed and walked over to the pantry. "I need another cracker" she muttered, looking inside.

I scanned the kitchen looking for evidence of what had been going on here today. It was a Monday, so both the kids and Sookie had been home all day. And usually, that meant baking. I spied where Sookie had left the container, and eased it open as quietly as I could while her back was still turned.

"You'll spoil your dinner" she said, without turning around.

Fuck. How did she do that? "No I won't" I said, with my mouth full of blueberry muffin.

"Mmm, you probably won't, I guess", Sookie said, turning around with a couple of crackers in her hand. "But don't let the kids see you…" we heard the annoying Baby Monkey song start again. "You're probably safe there too though."

"So what is for dinner?" I asked, closing up the container that had the muffins in it before I was tempted to eat another. I probably should have had lunch.

"Homemade pizza and salad. I was trying to think of something quick, but even then it's taken longer than it should have. Nearly done though" Sookie bent down and peered in the oven. "Do you want to get them to wash their hands? You might have to take your phone and lead them to the bathroom pied piper-style."

"Yeah, OK."

I did as Sookie suggested and picked up my phone from where the pair of them were dancing around it and kind of led them towards the bathroom. There was a fair amount of whining about both the requirement for clean hands and the need for the Baby Monkey song to stop now if Sookie and I were going to keep our sanity.

When we got back, Sookie was carrying the plates over to the table softly singing "Baby monkey, baby monkey…" to herself. She caught me looking at her. "Oops" she said. "But it's stuck in my brain now and I am never going to get it out."

I helped Felicia into her seat and ignored her small, querulous "Bebemonkee?"

Amelia peered at her plate. "Is this food OK, Mum?" she asked. "I don't want to get sick and you keep eating bad food."

"It's fine Ames" I said taking a bite. And it was fine. Well, it was OK. I took another bite. Actually, it was kind of…different. The sauce tasted a bit strong or something.

Amelia pulled a face. "I don't like it" she said.

"Yes you do" I told her. She took another bite and pulled a face. Felicia picked at a tomato, then put a finger in the cheese on top of the pizza and put some of that in her mouth. Neither of them seemed to be enjoying their dinner.

I looked over at Sookie. She was picking at her salad. I had another bite. Yeah, it still tasted kind of…funky. Or something. I didn't want to say anything though.

Amelia had no such qualms. "This is horrible" she said, pushing her plate away. "There's too much tomato stuff and I DON'T like it." The last bit was addressed to me. She picked up a carrot stick and nibbled it daintily.

I was still just making do with my pizza, but my enthusiasm was waning. Sookie looked over at Amelia and frowned, but didn't say anything. I watched Felicia take a bite of her slice and pull a rather disgusted face, but at least she didn't tell her mother she didn't like it.

Sookie finally took a bite of her own slice. She chewed for a bit, frowning. Then she took another bite and wrinkled her nose. And then it was like a lightbulb went off. Sookie stood up suddenly and walked quickly into the kitchen. When she came back she was holding a bottle of some description. She put in on the table.

"Tomato paste" she said. "I used tomato paste instead of the pizza sauce. It's the same shaped bottle."

"Oh" I said, taking another bite. Well, someone had to eat it.

"You can stop eating it now, Eric" Sookie said to me. "I stuffed it up, so it's OK to stop."

"Will it make me sick?" Amelia asked, plaintively.

"Nope. Not at all" Sookie said. "It's just tastes a bit…strong is all."

"Its fine" I said, finishing off the piece and starting on my salad.

"No, it's not" Amelia grumbled, at almost the exact same time Sookie said "No it's not". That was weird, like a kind of echo effect.

Felicia now had cheese strung between both her hands and was happily munching away at it. I made an executive decision not to look too closely at what she was doing.

Sookie sighed. "Stupid, stupid baby brain!" she said.

"What baby?" Amelia asked.

"No baby" I said, quickly. Sookie had decided we weren't telling the kids. For one thing Felicia wouldn't care, but she didn't want Amelia blabbing it because we were, apparently, keeping it a secret for 13 weeks. But we were in week 7 and I wasn't sure how long Amelia was going to buy the story that Sookie ate something bad. She was getting really suspicious. And in danger of turning into a hypochondriac.

"Bebemonkee?" Felicia tried, but everyone ignored her.

Sookie stood up and walked back into the kitchen, I followed her this time. "Bloody typical" she said, "I can't focus on anything, I feel sick all the bloody fucking time, I'm exhausted, and dinner turned into a complete disaster. I can't do anything right at the moment and I'm so fed up with it!"

Fuck. There wasn't anything I could really do. "And now" she continued "I need to come up with something else for dinner, because I stuffed up the first lot. Not to mention Amelia thinks I'm trying to poison her. And… oh, Christ! Felicia just dropped her pizza on Bob. Stupid Bob, when will he learn not to sit there?"

Fuck again. I really couldn't fix the nausea, the tiredness, Sookie's distracted baby brain moments or Bob's inability to comprehend that sitting under the table was just going to make Felicia use him as target practice under the guise of feeding him. But I could probably make everyone something else to eat.

"Scrambled eggs?" I asked Sookie, pulling out one of the frying pans.

"Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks" Sookie smiled, but her heart wasn't really in it. She looked a little green again.

"You go and sit down" I said. "I'll do this."

"Yeah, thank you" Sookie said, grabbing a couple of crackers and going back to the table to make sure general mayhem didn't break out in our absence.

SPOV

I was so completely over being pregnant, and I'd only made it as far as seven weeks. It was horrific.

After I miscarried, and when I realised that the first sign that it had gone wrong was actually the fact the morning sickness had stopped, I vowed that I would always be grateful for morning sickness.

I nearly got through the first three months of being pregnant with Felicia before I broke that vow. But this time, well this time I was back to being pissed off about it all. Pissed off that I was sick all the time, tired all the time, and I couldn't do a simple task like make pizza for dinner without it all going horribly, horribly wrong.

At first when I'd told Eric about baby brain, after I put the washing machine on without actually putting any washing in there, he looked at me funny. Like I was an idiot, actually. I'm sure he thought it was a totally made-up thing, like man-flu is. But it's not. Anyone who's lived through it knows it's not. Tara spent a couple of months early on in one of her pregnancies regularly forgetting to put the handbrake on in her car. After a while JB got fed up with seeing it had rolled slowly into the fence every night. Luckily it rolled so slowly no real damage was done, except for the time it went through the carport when some washing was hung up there and it took out some sheets and towels, but even so, it could have been worse. It didn't stop Tara feeling like an idiot though.

And I have to confess back then, before I'd ever been pregnant I'd thought to myself, how bad could it really be?

It was bad. This time especially, it was bad. I don't think I'd had it so bad the first three pregnancies. Nor had the sickness been as bad. But I didn't like to say that to Eric, as though it was his fault.

I knew that it was though.

Still, he seemed to be coping with it all OK. And it was hard to deny the reality of morning sickness when I had my head down the toilet every evening. That was horrible. And it was starting to upset the kids. Amelia was suspicious and, as much as I didn't want her to know anything about the pregnancy until it was a reasonably sure thing, I still didn't want her perpetually worried about me and what she might catch from me. It was so much easier last time when she was just a little bundle of two year old self-centredness, just like Felicia was now.

It was all starting to get to me. I was going to be glad when we got to our first appointment at the obstetrician's next week. At least then I'd get some indication that things were going OK. And if they were, and I managed to keep this pregnancy and actually get the baby at the end of it, well, I had a feeling this might be my last go around.

Pregnancy really sucks.

EPOV

After the second dinner of scrambled eggs, which everyone enjoyed a bit more, I bathed the kids and got them into bed and then made coffee. By the time I arrived in the living room Sookie was fast asleep on the couch. That wasn't unusual at the moment. She was tired all the time, and she hated it.

I lifted up her feet so I could sit down and then put them on my lap, before I started to flick through some channels.

"Hey" she murmured, partially waking up.

"Hey" I replied. "How are you feeling?"

"So-so. I'm probably going to regret lying down like this when I feel sick when I sit back up."

"Possibly" I agreed. I put the remote down, having finally found something worth watching on the Documentary channel, and then I picked up my coffee. Sookie started snoring.

This pregnancy thing was kind of lonely.

I woke Sookie up about 9 o'clock and told her it was time for bed. I offered to carry her, but she said no, and sat up. And then went quite white, before dashing off to the bathroom.

I carried my cup in the kitchen, rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher and did the nightly checks of windows and doors and children before going into the bedroom. I could hear Sookie throwing up in the bathroom. She was really bad today.

Eventually she emerged. "I think" she said, climbing into bed and turning her light off, "It's the cheese."

"Cheese?"

"Cheese. I can't eat dairy. That's what's doing it. So that's a whole other thing I can't eat. It's not fair!"

Fuck, she sounded close to tears. "Ssh. It's OK" I said, rubbing her back.

"No, it's not! I feel sick all the time, I throw up. I can't drink coffee, eat ham or sushi and now dairy's out. It's all just a big pile of poo!"

I sighed. She was kind of right. "It is" I agreed. "But it's not forever."

Sookie sniffed. "I know. When I'm in Birthcare I want you to bring me some sushi and a big ham and cheese sandwich. Can you remember that?"

"Uh, I think so."

"Well I might write it down. And ask Tara as well, but that's what I want. I'm hanging out for that. I just have to get to October."

"Yeah" I agreed, but I think she'd already fallen asleep again. I picked up my book and opened it.

Sookie wasn't much better the next morning and she was faced with a morning and early afternoon spent running around with a bunch of toddlers. And it wasn't like she could call in sick, although as she pointed out, even if you worked for a big company you couldn't exactly call in sick for morning sickness. No one really thought that was a reasonable excuse.

So Sookie was stuck back in the bathroom again while I was trying to get out the door with Amelia and Felicia in tow, hoping I wouldn't be too late to the monthly Business Banking breakfast that the bank put on. There was usually a guest speaker and the bank's customers got to mingle with staff, and with me, hopefully. If I got there.

Amelia emerged from the bathroom just as I was putting my shoes on. "I don't think you did a good job with those eggs" she said. "Mum's sick again. It's not…" she trailed off, trying to think what it wasn't. It wasn't good, I could agree with that, but I wasn't going to put words in her mouth.

I looked up and took in what she was wearing. "Ames" I said, "You can't wear your mermaid costume to pre-school."

"Yes I can" she replied, defensively.

"No, you can't. You need to go and get changed. Please. And hurry." I really didn't want to be fucking late, it was bad enough I would have to deal with Sophie-Anne, but I just wanted to get it all over with.

"I can. It's Super-Special Dress-Up Day today!"

"No it's not."

"YES IT IS! You just don't know." Amelia crossed her arms and tried to stare me down.

I stood up and walked to the bathroom door. "Sookie, is it dress-up day at pre-school today?" I asked.

"No…" she said tentatively. "No, I'm sure it's not. I'm bad, but I'm not that bad, I would have remembered."

"Ames, it's not…" I said, but before I'd finished she realised the game was up and was stalking out of the room muttering to herself. "And be quick, please!" I called after her.

I just needed to get Felicia ready. I found in her the family room, in just a pull-up. Fuck, that wasn't helpful. I ran to her room and grabbed a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. She'd recently gone up a size and Sookie had added a whole lot of stuff to her drawers from the hand-me-down boxes so I didn't recognise either item, but it was bound to be OK.

Amelia arrived in the family room as I was pulling the t-shirt on Felicia. She was wearing a t-shirt with white and pale pink horizontal stripes, and a skirt that kind of looked like a mushroom and which was black, with white and pink checks and a wide pink waistband. It wasn't a bad outfit, but, like most of what Amelia wore, there was something slightly busy about it. Still, I didn't have time to worry.

"Go and say goodbye to Mum" I told Amelia.

"That's my t-shirt" Amelia said, pointing at Felicia, who pointed back. That didn't help me get her arm through a sleeve.

"It was once" I replied.

"But it's got my name on it" Amelia said.

"Probably." A lot of the stuff Felicia ended up wearing was still labelled Amelia Compton on the inside, but hopefully the teachers could figure it out if it came to it. "But go and say goodbye" I repeated. Amelia stared for a beat longer, and then ran off to yell "Bye!" through the bathroom door.

I carried Felicia, and she and I did the same, and then I hurried out the front door to get them in the car, I just hoped Sookie would be OK in there.

"I still don't think its right she's wearing that t-shirt" Amelia said in the car. "It says Amelia."

"Yeah, it doesn't make any difference Amelia. It's just a t-shirt" I replied, trying to pull into the traffic.

"Amala!" Felicia chanted.

"It does make a difference! It's mine!" Amelia wailed.

"You're too big for it now. And you have a much nicer t-shirt on."

"It doesn't have my name on it though!" Of course Amelia had to pick today to get upset about something so stupid.

"Well, don't lose it then!" I replied. I was getting a bit sick of the argument at this point. Luckily we were almost there and for the rest of the way Amelia decided to sulk anyway.

We arrived at the daycare and I managed to get a carpark just as another guy was leaving. I hustled everyone into the centre and we took them over to the pre-school side first. I signed Amelia in, stowed her bag in the cubby hole and she sat and wrote her own name in the book set up for that purpose. She was getting really good at it now, and even wrote her surname as well on occasion.

"See? Amelia" she said, turning from what she'd written to look at Felicia's t-shirt then at me.

Before I could reply her friend Maisie came over. She pointed at Felicia. "That says Amelia" she said.

"Yes" I said, really tiring of this now. Even children I barely knew were starting up.

"On the front" Maisie commented to Amelia.

Amelia rolled her eyes at Maisie. "I _know_" she said, exasperatedly. "But he thinks that's OK."

"It's not" Maisie said.

"I know!" Amelia agreed.

I turned Felicia around and actually looked at the front of the t-shirt for the first time. It was a black t-shirt on which was written, in large, hot-pink letters, 'Amelia Since 2007'. Fuck. Maybe baby-brain was catching?

I sighed. "Well, bye Amelia" I said, leaning down to hug her.

"Yeah, bye" she said, eyeing Felicia's t-shirt. Felicia just smiled like the fucking Cheshire cat.

I walked Felicia over to the other side of the centre and signed her in and put her bag away. One of the teachers walked over. "Oh" she said, looking at Felicia. "Oh, you've got your sister's t-shirt on"

"Yeah. Amala!" Felicia said, excitedly.

"Um" I said, looking through her bag for another shirt. "Maybe we should change it Felicia?"

Felicia looked at me in horror. "No!" she said, really loudly. "NO! No change."

"I think she likes that one" the teacher said, pointing out the completely fucking obvious.

"Yeah. Well. OK, bye then" I crouched down to get a hug and a kiss and a "Bye, Daddy!" and then she was off to the sandpit, no doubt to spend all day making sand-angels so I'd have to spend a fucking long time washing her hair that night.

I took off to my car and glanced at my watch. Fuck, I was running late now. I just hoped the day wouldn't get any worse.

Luckily I made up some time on the drive into the city and when I got into the boardroom at the bank, the guest speaker, some expert on entrepreneurial ventures, had only just started. I slipped into the back and stared longingly at the food set out by the caterers. I'd missed the 'official' eat and mingle time, but maybe if I was quick no one would notice. I did like the look of the bagels.

I'd just grabbed a few things and was trying to work out if I could balance a plate and a cup of coffee when Sophie-Anne brushed past me. "Nice of you to show up, Eric" she said in a rather pointed whisper, and then she was gone again.

Fuck, I really didn't want to hang around her afterwards with her.

When the speaker had finished I talked to a few of the bank's customers who had come in for the presentation. Some of them I'd met before and one of them I'd been trying to sign up for a while, but he was proving elusive.

After that I tried to find out a bit more on the Sophie-Anne situation. I talked to Jake Purifoy, one of the business managers who now reported to her. He was really pissed about that, and spent the whole time telling me she'd only ended up in that role because the new CFO who replaced Peter hated her guts.

I could kind of understand that.

Finally people started to leave and Sophie-Anne appeared beside me again. As she did so, Jake sort of melted away. I couldn't blame the guy.

"Shall we, Eric?" Sophie-Anne said.

I nodded, and followed her into one of the meeting rooms on this level. There was quite a view of the harbour from the 29th floor. So at least I was going to have something to look at that wasn't Sophie-Anne's screwed up little face, as she looked down her nose at me. I didn't know why she was so pissed at me. It wasn't like I'd given her t-shirt away or anything.

"So, Eric. I hear you've been doing quite well from all the business we've been sending your way?"

"Yes, but that's not where all my business comes from" I said. Unfortunately the bank did provide the bulk of my clients.

"Mmm" Sophie-Anne said, as she gazed out into the Harbour. "You know" she said, "it's been very beneficial for you, hasn't it Eric? Being sent out to work here?"

"I guess" I said, cautiously. I wasn't sure what she was getting at.

"You've been able to set up independently, and work for yourself. That must be nice." She looked at me, but I didn't say anything, so she continued in. "And of course, you found Sookie. You must be enjoying family life. It sounded...busy. Last night. On the phone." Sophie-Anne smiled at me and the effect was slightly terrifying.

She seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I nodded, hoping that would be enough. I still wasn't completely sure what her angle was and I was wary of buying into anything at this stage.

"So what I was thinking" Sophie-Anne, continued "Was that we should be working a lot more closely together. Because I'd really like to see exactly what it is our clients are getting when they deal with you. I know that you came into this with a…well, with a reputation. But I can't help but feel, Eric, that you're…coasting somewhat on the good name of your former employer. It's all very well and good, but you're on your own now. Operating in New Zealand." She wrinkled her nose, delicately, when she mentioned New Zealand. I tried to keep a straight face. "Which is a market you're wholly unfamiliar with."

"I do alright."

"You do. But that's because we've been spoon-feeding you our clients. I see you've been working quite closely with Jake?" I nodded. "Mmm, see I have my reservations about him. At any rate, Eric, I'm sure that you can appreciate that I'm new to business banking, and I think that now I'm in this role I'd like to make sure…well, I'd just like to make sure that I'm on top of everything. And that includes you. Well, what you're doing, anyway." She smiled again. It still wasn't a great look on her.

"Sure, Sophie-Anne. I think we can do that" I agreed, as pleasantly as possible, while thinking 'fuck, fuck, fuck' to myself. I couldn't really blame her for wanting to be more involved, the previous Area Business Manager, Freya something-or-other had been fairly hands-off, but then she was currently on maternity leave and Sophie-Anne was covering it on secondment. I'd guessed maybe Freya had been distracted while she was pregnant and I'd reaped the benefit. The upshot was I was stuck with Sophie-Anne.

She stood up and I did the same, shaking the hand she held out to me. "Thanks for meeting me, Eric" she said. "I'll look forward to working more closely with you."

I followed Sophie-Anne back to the elevators. "Bye Sophie-Anne" I said to her.

"Goodbye, Eric. I'll see you soon."

I stepped into the elevator. Fuck, I thought. I needed an exit strategy and I needed it now.

**A/N OK, so for anyone interested in the world's most annoying YouTube clip, here's the link. It's the song that gets you. I have no idea about the animals and their welfare though!**

http:/ www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=5_sfnQDr1-o

**Thanks for reading!**


	39. Chapter 39

**A/N Thanks for sticking around, and for the reviews! **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

When I got home Sookie was in the bathroom again and the kids, and Bob, were clustered in the family room looking worried. Well, Bob just looked like Bob really, but he was probably wondering why he hadn't had dinner yet.

I got as far as our bedroom, but before I could go and check on her, Sookie emerged. "Better today" she said. "No cheese, so I think I might be OK in a bit."

"That's good" I said.

"So I better go and rescue dinner. It's cottage pie." Bob wandered in and meowed, loudly.

"Yeah, OK Bob" Sookie said. "You're next." She walked out of the bedroom and Bob followed. I wasn't sure how he did it, but somehow he was always first in line to get fed, in front of the kids even. I'd tried to point out to Sookie that he was perfectly capable of hunting for his own meals, but that hadn't gone down well at all.

I'd noticed when I walked in the door that Felicia was wearing a different t-shirt, so I could only hope that at some point during the day she'd been changed by a teacher and Sookie would be none the wiser as to what I'd done. Amelia had glared at me though when I'd arrived home, so I wondered if she'd already blabbed.

Mostly, though, I just wondered about the whole situation with Sophie-Anne. I just couldn't see a way out of it. And it was probably about time for me to tell Sookie.

I managed to catch her after dinner in the small space of time she had between throwing up and falling asleep. She was in the kitchen, looking for something.

"I just can't figure out where I would have put it" she muttered, while sorting through a pile of papers.

"What?" I asked.

"My very important piece of paper" Sookie said, sounding annoyed. I just wasn't sure who she was annoyed with.

"What did it have on it?" I asked.

"The details of Amelia's school visit. I just…I can't think where it would be." Sookie stopped shuffling paper and stood with her hands on her hips, looking around the kitchen.

I was a bit lost as to what to do. Sookie wasn't usually the person who misplaced stuff. "Um, where do you normally put important pieces of paper?" I asked her.

"There. In that pile" Sookie said, pointing to the pile she'd been searching through.

"Well, where else could it be?"

"That's what I've been asking myself and I just don't know. Aaargh! I am SO fed up with this. The sickness is bad enough, but this, this is just cruel and unusual. You should have seen what Felicia was wearing when I picked her up from daycare. She had a t-shirt with Amelia written on the front of it."

"Oh."

'Yeah. I can't remember what she wore this morning, but I must have added that one to her daycare bag and they'd put it on her. Stupid, stupid baby-brain!"

"Mmm" I said, not wanting to agree, disagree or let on what part I paid in the whole t-shirt thing now it was about to blow over. "And now you can't find the note" I reminded her.

"No. No, it seems to have disappeared." Sookie sighed.

"So, do you want tea?" I asked her.

"Yeah. That'd be nice."

I walked over to the pantry to get the teabags and the coffee out. I glanced at Bob's biscuit container. "What's this on top of Bob's food?" I asked her. "The note?"

"It probably reminds me I've already fed him. I wouldn't put it past him to take advantage of the whole baby-brain situation."

She was probably right, he would. I glanced at the note anyway. "I think I found your important piece of paper" I said to Sookie, handing it over.

"Oh, thank-you!" she said. "I must have put it in there when I fed him before." Then she just stood there, clutching the note and looking sad.

"But you've found it now, so that's solved that problem" I said to her.

"Yeah, but I don't want her to start school. It makes me too sad."

"She wants to go though, Sookie." She did, she'd been asking about it for months and months. She was desperate to start and, to be honest, she kind of needed to. She was a smart little thing and she'd really started to outgrow pre-school.

"Yeah, but she's my baby. It was only 5 years ago I was sitting here, wondering how much longer I could possibly last in the heat. And now…now she's all big. And bossy."

"I think she's been bossy for a while."

"Mmm. She seemed really pissed off when she was born. She was three days early and I think she thought I'd done it to her on purpose. There was a lot of screaming as she came out."

I handed Sookie her tea. "I can kind of imagine there would have been." I could imagine the yelling, it was Amelia after all. But the fact she actually came out of Sookie, well, that was just fucking weird. She was a person for God's sake. A whole separate person, who, admittedly, could act and sound just like Sookie when it suited her, but even so, it was kind of amazing to think that Sookie produced…people. And that there was another one in there now.

I followed Sookie into the living room where she had turned the TV on to her favourite show. It was something about building huge fucking houses in England. It was marginally better than some of the ones where they just put wallpaper up and then Sookie wanted to discuss the wallpaper with me afterwards. I was a bit better at discussing the use of environmental building materials and customised skylights than I was at wallpaper, or, even worse, paint. I could probably live my whole life without having to look at another feature wall.

Sookie sipped her tea. "So how was the breakfast this morning?" she asked me.

"Breakfasty" I replied.

"Nice food?"

"Yeah, the bagels were OK."

"Was there smoked salmon?" Uh-oh, I thought, here we go again.

"Yeah" I replied.

Sookie sighed loudly. "I miss smoked salmon" she said, plaintively.

"Yeah. I know" I reached over and kissed her cheek. I couldn't give her back smoked salmon at this stage. "I saw Sophie-Anne" I said, taking a sip of my coffee.

Sookie snorted. "Yeah. Finance people. They always know where the food is. I once worked with a guy who used to go through all the meeting rooms every afternoon looking for leftover biscuits."

"Uh-huh. Well, she's not in Finance anymore. She's...well, she's moved to Business Banking."

"Really? They must have told her she needed more experience out where the customers actually are. Shit, she must be really looking to move up then."

"Well, I think she was pushed. There's a new CFO. A…Steve Newlin I think they said?" That sounded right.

"Oh. Well he's a total arsehole. He used to work where I did. Remember I told you he made me redundant just before I went on maternity leave?" The bit about the redundancy did sound vaguely familiar.

"Ooh, I bet he pushed Sophie-Anne out, given she was Peter's favourite." Sookie continued, getting into her theorising. "He'll be trying to put his own stamp on the department. I wonder if Andre's still there or if he's out too?"

"OK, so whatever happened to Andre, I'm stuck with Sophie-Anne."

"Stuck with her?"

"Yeah. She's the area manager and she wants to keep an eye on what I'm doing."

"You don't work for her. That doesn't seem right" Sookie grumbled.

"Well…she's worried about the fact I'm working with their customers, and kind of being introduced by their staff. She wants to check I'm not doing anything too…well, just that I know what I'm doing I guess. It's hard to fault her for it, really."

"Yeah, except that it's Sophie-Anne and we know she has a crush on you."

"Maybe she's over it. Didn't you say she had a boyfriend at the cricket?" I was hopeful that she was over it, anyway. I really, really didn't need the fucking drama at the moment. And Sophie-Anne seemed to attract nothing but drama.

"Yeah, but her boyfriend has no neck. You have a neck. So, you know, you're a bit of a catch there."

"OK" I said, really not sure about the whole neck discussion.

"But I did get the impression she was kind of keen on the whole fact he played rugby for Auckland. You'd be lost if you had to play rugby for any team. So that's a point that's not in your favour."

"I'm not really sure Sophie-Anne's really sitting at home making a list of my pros and cons Sookie."

"Yeah, you don't know. Maybe she's doing that. And writing Sophie-Anne and Eric with little hearts around your names. Or sticking pins in a doll of you. You'd never know."

"Yeah…I don't think she's that bad."

"No. But it took my mind off the sickness for a while. Ugh. I feel awful." She put her cup down on the coffee table and lay down on the couch with her feet in my lap. She did look miserable. I wasn't sure the whole Sophie-Anne discussion had really helped all that much. It certainly hadn't helped me. I still couldn't really figure out what she thought would happen. I got the idea she just liked to have me around. In case. But in case of what, I wasn't sure.

Maybe, I thought, we could talk about something nicer.

SPOV

I felt for Eric and the fact that Sophie-Anne was now making life difficult for him at work, but I couldn't find the energy to worry about it. He'd have to sort it out. I had a whole list of other worries, which included worrying about getting through each day without throwing up or losing either of my children, worrying about two birthday parties, and Amelia's ever-increasing list of demands, and then, well, I was worrying about the baby.

Mostly I worried about keeping the baby. The horrible thing was there wasn't anything I could do if it went wrong. There weren't any magic drugs or operations they could give you. If something happened, it just happened. I'd heard all the things they say to make feel you better about it: that it was meant to be, there was something wrong with the baby, it was Mother Nature's quality control. It didn't make me feel any better.

I just worried about keeping this baby. Keeping it safe and getting to 13 weeks and having that first major scan and just not letting Eric down. That would be nice.

I lay on the couch wishing the sickness would just subside for a bit, and wondering if I should eat something to try to settle my stomach.

"So" Eric said. "When can we…um, pick names?"

I sat up a bit and regretted it immediately. "It's a bit, um…early" I said to him. It was early and I didn't want to do anything that definite this soon. It seemed like it would just tempt fate. And sometimes I was pretty sure fate didn't really like me, so I was inclined to lay low and not attract attention as best I could.

"Oh" Eric said. He looked really sad, the same way he looked when I told him it was too early to tell people, or to buy anything for the baby, or even dig out the baby clothes that I'd stored…somewhere.

"But maybe" I conceded "we could start a list." Surely a list wouldn't be too bad, I thought. After all, it could be used as a list for any baby that we had. And if we didn't ever have a baby, well, then we'd get a kitten.

"Oh. Yeah. A list sounds good" Eric said, brightening somewhat.

I eased myself off the couch. "Be right back" I said. I went to the study and spent a few minutes trying to find what I was looking for because every time I looked in here it had sprouted more of Eric's junk.

I walked back into the living room and handed the book to Eric. "There's the baby name book. You can flick through and make a list of what you like."

"Anything?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, anything. We can do a list for boys and one for girls."

"I think it will be a girl" Eric said, quite decisively. He'd been saying that all the way along. I wasn't sure where he was getting his information from, or how he knew more than me on the subject, but there was no changing his mind.

"Well, think about boy's names anyway. Then make a list and I'll do the same and we'll compare."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, looking in the book and not really listening.

"But there are rules" I said to him. That made him pay attention.

"Rules?" he asked. "What rules? And why are there always rules?"

"Makes life easier. So anyway, the rules mainly apply to girls' names."

"Why?"

"Because we have two already. So the names have to match. Kind of, anyway. So you should look for a name that has at least three syllables, maybe one that ends in an 'a' sound, but that's not compulsory, and it would need to be girly, and not too trendy."

Eric frowned. "I have no idea what you mean. I think you're making this overly complicated, Sookie."

I sighed. It made perfect sense to me. "OK, say, for example, the name Cameron. See I quite like that for a girl, but she would always be the sister who got the boy's name who probably wished she had a name like Amelia and Felicia, and they, in turn, might be annoyed their names are kind of old-fashioned. So I quite like Olivia, and Isabella, although that's very popular, and maybe over-done, and Mia, although that breaks the syllable rule, and Madeleine, although that doesn't have an 'a' sound, but it's still nice. So you see? It's simple really."

Eric managed to give the impression he didn't think it was simple at all, but he didn't say anything else. He just put the book down and kissed me. "I'm sure I can come up with something" he said.

I wasn't sure if he was just talking about the name, or if he meant Sophie-Anne as well. I might have asked him, except that my body was about to shut down for the night and really, it was bedtime for me. Pregnancy still sucked.

I got through the next week by the skin of my teeth. I pulled a muscle in my side while I was throwing up one night and mostly, mostly I just wanted to fast-forward through the next few weeks.

Amelia was still suspicious. "You're always sick" she said, cornering me as I crouched by the toilet in the ensuite. "You'll be sick and ruin my birthday."

"No, I won't" I assured her. By that stage I'd be about 12 weeks along, surely the morning sickness would be just about over by then.

"I'm having a special party" Amelia said. She'd wanted a party at the Fairy Shop in Ponsonby, with a live fairy to provide entertainment. It cost an arm and a leg and we'd been arguing over the guest list for a while. But it didn't matter how many times I told her she could only invite a few friends, she insisted on adding to the list so no one got left out.

A party in the back garden seemed so much easier. It was all Felicia was getting. If I ever got around to organising it.

"You are" I agreed with her. "But only a few kids can come. The fairy can't cope with any more than that."

Amelia frowned. "She can. They're my friends. They can come."

"No they can't Amelia! We've been over this. You have to decide who's most important."

"They're all important!" Amelia huffed, and then she stormed off. I wasn't sure what to do with her over this one.

Eric hovered in the doorway. He'd been doing that a lot lately. "Anything you need?" he asked.

"Some of those ginger lollies" I said, pulling a face. They weren't nice. "Also, you could take over being party planner for a bit."

"Um. OK" Eric said, looking worried.

"Well, maybe just Felicia's party. Although Amelia's the one causing problems. She doesn't get the concept of 'exclusive guest list'."

"No" he agreed, looking thoughtful.

"So anyway, hire a bunch of plastic stuff for Felicia's party and we'll go from there."

"OK. I'll get you the candy" Eric said, wandering off to the kitchen. I just sat on the floor and hoped I'd feel more like moving soon.

When I was 8 weeks' pregnant I had my first appointment at the obstetrician. When I was pregnant with Amelia I had been a bit dubious about the need to pay for a private obstetrician, when I could have had a nice midwife for free. But Bill had decided it was a good idea, I think he saw it as a bit of a status symbol, and I really couldn't be bothered arguing about it in the end.

I'd been a bit cautious about Russell Edgington to begin with; he'd seemed a bit blasé about the whole process when I went to my first appointments. I guessed he had a huge number of women who'd pass through his consulting room and I wasn't anything special, no matter how special my first pregnancy was to me. But by the time he'd delivered Amelia I was a tiny bit in love with him. He was calm, and he knew just what to do when I was at my most vulnerable. And so I'd stuck with him through my next pregnancies and on into this one. I didn't think Eric was exactly going to begrudge the money we spent on seeing him, but he probably wouldn't have cared if I'd wanted a midwife either. He didn't quite get the nuances of the New Zealand health system and how they related to your social standing.

But I liked Russell, and I was used to him now. And it would have seemed weird not to have him in the delivery room. Although after last time, well. He was possibly going to be glad I wasn't bringing Bill with me this time around.

Russell's practice was in the Mt Eden village, just off an alleyway that ran parallel to Mt Eden road. It was just up from Eric's office, so I'd agreed to meet him there on the afternoon of the first appointment. I was sitting there, filling in all the forms for my next of kin and to register me at the hospital, when Eric walked into the waiting room. Every other woman in the room, no matter how heavily pregnant she was or whether or not she had her own partner there, looked up at him as he walked over to join me on the couch. These days I was pretty used to Eric, but I wasn't sure I'd ever get used to the effect he had on other women.

"You found it then" I said to him, resting the clipboard I was holding on my knee.

"Yeah" he kissed me, and all the other women went back to looking at their own magazines or forms, having worked out Eric was another prospective dad and not an interesting new doctor. Stink for them, really.

I was feeling a bit jumpy, but tried not to let it show. There was no reason anything should be wrong, except that last time it took a while for the miscarriage to become apparent…so. Well, it wasn't worth thinking about.

Russell appeared in the door of the waiting room "Sookie?" he called, and then he smiled at me when I stood up. Eric followed me and he and Russell introduced themselves as we walked into the consulting room and sat down.

I was feeling really nervous now.

"So, Sookie" Russell said. "Fourth pregnancy?" he squinted at the computer screen which had my notes displayed.

"Yep" I said. "But Eric's, um, first…" It was a bit odd really, telling your obstetrician you'd shacked up with someone else.

Russell looked again at Eric. "Eric's my second husband" I said. "I, um…Bill died." There wasn't really a nice way to say it.

"Oh. I'm so sorry to hear that" Russell said. He sounded pretty sincere.

"We had split up anyway. Um, he wasn't…well, he was there at Felicia's birth…remember?" Russell looked at the screen again and picked up his mouse and scrolled through the notes.

"Ah. Yes" he said in the end. And that closed off that chapter of my life.

I answered all the standard questions, when my last period was, how my health was, was I taking folic acid, had I had any bleeding. I think I pretty much passed them. Then it was Eric's turn. He didn't do so well because he had no clue how big he'd been at birth, nor did he know much about his family's medical history. Russell shrugged, and gave up on that line of questioning.

"Shall we see what's in there?" he asked, standing up. I stood up as well, and went to lie on the examination table. This was the best bit about having Russell as an obstetrician. He had his own ultrasound machine, and you got to see the baby at every appointment.

I lifted up the Jumping Beans polo shirt I was wearing and pushed down the waistband of my yoga pants. Russell started up the machine and put the horrible cold, sticky gel on my tummy. Then he placed the hand-held bit on my skin.

I turned to look at the screen and the fuzzy black and white image. Russell adjusted the machine and there it was. A tiny little pulsing blob.

Eric was still sitting in his chair. "Come and look" I said to him. He walked over and looked at the screen over Russell's shoulder.

"That's the heart beating away in there" Russell said, pointing with the mouse cursor and making some measurements. "Seems to be on-track for dates" he said.

I looked at Eric. He was mesmerised. It was hard; this was my fourth time doing this. Four pregnancies, two babies. So far. But for Eric, this was a whole new world. Well, it was my insides anyway. That perhaps didn't bear thinking about too much.

When Russell was satisfied with what he'd seen, Eric and I sat back in the chairs. There were a few more questions and then we were sent back out to make another appointment for five weeks' time, after I'd had my scan.

Eric just seemed a bit quiet really, through all of that. We walked outside into the sun. "Want coffee?" I asked him. "I don't have to pick the kids up for a bit."

"OK" he said, and we walked around to the café on the corner of Mt Eden road. The one with the circus theme that the kids both loved. We ordered Eric's coffee and a cranberry juice for me and sat down.

"So is it more real now?" I asked him.

"It's um…it's um…Well, yeah. There's really something in there. Something with a heartbeat, but no legs. Which is just fucking weird, really." He smiled at me.

"Yeah. It will get legs. I hope" I said to him.

"When can we tell what sex it is?" Eric asked.

"Twenty week scan" I replied.

"That seems…a long time off" Eric said.

"Yeah, but it'll go quite quickly. Once we get to 13 weeks and the first scan, it speeds up. And hopefully, I start to feel better."

"Yeah. I still think it's a girl. And I thought of a name." Eric said, brightly.

"_A_ name?"

"Yeah" Eric looked excited. "Her name."

"Oh, OK. What is it?"

"Well, I thought about all the, um…rules that you had. And I realised what was missing."

"Missing?" I thought my naming rules were pretty comprehensive really.

"Yeah. You needed better diminutives. It's hard work shortening Amelia and Felicia."

"You seem to have managed, though" I pointed out, trying not to sound grumpy.

"Yeah, but it's still a bit…awkward. And so I wanted to pick something we could shorten, and it would still make sense. And people would all use the same nickname, because God knows, Amelia has about 3 different ones on the go."

"Uh-huh, but what is it?" I asked, wondering what on earth this amazingly spectacular name could be.

"Samantha" Eric said proudly. "And then we can call her Sam."

Well I didn't hate it, but I wasn't committing to anything this early. "OK, we'll put it on the list" I said, drinking some of my juice.

"List?" Eric asked. "But I picked that one."

"Yeah, but I might have picks too" I said.

"Mmmm" Eric said, in that kind of annoying way which didn't commit him to an opinion at all.

"And of course it might not be a girl" I reasoned.

"I'm sure it is. I just…well I think it's a girl" Eric said. He really wasn't budging on that point.

"You realise the world doesn't work according to the decrees of Eric Northman, don't you?" I asked him.

Eric smiled at me over the top of his coffee cup. "Be easier if it did though, wouldn't it?" he said.

"For you, not for me" I muttered. Eric just laughed.

**A/N So we have ultrasounds, but I think some of you would call them sonograms.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	40. Chapter 40

**A/N Hello! Glad everyone is happy about the pregnancy. It's a shorter chapter today, mainly so I could get something posted, but also I wanted to split it here as there's a lot of stuff to happen next chapter. So stay tuned, because any minute now Sookie might stop throwing up (she really, really hopes so!)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

The appointment with Sookie's doctor had been a revelation. And not just because I got to see the tiny blip on the screen that I was assured was the actual baby. It was because I could see the way she tensed up every time the guy said something about four pregnancies.

She was fucking scared of losing this baby too. And there wasn't anything I could do about that, just like there wasn't anything I could do about the morning sickness or the tiredness.

I'd done what I could do, which was read up on the internet and try to tell her that she had no more or less risk with this pregnancy than anyone else did, but all that got me was a rather terse "I know, Eric!" and I let the subject drop. We'd just have to wait it out.

Although I would be fucking glad when this sickness part was over, as Sookie assured me it would be soon. I hadn't realised that it was going to be like Sookie having permanent PMS. That was a subject I definitely wasn't going to bring up at all though.

We'd made it to nine weeks though. That was something, I thought. And I'd seen it. I'd seen the actual baby-blob that I'd made with Sookie. It was really fucking in there, with it's tiny heart that wasn't even as big as my fingernail beating away so fucking fast. It was like nothing I'd ever fucking seen in my life, that tiny scrap of cells that carried half my DNA. It didn't look like it had any intention of giving up on life now. Surely it would be all OK?

I walked in the door and Felicia greeted me wearing a t-shirt and no pants at all. "Daddy!" she said cheerfully. "Look!" She ran off towards the living room and I followed. The potty was stationed in front of the television set and Felicia pointed to it excitedly. "Wees!" she said proudly.

I looked and verified she was actually telling the truth. She'd definitely produced something in there. "Well done" I told her, holding my hand out for a high-five. She slapped my hand with hers enthusiastically. Felicia giggled, and then she started wandering off.

I picked up the potty. "Do you want to put your underwear back on?" I asked her.

"Nah" she said, as she disappeared from view. I figured it would be a while before she produced another puddle so we'd probably be safe.

I emptied the potty and went into the bedroom to get changed. I could hear Amelia and Sookie talking in our ensuite. Well, Amelia was predicting doom and gloom again. "You're going to die, Mummy!" she exclaimed.

"No, I'm fine" Sookie said.

I ditched my suit and pulled on some shorts. "No one's dying, Amelia" I said, walking into the bathroom.

"Oh, hello" Sookie said to me. 'You're home."

"Yeah, just in time for Felicia to show me the contents of her potty. She'd peed."

"Really? That's something then."

Amelia realised she'd lost her audience. "I still think you might die" she said to Sookie.

"Nope. Not going to kill me" Sookie said, standing up. Amelia muttered something and walked out of the room.

Sookie looked at me as she walked over to the sink. "Not bothering with a shirt tonight?" she asked me.

"Nope, it's too hot." Sookie didn't say anything else; she just brushed her teeth slowly. I rubbed her back and tried not to hold out any hope that she'd want to chase me around for a bit. I kind of missed those days.

"So how are the preparations for Felicia's party going?" she asked me when she'd finished.

"Good. I think. We should be OK for Saturday." I'd been delegated that party and I was pretty sure I had it under control. It was all the kids we knew in the back garden, it wasn't exactly like I was organising a gala event.

Sookie nodded. "I just wish Amelia's was sorted. I've made the booking but she's still fighting me on the guest list. She was moaning about it again before you got home. I just need her to understand that she can't have everything she wants."

Sookie sounded really frustrated about the whole thing. They'd reached a complete deadlock. Sookie said 10 kids in total, Amelia wanted more. Neither was budging.

"I'll talk to her" I said.

Sookie turned and put her arms around me. "Thank you" she said, before pulling away and walking into the bedroom. She pulled the rather unflattering polo shirt she wore for work over her head. I took a good look at her. Fuck, she was starting to look pregnant. And her boobs were huge. Although that bra was kind of ugly.

"What?" she said, stopping and looking at me.

"Oh…just, um. You can see. That you're pregnant."

"I know!" she wailed, sitting on the bed. "It's not fair! The more you do this, the earlier you show and now I look fat and it's horrible. I've put on weight round my bum and my bras don't fit and my boobs are sore and I'm a huge lump."

"No, you're not. You're lovely" I said, going to sit next to her.

"You have to say that" she grumbled. "But I'm not. I'm just…all lumpy and sick and over it."

"Very lovely" I tried again, wondering if I'd be allowed to touch the boobs if they were sore. Probably not I decided. I settled for running a hand over her stomach. Sookie squirmed a bit, and I expected her to push me away, but she didn't. I was fascinated by the way her body was changing, Sookie seemed appalled. I couldn't see why though, she still seemed sexy to me.

Sookie looked at me and smiled wanly. They always said pregnant women glowed, but honestly, Sookie just looked so pale and tired. The only glow she had was a faintly green one which just didn't look natural.

"It doesn't matter how many times you say it, I'm not going to believe you. I even had to dig my maternity bras out because my boobs are so huge, and now I worry just how big they'll be when my milk actually comes in. I might fall over!"

"I think you'll be OK" I reassured her, while taking another look at her boobs as she still hadn't put a shirt on. Yeah, they were big. And I guess that explained the ugly bra.

And then Sookie started quivering slightly. Fuck, she was crying. It was horrible at the moment. "I'm sorry" she whispered. "I'm just…not coping so well…" she broke off into sobs.

There wasn't much I could do except just sit there and hold her. "Look, I'll make dinner. Why don't you get into bed and rest?"

"Amelia will think I've died" she sniffed.

"No she won't. She's just worried about you. You might have to tell her something."

"No. It's too early, she'll blab" Sookie said vehemently, and I let the subject drop.

"Get into bed" I tried again, and this time she sighed, and then stood up to pull some pyjamas out of her drawer. When she was settled I kissed her cheek and headed out to make dinner for everyone.

I made chicken burgers in the hope that it would prevent Sookie sending me through the Burger King drivethru later that night. She'd decided their chicken burgers were the best thing for settling her stomach and my role was to just shut up and go and get them.

But I thought it might be nice to have a night off.

Amelia was hugely suspicious about why Sookie was in bed. "Is she going to be OK?" she asked me as we were eating.

"Yeah, she'll be fine, Amelia. Sometimes…people just get sick."

"And then they die?"

"No. Then they get better."

Amelia didn't look convinced, but she did stop talking about it and eat her dinner.

After we'd finished eating I bathed the kids, which seemed to take a long time as Felicia wanted to sit on the potty and sing 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' but not actually do anything on the potty, and every time I suggested she just get in the bath she'd say "Nuh! Wees" and carry on singing. Eventually we got through it though. I read to them both in Felicia's room, and then I escorted Amelia to her bed.

"She will be OK. Your mom" I told her, as I tucked her in.

Amelia bit her lip. "Mum. But sometimes people get sick and die."

"She doesn't have that kind of sickness. It's one you get better from, trust me."

Amelia sighed, and just went back to playing with her bedcovers. "I don't want her to be sick at my party" she said in the end.

Yeah, I thought, the party. I needed to do something about that. "You need to finalise the names of the guests with your…mum."

Amelia sighed again. "I've told her who I want! She doesn't listen!"

"But you need to have less people, don't you?" I asked.

"No! I don't want anyone to miss out."

"But sometimes, someone has to."

"NO!" Amelia crossed her arms and glared at me. I needed to try another tactic.

"Amelia, what do you think will happen if you don't cut the guest list down?"

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Mum'll let me have them?" she said, hopefully.

"Really?" I asked her. She thought again. "Um…I'll have to have a party at home?"

"Or?"

"Or I won't get a party at all?" She looked a bit horrified, having reached that conclusion. "Can I still have a party?" she asked, her eyes filling up with tears.

"Yes. Yes, you can. But you need to invite less people or you can't."

"Oh. Oh, well I guess I could, but…" she trailed off. "I just…I just want everyone to like me…"

"They'll still like you, Amelia."

"Even if I can't invite them to my party?" She looked up at me hopefully.

"Even if you can't. It's only one party. They'll still like you for who you are the rest of the time" I assured her, hoping that would be the end of it.

"OK, then" she said in a small voice. "OK, I'll just invite a few people." I gave her a hug and tucked her in for the night.

By the time I got to bed Sookie was petty much asleep. "Hey" she said, coming around slightly. "How did it all go?"

"Fine" I said, taking off my shorts and sliding into bed behind her. "I think Amelia's come around about the party."

"Really? How did you do that?"

"I just made her think it all through. Mostly she was worried about being popular. I tried to point out one party won't make any difference to that long-term."

"Huh. Well, maybe you have got the hang of girls now. You might be in luck if this baby is a girl too."

"It is" I said, putting a hand on her stomach and hoping she wouldn't push me away.

"Yeah, you keep saying that" Sookie said, and then she started snoring slightly. I just lay there, enjoying my chance to feel the new curves of her stomach. It was fascinating to think there was something in there. A baby.

I kept telling Sookie that I was sure it was a girl, but honestly, I didn't know. I hoped it was. And I hoped that if I just said it enough, maybe it would be true.

Sookie was right; I did kind of have the hang of girls now. But mostly…well, mostly I was worried that I wouldn't know what to do with a boy. That I wouldn't be a good dad because I didn't know what fathers and sons did together. I had no fucking clue. Mostly, I just tried to stay away from my dad. I just, well I couldn't imagine what it would be like if I had my own son. And I thought I might screw it up. So I figured it would be better if we just didn't go there. I just hoped the baby had realised that.

SPOV

I was feeling completely betrayed by my body. It wasn't enough that I was feeling sick, throwing up and unable to remember anything, but now I was busting out of all my clothes while I was still actually trying to hide the pregnancy. That really sucked big-time.

And I'd had to let go of a few things. Felicia's party being one of them. Eric had done as I'd asked and hired some plastic slides and things for the backyard. We also had black and silver balloons, which were clearly meant for an adult party, but which were the ones Felicia had apparently picked in Kmart, and an ice cream cake from the supermarket. Eric had also bought chips and lollies galore, and organised several platters from the local Subway. It wasn't bad, and the kids certainly all seemed to love it, but it wasn't what I would have done.

Still, I was starting to realise there was a lot of things I wasn't doing around here at the moment. And I felt guilty for every single one of them. Sex was a big thing. Eric had gotten more grope-y and was obviously fascinated with my new, ridiculously large boobs. I'd caught him staring at me when I took my shirt off, and I just felt embarassed that he was stuck looking at my manky old maternity bras that had already survived a couple of babies. He kept reaching for my stomach as well, but basically, he was happy with any bit of me he could lay a hand on. And I felt bad about it, I really did, but I was so busy with feeling sick and tired that I had no energy left to expend on sex, and in no way, shape or form did I feel sexy anyway. Eric said he understood, but I still felt bad about it. Well, I did when I had a moment between throwing up and falling asleep. Really, he was just going to have to live with it.

EPOV

I hadn't heard much from Sophie-Anne since our meeting after the breakfast, other than a few phone calls. Not so much contact that it counted as harassment, but just enough that I still knew she was there.

I was still trying to find an exit strategy out of the whole situation. I'd been using the contacts I had with the bank to get most of my clients, and relying on the fact that I'd built up a good relationship with a lot of the business managers. But maybe it was time to branch out a bit. I didn't trust Sophie-Anne not to do something, well, crazy. The whole situation with Andre had been so completely fucked up and I didn't want to go down that road again.

So when she asked to see me again I was slightly worried. Surely she didn't need me to steal any pictures from the new no-neck boyfriend Sookie had insisted she'd seen Sophie-Anne with?

But no, at first the meeting was all business. Sophie-Anne wanted to go over which business managers I'd been working with, and what I thought of them. She seemed particularly interested in my thoughts on Jake. I knew that he was livid about having to work for her, and thought she was a know-nothing accountant who shouldn't be let loose with actual customers, but I couldn't tell her that. So I said as little as possible and hoped it would be over soon.

Typically, though, Sophie-Anne had something up her sleeve. "So, Eric" she said, "You know about the business awards dinner the bank is hosting next week?"

"Yeah" I said. "I'd heard."

"I think we should go" Sophie-Anne said, matter-of-fact.

"We?" I asked.

"Yes. You can be my date. It's a good opportunity for you to network. I know at least one of the clients you've been trying to attract will be there so it will definitely be worth your while."

"But…I'm married. And you have a boyfriend, don't you?" I couldn't figure out why she thought I'd just go with her.

"Bert's at a training camp. In Christchurch." She rolled her eyes at that. "So anyway, you can take me."

She seemed to have missed the point about me being married. "I still don't see why I can't just be a guest of the bank?" I tried again.

"Because we don't have any tickets left to give you. And I need an escort. And it'll be good for your business. You can meet me here at seven, next Wednesday." That seemed to be the matter closed for Sophie-Anne.

"Um, no. No, I'm sorry, Sophie-Anne, but I'm not going to do that." I really, really wasn't buying into her bullshit again

"I don't understand why you're being so difficult, Eric" she spat out. "It's business, that's all it is."

"No it isn't, it's you expecting me to leave my pregnant wife at home to be your date. I'm sorry but no." Fuck, I realised what I'd said. Hopefully Sookie would never find out I'd let it slip.

"She's pregnant?" Sophie-Anne said.

"Yeah" I confirmed, I really couldn't go back on that now.

"Well, she won't mind then. I doubt she really feels like going out and surely she can't begrudge you the opportunity." Sophie-Anne smiled. I realised I was going to have to try something else.

"Sophie-Anne, what do you think will happen if we go to this dinner?" I asked her.

She looked puzzled. "I thought that was obvious, Eric. We'd have a nice time and you'd get to meet some new clients."

"Really?"

"Well, yes. It might be nice to spend some more time together. Away from work."

"But why me?"

Sophie-Anne sighed. "Why not you?" she asked me. I shrugged, I'd asked first. She turned to stare at the window. "I thought…maybe..." she turned back to look at me defiantly. "Well they all seem to like you" she said.

"Who?" I asked.

"The other managers. Jake and the others. They all like you; they all think I'm an Australian cow who got the job through sleeping with the CFO. As if _anyone_ would sleep with Steve." She paused, and shuddered. "So…I thought if I was there with you, well. I might have a better time."

Oh, I figured it out. Fuck, Sophie-Anne wanted to be popular. She was no better than Amelia really. "I don't think one dinner's going to make that much of a difference" I told her.

"No, but it's still a good opportunity to…well, to socialise. For both of us" Sophie-Anne countered.

"No. I think it's a good opportunity for _you_ to socialise, with your staff. Show them…well, show them that you're not who they think you are." I wasn't convinced she could really do it, but I thought that maybe if I said it, she'd believe me.

"Do you think so?" she asked, staring back out the window.

"Yes. And now I have to get going. See you around Sophie-Anne. Enjoy the dinner."

She didn't say anything else, so I just left, hoping I wouldn't be hearing from her anytime soon. And I didn't, but three days later I did get a phone call from Jake Purifoy saying he'd been head-hunted by another bank and was I interested in talking to his new area manager about the kinds of things I could offer their clients.

And there was my exit strategy.

**Thanks for reading!**


	41. Chapter 41

**A/N So it's the hottest time of year here at the moment. Scorching. As I write this it's 26 degrees C and 71% humidity. I'm surprised I haven't melted all over the keyboard. So it's a really dumb day to start handing out flowers and chocolates and not expect them to wilt or melt, that's for sure! Happy Valentine's Day, anyway (when you get there, I know, I'm ahead of most of you).**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

Eric was walking ahead of me and managed to trip over one of the toadstools. "Fucking fairies" he muttered to himself, only it wasn't entirely to himself because I managed to hear him.

"Oi!" I whispered. "Watch it!"

Eric just looked at me, with a kind of fed-up expression and then surveyed the room. It wasn't a big room and it kind of looked smaller with the large grumpy man in the middle of it, holding the world's most annoyed ladybird in his arms.

I sighed. It had been a trying few weeks for all of us, with me constantly sick and struggling to just cope with the day to day stuff. Luckily I hadn't caused any major disasters, although Amelia was still upset about the day I dressed her and Felicia identically before sending them off to daycare. Eric was grumpy about that as well, as he was the one she complained to all the way there, as I hadn't seen the pair of them side by side before they'd left to realise what I'd done. Personally, I was blaming Lorena for that one. She was the one who'd bought the outfits for them for Christmas in the first place, and she tended to buy in bulk these days, so I knew for a fact Jessica had the same outfit, and I could hazard a guess that Sarah's youngest, Briana, did too.

But still, there was a lot of grumpiness around. And today it had been compounded by the fact we'd missed lunch somewhere along the way. Well, Eric and I had anyway, and that certainly wasn't helping his mood at all.

The morning had been a bit of a rush. First off, Eric had taken Felicia to her Soccer4Tots class. They'd started a few weeks earlier, as it was a class for kids aged 2 and above, focussing on general ball-skills, as much as on actual soccer. The first couple of weeks had been hard-going, I think, as Felicia ran around a lot and wasn't so interested in doing much with the balls they provided, or following the rules of the games. From what I could gather she was slowly getting the hang of it all, or, at least enjoying running around a church hall with a bunch of boys. Eric kind of liked the trips to Nosh to get coffee afterwards.

But somehow the morning had just got away from me. Eric and Felicia had arrived back and I'd managed to throw sandwiches together for the kids, but then I got stuck helping Amelia create an elaborate up-do in her hair, which was in danger of falling out at any minute, but which she thought would go well with her tiara and horribly expensive fairy dress. Then there was the tussle I got into over the ladybird costume that Amelia had decided Felicia needed to wear. Well, she'd said there had to be costumes and that Felicia's first choice of pirate wasn't acceptable for a girl. The ladybird was a compromise, but not enough of one as far as Felicia was concerned.

So although I knew for a fact that Eric had been through the pantry and pulled out a few biscuits for himself while we were getting ready, we'd never actually had lunch. And Eric's not good on an empty stomach.

He was especially not good when we rocked up at the Fairy Shop and he saw was what across the road. Murder Burger. He'd wanted to go there for ages, but we didn't often come to Ponsonby. Their entire advertising strategy seemed to be that they sold dead things, in a bun, and as far as Eric was concerned, what was there not to love about that as a concept? But we had a party to get to and he was out of luck.

The party was above the Fairy Shop. Not only did it sell every fairy-themed item known to humankind in the shop at street level, it also had a party room upstairs. But it wasn't a big party room, and it was that room, festooned with toadstools, in which we were standing now.

Eric put Felicia down as Amelia immediately sat down in the little throne. "This is _my_ seat" she said, looking pointedly at Felicia. Felicia ignored her and started pushing the toadstools around.

"Can you see my stomach?" I asked Eric, for perhaps the fortieth time that day. If I was being perfectly honest, my rumble through my wardrobe to find something that didn't show just how round my stomach was had eaten into a fair chunk of the day too. Eric just rolled his eyes. "It's fine" he said.

"Fine how? Like fine you don't notice it, fine you see it, but I just look fat, or fine because everyone can tell but they'll be too polite to say anything?"

"Fine, Sookie. Just fine. So, when is the food coming?"

"When the guests get here. Felicia, I don't think they need all the toadstools in the one corner." Felicia turned to look at me, but then carried on with her project. I gave up.

"When will they get here, Mummy?" the fairy Queen asked from her throne. "When?"

"Any minute now" I replied, hearing footsteps coming up the stairs. Jessica burst into the room wearing a rather lovely rainbow fairy dress. She looked at Felicia, who glanced at her, then carried on with a toadstool. The she spied Amelia. Having judged Amelia to be the most interesting fairy in the room, Jessica wandered over.

"It's _my_ party today" Amelia informed Jessica.

"Yah, I knows" Jessica said, clearly marking out where her dad was from by her use of yah rather than yeah. It sounded so odd coming out of her mouth. Then she just stood there and stared at Amelia. Amelia simply took this as the adoration she was due and didn't bother trying to make any further conversation. Instead she turned her attention to Judith who had arrived in the room and was carrying a large, brightly wrapped present.

"Are we here first?" Judith said to me. "Wow, and I thought we'd be late. It's a bit of a rush getting everyone ready."

"Yeah, that's the stuff they don't tell you about two kids" I said to her. "Hi Calvin!" Calvin had walked in carrying Thomas in the baby capsule. "If you go out to the balcony you can put Thomas down."

"Great, Sookie" Calvin said, walking past me. Eric was already out on the balcony, which was where the adults could stand around and we'd be serving coffee for them. He was eyeing up the white, wrought-iron chairs and tables dotted around and didn't look at all comfortable in his surroundings.

"So, how are you?" Judith said, looking at me significantly. She'd rumbled me picking some ham out of my Subway roll at Felicia's party and knew I was pregnant as I couldn't lie outright when she asked. Of course anyone else might have turned a blind eye, but Judith, well Judith felt she had the same rights to me that she had to her own sisters sometimes.

Her knowing had come in handy though the next weekend when Jessica's birthday party had turned into the kind of all-afternoon and evening extravaganza that Calvin and Judith seemed to favour. I'd felt pretty crappy and at least they'd understood why I was dragging everyone home while the party was in full swing. Although I did have to hang around for a bit while Eric tried the weird South African sausage that Calvin was cooking on the barbecue.

"Oh, I'm alright" I told Judith. I didn't really want to list off that I was actually tired, emotional, vaguely nauseous and absolutely petrified that having got to twelve weeks I was going to turn up to my scan and find out something had gone wrong.

"Yeah, it's no fun" Judith said. "But you'll be OK. You've done it all before." With that she walked off to find Calvin. And that was really the reaction I guessed I was going to get to the fact I was having this baby. The novelty of me being knocked up had well and truly worn off. For me included, at this point.

I followed Judith and took the present off her, and started a little pile for them in the corner, all the while ignoring the fact I could hear Amelia laying down the law to Jessica and Felicia in the main room. "You have to do what I say" she was saying. "Because it's my birthday." Her speech clearly wasn't having much of an impact on Felicia because I could still hear toadstools being moved around. I guess it's hard to find good ladybirds these days.

EPOV

I wasn't quite sure how I'd missed lunch, but I had. Sookie had spent the last few weeks eating everything in sight because, apparently, it made her feel less sick. So I assumed that at some point she'd stop rushing around the house and actually eat something.

And maybe feed me too.

But she didn't, and then all of a sudden we were heading out the door and all I'd had to eat were some cookies I'd found in the pantry. And it's not even like they were the nice, homemade kind.

So instead of lunch I'd got to stand around while Sookie tried on every top in her wardrobe and asked whether or not you could notice her stomach in it. I soon learned the correct answer was 'no'. Unfortunately that just made her stand there and worry that you could see too much of her boobs in it, instead.

I tried telling her it would be fine, but she'd huffed and turned from side to side in front of the mirror saying "I don't want to scare the fairies off with too much cleavage."

"Why would it scare them off?" I'd asked, wondering if it would be lunch soon.

"Duh! They're _fairies_!" Sookie walked back over the closet and started looking through it again. I gave up helping her and decided that I might need to go and find a banana or something to hold me until it was actually lunchtime.

But it was never lunchtime. Sookie spent a long time fussing with Amelia's hair while Amelia fretted that it wasn't right, and she then got involved in protracted negotiations over the costume that Felicia had to wear. She liked the colours in the ladybug costume but she wasn't particularly taken with the idea of actually wearing it. She would have preferred to stay in the same t-shirt and shorts she'd worn to the soccer class I'd taken her to earlier in the morning.

Of course, it wasn't actually soccer. When Sookie had signed us up for it I'd vaguely wondered how you'd get a bunch of two year olds to play an organised game. The answer was, you didn't. You gave them a bunch of different balls to kick and throw, you organised them into relay races, and you made them do weird games where they had to collect beanbags in a bucket, one at a time. The idea was to wear the kids out, I think. Instead I was exhausted by the end of it and Felicia was still happy to do a good half-hour in the playground next door before I could persuade her to come and get coffee with me. In hindsight, I should have bought a muffin as well.

And now here we were in the weird-ass fairy party place where there wasn't any food. I hadn't been here before and hadn't realised it was going to be quite so…small. And absolutely full of fucking toadstools. The furniture for the adults was barely larger and the whole place just made me feel a bit uncomfortable.

And I was still hungry. "How long does the party go for?" I asked Sookie, while keeping one eye on Felicia's accumulation of toadstools in a corner of the main room.

"I don't know" she sighed. "A couple of hours? I think we get the fairy herself for an hour."

"There's a fairy?"

"Well, yeah! A fairy princess. And then we can get you Murder Burger, don't fret."

"I wasn't fretting!"

"Oh, Eric! You've been on and on about Murder Burger since we got here."

"No I haven't! I just pointed out that the logo looks like Bob."

"Oh, it does not! Bob does not look like a demon cat."

I shrugged. I'd seen him out there at night hunting things in the dark; he didn't look particularly domesticated at that moment. Sookie just liked to conveniently forget about that side of Bob sometimes.

I looked over at Sookie who just pursed her lips and stared at me. I was tempted to tell her I could quite clearly see the outline of her stomach, but I didn't want the afternoon to deteriorate quite that much. But just then some more guests arrived. "Go and say hello to Andy" Sookie commanded "And try to distract Felicia before she notices Riley's dressed as a pirate, would you?"

I ventured back into the party room, where at least my path was clear of toadstools now.

SPOV

Parties are exhausting, even when you're not hosting them at home. It was a bit of an effort to make small talk with the parents while sucking my stomach in as best I could, and at the same time keeping one eye on what my kids were doing, and the other eye on Eric to make sure he wasn't looking too fed-up. Mildly fed-up I could deal with, but I didn't need him having a full melt-down in the middle of fairy-land because he was hungry.

The fairy appeared and gathered all the kids up. "Are you a real fairy princess?" Amelia demanded.

"Yes. I'm Fairy Forget-Me-Not" she trilled in a really fake, high-pitched voice.

"Huh. My mum's the underpants fairy, but she's not a very good one at the moment. Because she keeps being sick. Daddy says she won't _die_ though. I guess fairies don't die? Do they?"

Fairy Forget-Me-Not looked a bit stunned for a moment. But then she adjusted her tiara and decided to carry on with the scheduled program. "OK" she said, forgetting momentarily to use the fake voice. "Let's all choose our fairy names, shall we?" She glanced sideways at Amelia, still perched on her throne. Amelia gave a fairly regal nod to show she thought that was an appropriate activity, and the afternoon's entertainment carried on.

The fairy did work hard for her money. She handed out wands and had all the kids turn into frogs and leap around the place, she had them blowing bubbles, and she told stories and sang songs. I was exhausted just watching her.

We had coffee and tea served on the little tiny enclosed balcony for the parents. This had once been a rather grand Victorian house, but all the spaces were still on a Victorian scale, which meant kind of on the small side. I'd been telling the parents they could leave if they liked and we'd keep an eye on the kids, so several of them had drifted off up Ponsonby Road to go shopping or sit in a café.

Eric drank some coffee out of one of the pretty pink polka-dotted cups they provided, ate his cupcake and still looked a bit miserable. It probably wasn't helped by the fact that Calvin and Andy were standing there with him having a conversation about where you got the best burgers. Andy seemed to making a case for Burger Fuel, but Calvin was really trying to sell the other two on Murder Burger. Yeah, he wasn't my most favourite person at the moment.

I was chatting to Maisie's mum, Becs, about school visits and buying uniforms and all the other things we'd had to do recently. It all made me a bit sad. I couldn't believe I had a child who was big enough to start school, despite the fact Amelia had always been such a precocious little thing. Somehow I'd honestly thought she'd stay little forever.

But that wasn't going to happen, and my not so little fairy was growing up fast.

Becs drifted off to talk to someone else and Eric came over and nudged my elbow. "You OK?" he said. "You know, after not eating anything for lunch?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I still feel a bit sick, but I'll be OK."

"Mmm. I think you should have eaten" he said, and then he wandered off again, to see if any cupcakes were leftover. Yeah, he was having trouble thinking about anything other than food.

I stuck my head into the party room. "Right" Fairy Forget-Me-Not said, "And now it's time for our special fairy picnic! Follow me everyone and we can eat!"

The kids lined up behind her, and followed her into the even smaller room next door where they had set up a table and the food. All except Felicia, who'd discarded her ladybird antenna headband somewhere along the way and made a beeline for Eric. "Muda burga?" she asked. "Muda burga?"

"Um. Later, Leesh" Eric said, trying to turn her around and push her in the direction of the other kids. "Now you get…oh, whatever the hell it is fairies eat."

"No muda burga?" Felicia asked.

"Nope."

Felicia let out a loud sigh and trudged off in the direction the others had gone. Me and the rest of the adults followed along.

The fairy picnic was full of tiny bits of food, most of it pink. The kids managed to pick at everything and create a huge mess. I pretended I couldn't see Eric looking longingly across the road at Murder Burger. Or that he stole about three of the small star-shaped ham sandwiches off Felicia's plate when she decided she'd eaten enough.

Then they brought out the birthday cake, which most of the kids just crumbled because they'd filled up on enough sugary stuff already, and finally it was present-opening time. I guess everyone had figured that as Amelia was starting school she needed stationery because it looked as though everyone had bought her present from Smiggle. I wondered if there was anything in the shop that she didn't now own. Amelia was ecstatic because she spent most of our trips to St Luke's these days trying to get us to go into that shop with her and I had yet to see Eric actually cross the threshold. Either he was allergic to pink plastic pencil cases or it didn't have the word murder in its name, but whatever the reason, he just couldn't see the appeal of Smiggle.

Once Amelia was surrounded by a mountain of presents and wrapping-paper, which I was valiantly trying to bundle up into a smaller pile, people started to drift off. The parents who'd left their kids earlier turned up to collect their now sticky and slightly bouncy children and find out what their goody-bags contained. Eric came over and said something to me, which I kind of missed, as I was saying goodbye to Becs and arranging a playdate for Friday, and pretty soon it was just me and Judith left in the room with the remaining kids. This was odd, because there should have been an Eric as well.

I looked out the window facing the street just in time to see Eric and Calvin waltzing into Murder Burger. I see, I thought, couldn't wait for the rest of the family, could he?

"Did you know where they'd gone?" I said to Judith, who was trying to persuade Jessica that she did need her hands wiped.

"Yeah" she said. "The story I got was they were starving and in danger of eating one of the children if they didn't go now."

"They're just a bit hungry" Amelia said automatically. Then she paused. "Who is?" she asked.

"Daddy and Uncle Calvin" I replied.

"Oh" she said. "Have they gone to the place where they kill things you can eat?" She wrinkled her nose. "That doesn't sound like a nice place. Do you think that's where the evil witches are? The ones who don't like fairies?"

"No Amelia" I said, handing the leftover cake to one of the staff who was going to wrap it up for us. "It's just burgers over there. They only sell normal old burgers. No one gets killed."

"Muda burga!" Felicia chanted. "Mudaburgamudaburgamurdaburga!" Boy, she really liked the sound of those two words.

"Oh, are we getting a burger?" Amelia asked, turning around and looking out the window. "I want a burger. But not a cat one. That would be yucky."

"It's just a picture, Amelia" I said. "They don't actually sell cat burgers"

"MEOW!" Felicia yelled at the top of her voice. Yeah, she was pretty hyped now by the afternoon's activities.

I managed to pack up all our belongings and make a couple of trips to the car with the presents while Judith watched the kids who were getting a bit restless now that they knew the party was over and there was something better going on.

Then we all made the rather treacherous crossing across Ponsonby Road, with Judith having to manage Thomas in his capsule and Jessica, although she did at least have a wrist strap she attached to Jessica first. I just held on tight to Felicia and Amelia's hands. Felicia seemed to be a bit scared of the wrist strap idea and, for once, decided she wouldn't actually try to run off. Thank God.

When we walked in Calvin and Eric were just finishing off their burgers. Eric had the decency to look a bit sheepish. "Found you!" I said, as Felicia crawled into his lap to see what food was on offer. "Muda burga?" she asked, looking at the empty plate kind of forlornly.

"I don't want a cat burger" Amelia said.

"There are no cat burgers, I told you that" I said to her.

"So was it nice?" I asked Eric.

"Well the one I had was" Eric replied. "It had wild-boar bacon."

"Bac'n?" Felicia asked. She loved bacon. She looked heart-broken, and it was even worse for her when she realised that Jessica had climbed into Calvin's lap and was now sitting opposite her munching on a bit of burger that Calvin had left. Yeah, poor Felicia, she'd missed out.

"Do you guys want something?" Eric asked.

"Well, yeah. We came to eat with you…but you've eaten." I said, sitting down next to him.

"Oh. Well, um…I could eat some more…" Eric said thoughtfully.

"You want another burger?"

"Yeah. I missed lunch! And Calvin's ostrich burger looked really good.

"It was" Calvin confirmed.

"What's an ostrich?" Amelia asked.

"Like…chicken" I tried.

"But much, much bigger" Calvin added.

"Right, well you can order then" I said to Eric, and he stood up and headed towards the counter with Amelia and Felicia shadowing him in case he forgot to feed them.

EPOV

Calvin was right about the burgers being really fucking good, but maybe not so right about the fact they wouldn't miss us. I had told Sookie that's where we were going but I don't think she'd heard. I was kind of over fairies for the day though, and really fucking sick of feeling hungry.

Yeah, I didn't know how Sookie had been coping with the whole morning sickness thing. One afternoon of hunger and I was a mess. She'd had weeks of feeling sick, hungry, tired every fucking thing under the sun. But it wasn't for much longer. It was hopefully just a bit longer and then we wouldn't have to miss lunch in favour of having stupid fucking conversations about which t-shirt made her bump less visible. We could actually tell people about the pregnancy, and she'd be able to show off that bump and everyone would finally know we were having a baby. Our baby.

So the following Friday I drove home and picked Sookie up for the scan. The NT scan Sookie had been referring to it as, so I'd looked that up. Apparently they were measuring something in the baby's neck to check the risk of Down's syndrome. It all seemed pretty standard.

Amelia was at school. It was her third day and she loved every minute of it and completely oblivious to the fact that Sookie had just about cried as we dropped her off on her first day, and every morning since. Sookie would just sigh as Amelia skipped off, and then give Felicia a lot of hugs, which made Felicia squirm a lot and look annoyed. I didn't feel quite the same way, having met Amelia when she was 3 going on 13 and probably perfectly capable of holding her own in a classroom even then. But I told Sookie it was going to be OK, and tried to extricate Felicia from her mother's arms before she initiated an escape plan that wasn't going to do either of them any good.

So when I pulled into the driveway it was only Sookie and Felicia who were waiting for me. They got into the car and we drove off. Sookie was quiet, she was really worried about the scan, but I couldn't see how anything could go wrong at this point. She'd had no signs of any miscarriage and was still feeling a bit sick all the time. She'd admitted herself that the pregnancies she had got to this stage with were the ones that had resulted in Amelia and Felicia. So as far as I was concerned we'd be fine. We'd see the new baby in there. And hopefully this time she'd have legs.

The place that did the scans was in the same building as that mother's unit we'd visited when Judith was in there with Thomas. It was kind of odd to think that wasn't all that long ago. Seeing him at Amelia's party and watching how alert he was now, was fucking scary. They grew up so fast.

But that wasn't a conversation I could initiate with Sookie this week.

As we waited for the elevator, I watched Sookie biting her lip and gave her arm a squeeze. "It'll be OK" I said.

"Yeah. I know" she said. But she didn't sound convinced. So I turned my attention to Felicia. "You have to be good in there" I told her. "The doctor is going to look at mummy's tummy so you need to behave. OK?"

"OK" she said, as we stepped out of the elevator and Sookie walked over the reception desk to check in. But then Felicia tried to leap out of my arms at the sight of the large plastic kitchen they had set up in a corner of the waiting room. Well, at least she'd be distracted I thought.

Sookie and I sat down on a couch, while Felicia brought us a large selection of plastic food. Sookie was still quiet and I just hoped that she was worrying over nothing.

SPOV

I really didn't want to be worried about the scan. It was silly really. I'd never had a bad NT scan before. When it went wrong, I knew about it before this stage.

But even so, I was a little bit nervous about what they'd find. I tried not to show it, but I'm pretty sure Eric could tell. It had been an emotional week anyway with Amelia starting school, and now we had this on top of it.

I tried to break the silence by talking about names. Eric liked that I thought.

"I thought of another name" I said.

"Another one?"

"Yeah. How about Lillian, and then she could be Lily for short. I mean, Lily's OK on its own, but I like Lillian, it's classier."

"Or she could be Lil" Eric pointed out.

"No. That sounds like an old lady with a bad gin-habit." Eric didn't say anything to that, just raised his eyebrows and took the plastic corncob that Felicia was thrusting into his hand.

"And we need to think about boys' names, too. Um, I like Ryan…or do you want to do the American thing and name it after you?" I asked him.

Eric sighed. "I don't think we need to worry about boys' names Sookie. It's a girl." I'm pretty sure he also muttered "And I've picked a name" under his breath but I ignored him.

"Well it's a while until we find out the sex for sure" I said. "And you might be wrong."

Eric looked like he was thinking of a way to answer that when they called my name. He scooped Felicia up and we went into the room where the ultrasound machine was set up. The radiographer introduced herself and I assumed my position on the table with my shirt pulled up and my pants undone and pushed down. It wasn't that dignified, but I'd had worse.

Eric got stuck trying to persuade Felicia to sit still and look at some of her books which we'd brought along with us and he missed the start of the scan. So when he looked the baby was right there, in clear view. Waving its little arms in annoyance at being poked and prodded.

"Oh" Eric said. "Oh, it's got legs now. Kind of."

"Yes, everything's there" the radiographer confirmed. "I'll just do some measurements."

She started changing views and measuring things on the screen, muttering about it being quite big and telling us which bits she was showing us: hands, feet, spine, head. I just watched it. It was really there. It was really OK.

Eric watched as best he could, while wrangling Felicia. I felt a bit sorry for him and would have happily changed places, except that I couldn't. They kind of needed my uterus to stay where it was for there to be any kind of view of the baby at all.

And then finally, after a lot of poking, prodding and getting me to roll from side to side to get the baby into the correct position, the radiographer took the nuchal translucency measurement, the one which, when combined with my age would give me the risk of Down's syndrome. I'd always had really good odds before so I didn't suspect it would throw anything up this time.

She repeated the measurement several times and then, after watching the bloodflow to and from the placenta, we were done, and she sent us back to the waiting room.

Felicia immediately made a beeline for the kitchen again, almost knocking over another little boy who'd dared to play with it in her absence. They glared at each other for a bit and then Felicia set about trying to claim as much of the plastic food as she could.

I was a bit absorbed in making sure she played nicely so I didn't hear the first time the radiographer called my name. When she called again, I stood up and got to her as quickly as I could, leaving Eric to try to prise Felicia off the kitchen and come with us. I followed her into the examination room while she held out the sheet that held all the measurements and results of the scan.

"So here it shows the results of the nuchal translucency measurement, and we've calculated out your risk. It says you have a one in 47 chance of the baby having Trisomy 21. Down's syndrome."

I felt like the ground was falling away from under my feet. Dimly over the roar of the blood rushing to my head I heard Eric's voice say "What?" and I registered he'd arrived in the room with me. I couldn't do anything, I couldn't even blink for fear the tears would start falling.

The baby wasn't right. And it was all my fault.

**A/N So The Fairy Shop and Murder Burger are real places, opposite each other on Ponsonby Road. If you want to be nosy check out www (dot) thefairyshop (dot) co (dot) nz and www (dot) murderburger (dot) co (dot) nz. Smiggle (which is a weird name for a shop, I agree) is like heaven for little girls. It's all stationery - pencilcases, gel pens, notebooks. They go mad for the stuff - www (dot) smiggle (dot) co (dot) nz.**

**As for the scan, the nuchal translucency scan measures the fluid that accumulates at the back of the baby's neck and is then added to the mother's age (and sometimes a blood test) to work out the risk for Down's syndrome. It can identify babies who do have it really well, but it also throws up a lot of false positives because it is just someone measuring a blip on a computer screen. There's lots of room for error and it's not a perfect test.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	42. Chapter 42

**A/N So I will just say if you're not in the mood for sad, this might not be for you. Check back in tomorrow perhaps. It's been hard enough writing it.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

The scan had been…I couldn't really describe it. The baby had legs. And tiny little arms which she waved around whenever the technician poked Sookie really hard in the stomach. I just couldn't get my head around the fact that a baby was actually in there. I mean, Sookie's stomach might look bigger, but it wasn't that big. So the baby had to be so fucking tiny. But it was recognisable. As a baby. With a beating heart. Our baby.

Unfortunately our toddler decided to be slightly difficult and Felicia wanted to bounce around the room we were in and I was a bit worried she was going to pull out an important wire or something. So I missed the odd bits of the scan, and some of the others I had to watch with a squirming Felicia in my arms. But I could deal with that.

And then we had to go back to the waiting room where Felicia and another small boy had a stand-off over the plastic kitchen. Sookie was distracted by watching Felicia, probably worrying that she might bite the kid. So I tried to smile at her and tell her how fucking wonderful this all was, but she kind of missed it.

The next thing I knew Sookie was scuttling back into the examination room with the woman who'd done the scan. I grabbed Felicia, who tried to avoid being captured, and followed her. And when I got there I could them saying something about odds. Something about Down's syndrome.

"What?" I asked, as Felicia tried to climb out of my arms.

The woman looked at me and bit her lip, then looked back at Sookie who was as still as a statue. "Your risk is high. You'll need to talk to Russell. Ring him when you get home, OK?"

Sookie nodded and then turned and walked out of the room, brushing past me and Felicia in the process.

I turned to follow her. "I don't get it" I said. And I didn't. The baby had looked fine. The technician had said that it had all the things it was supposed to, it had fingers and a spine and just…it was there. Why wouldn't it be OK?

Sookie had walked back to the reception to pay for the scan. I just stood behind her holding Felicia. She looked closed-off, shut-down. Completely fucking broken.

Felicia lunged towards the kitchen. "Play!" she demanded.

"Not now, Leesh" I said to her.

"Play!" she tried again.

"No" I said, just watching Sookie's back as she went through the process of pulling out her credit card and handing it to the receptionist.

Sookie started to walk out the door and again I followed her. "Play!" Felicia wailed, sounding as though she was about to sob. She had no fucking clue what was going on but if she decided to throw a tantrum right now it really wasn't going to help matters. "Be a good girl" I told her "And there'll be a treat when we get home."

Felicia thought for a second or two. "Mishmallow?" she asked.

"Maybe. If you're good."

"Mishmallow" she said confidently, and, thankfully, she stopped trying to climb down and get back to the kitchen.

Sookie was quiet in the elevator and on the way across the parking lot to the car. Felicia didn't really notice. "Home, Daddy?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm taking you home now."

"Mishmallow."

"Maybe."

I strapped Felicia into her carseat while Sookie sat in the passenger seat, staring at the piece of paper in her hands. I got in and started the engine. "It'll be OK" I said to her, in the hope she'd say the same thing. That maybe that woman was completely over-reacting. Sookie had done this before, she'd know.

"You don't know that" Sookie said instead, staring out the window. "The odds aren't great. I'll have to ring Russell and find out what we do. Amnio probably."

"Oh. So…what did you have before?" I asked, wishing like fuck we'd discussed this before going into the scan. It felt cruel to ask now but I needed to know.

"Um. I think with Amelia it was like 1 in 800 and something, and with Felicia…600 and something. Maybe the other way around."

Oh fuck. That was a huge fucking difference to the odds they gave us for this baby. Yeah, no wonder Amelia and Felicia had been fine. There'd been almost no risk. But this baby, this baby had a good chance of being…wrong.

This baby.

Our baby.

My baby.

Sookie wouldn't look at me, and I knew why. It was all my fucking fault. It was genetic, wasn't it? Down's. It was genetic and it was, had to be, from me. She hadn't had this risk before. It was obvious I had some fucking defective genes.

Fuck. I never should have pushed her into having kids with me. I should have just been fucking happy with Amelia and Felicia and left it at that.

Sookie continued to stare out the window as I drove her home. Felicia was chattering away in the back of the car but not getting much response.

I wanted to say something, anything to Sookie. I wanted to say I was sorry, that this was the worst idea I'd ever fucking had and I was so, so fucking sorry for putting her through this. But I couldn't. It seemed too little for what I'd done.

I didn't think I could ever make this up to her.

Instead we continued on in silence and I pulled into the driveway at home. As Sookie jumped out of the car I saw her swipe a hand across her cheek quickly. Fuck. I really wanted to comfort her but nothing was going to do that and it was pretty obvious that she didn't want me to anyway.

I got Felicia out and she trotted into the house after Sookie. I followed them in and Sookie finally looked at me. "So" she said, obviously going for brisk and businesslike, "I'll ring Russell and let you know what he says."

"Yeah" I said. "I would stay but I have an appointment." I did, I had to go and see someone that Jake had set me up with and I really couldn't afford to blow it off.

"Yeah. Good luck in the wilds of East Tamaki." Sookie smiled a little.

"I have no fucking clue where it is" I said.

"I guess the GPS does."

"I guess it does."

Sookie sighed. "OK, well. See you later. And talk to you when…I know anything."

"OK." I waited for a beat, and then I leant down and kissed her cheek. The slightly damp one. Then I turned and started to walk out the door.

Felicia almost tackled before I'd taken more than a couple of steps. "Mishmallow!" she cried.

"Yeah, OK" I said. I walked back into the kitchen and got the container out of the pantry and handed two marshmallows to Felicia. "Two!" she said, looking really pleased and shoving a whole one straight in her mouth. I crouched down and put my arms around her, and squeezed her as hard as I could, breathing in the scent of the banana shampoo the kids used. Felicia took the hug for a minute and then started squirming. Usually this was Sookie's domain, but today. Well today it was me.

I let her go and she popped the other marshmallow in her mouth. "Bye, Leesh" I said, and then I stood up and walked out the door.

SPOV

I felt physically sick the whole ride home. Sick in a totally different way to the way I'd been feeling for weeks. Just…sick. I couldn't look at Eric. I was so close to tears the whole time, and some did escape. And I didn't want to talk about it. At all.

I just wanted to hit rewind and go back to yesterday. When I wasn't a woman in danger of having a Down's syndrome baby.

And I felt guilty. So terribly guilty. This was the baby Eric had longed for and stupidly, he'd picked me to have it with.

He should have left when he had the chance. Left and gone back to the States and found some nice 26 year old teacher, or marketing manager or just…just anyone. Someone who wasn't 35. Someone who wasn't high-risk for having a baby with Down's syndrome.

I'd always known in the back of my mind that it was a possibility. You're told all the time that once you turn 35 everything to do with having babies is screwed. Your fertility drops, you have a higher risk of these types of problems. But you never think it will happen to you.

Until it does. And then you realise just how stupid and selfish you were to ever think you'd be any different.

I rang Russell's office and explained to the nurse about my results. She said Russell would ring me back when he had a chance. And then I rang the only person I knew who'd understand. Tara.

"How was the scan?" she asked me. She'd known about the pregnancy almost all the way through. Mostly because I needed someone to moan to about the morning sickness. And she was sympathetic, in between laughing at me for going through it all again.

Now neither of us was laughing. "One in 47?" she said, after I told her. "Fuck, that's high." Tara's odds had come up as 1 in 98 when she'd had Lachlan. Given she was only 29 at the time, those were odds her doctor wasn't happy with at all. So she'd had an amnio and decided that if the results were bad she wasn't going through with the pregnancy.

But she'd admitted that by the time she had the test and got the results back she was almost 18 weeks pregnant. She could feel the baby kicking. It wasn't going to be an easy decision to live with.

And at this point in time it was a terrifying thing to be thinking about having to make that kind of choice myself.

"Yeah, I know" I said, quietly.

"So are you having an amnio?" she asked.

"Don't know. I'm waiting on my obstetrician to ring me back."

"Well, hopefully he will soon. And you'll be able to sort it out. It's the waiting that's the hard bit. And the not-knowing. Hug Amelia and Felicia a lot. That's what got me through."

"Yeah, I will. I…I better go. In case Russell rings."

"Yeah. Take care, Sookie. And let me know what happens"

"OK. I will. Bye, Tara."

"Bye."

I put the phone down and stared at it, willing it to ring. It didn't. I made a sandwich for Felicia's lunch but wasn't keen on eating myself even though I knew I should. I briefly contemplated having a ham sandwich because really, who knew now if there was any point continuing on with the whole 'don't eat anything dangerous' diet. Because, God knows, a glass of wine would have been so very, very welcome right then.

And then phone rang. It was Russell. "So we'll need to do some more tests" he said. "Did they tell you where your placenta was?"

"No" I said, wondering what that had to do with it.

"We might be able to do a CVS instead of an amnio, but I need to know. So…why don't you pop up here about three when I'm done with my other patients and we'll take a look, OK?"

"OK" I agreed.

When I got off the phone I sent Eric a quick text with an update on what was happening and went off to play with Felicia. At 3pm I packed her in the car and drove up to the village, parking behind the old house which housed Russell's practice. It was off an alleyway and on the other side of the alleyway was a small reserve. With a playground.

"Park?" Felicia asked as she got out of the car.

"Maybe afterwards" I said. "Mummy has to go and see a doctor right now."

Felicia sighed, but didn't whinge. I think she'd realised something was off. I'd tried not to show how sad I felt. But I had snuck off to the bathroom to have one cry and she'd nearly found me.

She'd been looking for Amelia.

There were all sorts of changes to her little world and sad-mummy was almost eclipsed by the mystery of the missing sister. I don't think she quite understood that school was now a permanent part of Amelia's life.

Of course she was supposed to be getting her own baby in 6 months' time. Her own little shadow who'd one day wonder why Felicia wasn't there anymore being noisy and bossy and generally running the place.

But who knew if that was going to happen now?

Felicia and I sat in the waiting room and hadn't been there long before Russell called me into his room. I sat Felicia on one of the chairs and hoped she'd be good and Russell got me to hop up onto the examination table.

Luckily, my placenta was on the front, on the left hand side. Apparently that was something I had done right.

Russell explained about the CVS test, that it was going to take a sample from the placenta and could be done a lot earlier than an amnio, but, like an amnio, there was a small risk of miscarriage.

So I could add that back in to my worries.

"So, we'll do it Monday?" Russell said, asking what was pretty much a rhetorical question. "And I think…" he continued, bringing up something on his computer screen. "Yes, I'm rostered on at the hospital on Monday, so it'll be me doing it. So just report to the fourth floor ultrasound rooms and we'll take it from there. Your fast results should take about two working days, so then we'll know more after that. OK?"

I nodded, and then we said goodbye and I scooted out of the room and tried to ignore the sympathetic looks of the nurse and the receptionist as I left.

As I had promised, I took Felicia across to the playground and pushed her on the swings for a while. She got a bit grumpy because I didn't push her as high as Eric did, but she would have to live with that.

I sent Eric another text, telling him about the CVS being scheduled for Monday and that he'd have to take me there. I'd need to find someone to have the kids for me too. And pick Amelia up from school. This meant I'd probably have to tell Judith. Crap. I really didn't need anyone else knowing, but Tara couldn't pick up her kids and Amelia at the same time, it wasn't physically possible.

Then after a few goes on the slide as well, we got in the car and went to pick Amelia up from her playdate at Maisie's house.

EPOV

The meeting with the new client had gone as well as could be expected given my mind was elsewhere. I'd had the drive there and back to think. Not that it did any fucking good, but at least it felt like I was doing something.

I tried to remember if there'd been anyone in my family who had Down's. But I had no fucking clue about anyone from my mother's side and, quite frankly, Dad's relatives stayed the fuck away from him so if there was, well, I never saw them. A whole bunch of them were in Texas anyway. Fuck, maybe if I'd known this kind of shit I would have known not to contemplate getting anyone pregnant.

Sookie sent me a couple of short texts, one saying she was going to see Russell and one saying she'd been and she was booked for something called a CVS on Monday afternoon.

So when I got back to the office I made good use of my time. I looked up everything I could on that procedure, Chorionic villus sampling. And then I looked up Down's syndrome. And when I'd done as much reading as I could take, I went home.

On the surface everything at home seemed the same as it always did at this time of day. Sookie was busy making dinner, Felicia tried to climb me, Amelia insisted on telling me every single thing she'd done at school that day with a great deal of excitement.

We got through dinner with a minimum of conversation from everyone apart from Amelia. And then it was bathtime and bedtime and I still hadn't had a chance to do much more than say a few basic words to Sookie.

I found her emptying the dishwasher. "I, um…I did some reading" I said.

"Uh-huh" Sookie said, never lifting her eyes from what she was doing.

"I, um. Well. The prognosis isn't as bad as it once was. They can live for a lot longer these days."

"Who can?" Sookie asked.

"People. With Down's syndrome. It's not…well, it's not like it used to be."

"OK" Sookie said tersely. She didn't want to talk. I gave up. Of course she didn't want to talk to me, it was all my fucking fault and no amount of talking was gong to change that.

We lay in bed that night and didn't talk and didn't even really touch. I couldn't help feeling that it would be a lot better if we could just have sex, but Sookie had been off-limits for a while now, what with the nausea, and the tiredness and the sore boobs she just hadn't wanted to. And I understood that. But now she was off limits for a whole other reason. She'd built a wall around herself and she wasn't letting me in anytime soon.

Saturday morning wasn't any better. Sookie was still quiet, still abrupt, and still sad. It was painful to watch. Her eyes would fill up with tears, but she'd say "I'm fine" and brush off my concern.

When I tried to talk to her about it, when I put my arms around her and told her it was OK to be sad, she just kind of pushed me aside, saying it was silly to be sad when it might still be OK. And then she walked off to do the vacuuming.

I took Felicia to soccer and we had lunch and just tried to get on with pretending it was all OK.

SPOV

I really needed Eric to stop talking about it. Or trying to talk about it. I didn't want to talk about it. At all. I just wanted it to be Monday and for the test to be done. Because I'd resigned myself to the fact that that was going to be the only way we were really going to know anything. For all I knew I was just being silly over nothing. I could be like Tara, who'd had some bad odds but still managed to produce a perfectly healthy baby.

Of course she was only 29, but even so. I still had a chance, didn't I?

But I couldn't say that to Eric. If I did I'd be asking him to tell me it would be OK, that being 35 didn't really matter. And I couldn't guarantee he felt that way. For all I knew he was regretting ever marrying me and the whole desire to discuss the results of a million Google searches was just his way of ignoring the obvious. That he was having a baby with an older mother. That he'd thrown away his opportunity to have nice, normal healthy offspring. That he had to make the best of it now and that he was stuck looking on the internet for any shred of hope he could salvage.

And when he wasn't trying to talk to me about it all Eric was just watchful, waiting, I think, to see what I might do. Whether I was going to break. It was a bit like being an animal at the zoo.

So I set about cleaning the house because really, thinking was vastly over-rated. Thinking led down the path to feeling sorry for myself and that was a dumb thing to do when I only had myself to blame for the whole sorry mess.

And when I'd cleaned everything I could think of, some of it with Amelia's help while she told me a story about a little boy who was captured by a mean witch and escaped with the help of his pet dragon, I made a lamb roast for dinner. With Yorkshire puddings. That took some of my concentration too, and they were Eric's favourites. I could do that for him.

I couldn't give him a normal, healthy baby of course, so he'd have to settle for Yorkshire puddings.

After the kids were in bed I decided to put some of the leftovers into the big freezer in the garage. I headed out the door and was moving stuff around in the freezer when Eric appeared.

"So, um, are you OK?" he asked me, for about the twentieth time that day.

"Well I'm as good as can be expected I guess" I said, a bit grumpily. I was fed up with him asking.

"It's not…well, it's not good, is it?" Eric looked at me. He looked worried. He looked scared. He looked really, really young.

"No, but I guess we have to wait until the results are back. I mean, there's not much we can do until we know for definite." I shut the lid of the freezer. "And then we'll have to make all sorts of decisions."

"Yeah…" Eric said thoughtfully. "I just wish…"

"I know Eric!" I interjected. "I know you wish it was different, I do too. But we can't change anything. And we just don't know. And it's tough for all of us. It's going to be tough whatever way it ends up. And if it's bad…then, fuck. It's going to be horrible. But we just have to get through it."

"But we can, can't we?" Eric said, frowning.

I leant against the freezer. "I guess. But it will be tough. Tara had something similar, so I know what she went through. We have to think about everyone" I paused for a bit. "About Amelia and Felicia too. And what it would be like for them."

"What do you mean?" Eric asked slowly.

"Well what the effect would be, if they had a…sibling who was special needs. How much they'd miss out on. What their lives would be like. What happens if I'm dead? All that kind of stuff. I mean, they're my kids and part of my loyalty has to be to them…" I trailed off. Eric looked murderous.

And then he turned around and punched a hole in the wall of the garage.

He pulled his hand back and looked a bit shocked at what he'd done. I saw red. "Fuck, Eric!" I said. "What the hell was that for?"

That shook Eric out of his shocked silence. "Because I'm fucked off, what do you think?" he roared at me.

"Yeah, well. Boo-hoo. I can't deal with you having a temper-tantrum right now. That was a fucking stupid thing to do. You'll have to ring Calvin to come and fix it now. And you better do something about the grazes on your knuckles. Idiot." I started to walk past him and back into the house.

"Sookie…don't." Eric pleaded, having obviously decided yelling wasn't working.

"Fuck off" I said, and then I walked around the side of the house and up the steps of the deck.

EPOV

I wasn't quite sure how it all went so wrong so quickly. I had just wanted to talk to Sookie, about the results. Because surely talking about it would help? Communication was the key. I'd learnt that from counselling.

They just hadn't covered what to do when your wife suddenly announces she might want to terminate a pregnancy.

She'd been talking about the kids and all of a sudden it was clear, she didn't want to upset Amelia and Felicia, throw their perfect lives into disarray.

She was picking them, her kids with Bill, over the baby she was going to have with me. And I couldn't do a fucking thing about it. I felt so powerless, and I just lashed out.

And Sookie made it perfectly clear what she thought of me after that. She looked at me like I was something she'd stepped in. Fuck, she was probably regretting ever marrying me, ever letting me into her life. I'd caused her nothing but pain.

She told me to fuck off so I did. I walked back in the house, got my keys and headed to the car. Only once I set off I didn't know where to go. I didn't have anywhere to go. So I just drove around aimlessly. My hand throbbed where I'd hit that fucking shed wall, but it didn't match the way I felt inside.

I'd heard about heart-break before but I hadn't realised it was real. There was a dull ache in my chest and a nasty taste in my mouth. And I was finding it hard to breathe. I drove around and around and eventually I found myself back in our street.

But I wasn't ready to go home yet. I couldn't. So I parked on the street and just tried to think about what to do next.

Well, there was still that liquor store on the corner.

I bought myself some bourbon and headed back to the car. Sookie had made it perfectly clear I wasn't welcome at home anymore. Or maybe it was back to being her house, I didn't fucking know. I sat in the car and took a drink, thinking back to the first time I'd done this. Back when Sookie had been everything I thought I wanted.

She still was though. Even moreso now. There was no changing that.

I drank a bit more. And then I gave up on that as well. It didn't change anything, it wouldn't make the baby better, wouldn't fix what I'd broken, wouldn't take me back in time. It just made me feel worse.

Maybe, I thought, I could take the baby away. If she didn't want it. It was half mine, after all. She couldn't deny that. I could take the baby back to the States and we'd be OK, Sam and I. We'd get by.

But I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I hoped Sookie wouldn't make me choose my baby or my wife. I hoped…well I was just trying to hope for a miracle about now.

I'd lost track of the time completely now. I just put my head on the steering wheel and wished it would all be over soon.

I might have even fallen asleep. Because the knocking on the window, when it came, was fucking loud. I sat up and rolled down the window.

"Get in the house" Sookie said, looking as fucked off as I'd ever seen her.

"What?" I asked, a bit confused. Yeah, I thought, I must have dozed off.

"Get in the house, Eric" Sookie hissed. "You can't sit out here all night. People are noticing."

"They are?" I asked, getting out of the car and locking the door. I followed Sookie's pink bathrobe-clad figure across the street.

"Yes. Andy rang me. He saw you out here when he went to start his shift. I said we'd had a fight and I'd come and talk to you."

"Oh. Oh, I'm surprised."

"Why? Because you've been fucking drinking again?" Sookie gestured to the bottle I was holding. She sighed as she walked in the front door. "I came because I promised. I promised I would always come and get you. And I keep my promises."

"Oh." I wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

"But I nearly didn't" Sookie admitted. "Andy rang about an hour ago. I've been steeling myself to go out there."

I didn't reply I just stood in the hall wondering what happened next. "There's a bed for you on the couch. Goodnight" Sookie said, and then she turned and walked off. I drifted into the living room and sat down on the couch. I guessed I was back to square one then.

SPOV

Sunday morning I woke up and the bed felt very empty. Well, relatively so because Felicia was sitting on my feet. "Daddy's onda couch" she said, looking puzzled.

"Yeah" I said. I wasn't giving her a reason, she was really too little to understand.

"Is he sick?" Amelia asked, as she arrived in the room with me. "Because if he is, Bob might get it, he's asleep on Daddy's chest."

Well, I thought, it was nice that Eric was still in favour with someone. "No, he's not sick. He just…well, we needed some space."

Amelia nodded. "Sharing is nice but sometime's you don't want to" she said. "What's for breakfast?"

"Toast" I said, swinging my legs out of bed.

Amelia looked at me. "Mum" she said. "Mum, you're really fat."

"Uh-huh" I agreed, not really wanting to get into the reasons why with her right at that moment.

I peeked into the living room. Amelia was right. Eric was lying on his back with one hand thrown over the arm of the couch and Bob was balanced rather precariously on Eric's chest. Eric's snores did not seem to be putting Bob off at all.

I sighed and walked back to the kitchen. It would help, I thought, if I didn't feel quite so protective of Eric all the time. Because I wanted to be mad with him, I really did, but it was hard. He'd been stupid but it was a trying time. And I'd kind of blindsided him with that comment.

So when he got up and came shuffling into the family room to join us I did my best to just move on. He was very apologetic and said it would never happen again. I made him promise to ring his counsellor the next day and took a look at the grazes on his hand.

Eric rang Calvin and had to explain what had happened to the garage wall, and then I spoke to Judith and asked for a favour and childminding for the next afternoon. Judith was very sympathetic, but really, I didn't need sympathy. I needed good news.

We took the kids to the park but we were both a bit wary of each other, not really knowing what to say. I was sorry that I'd hurt him, but it was something that needed to be said. Something we needed to discuss anyway, to find out what we thought about it.

I guessed I knew where Eric stood on the matter now though.

Eric made dinner; he cooked salmon on the barbecue. It was popular with the kids. And with Bob who hung about waiting for Felicia to drop bits for him.

I just concentrated on trying to be as normal as possible for the kids, because a lot of what I'd said to Eric was true. I did have a loyalty to them. I was their mother and it was my job to protect them.

It was my job to protect all my children.

EPOV

Sunday was fucking miserable. I'd fucked up in a major way and there was no getting around that fact. Waking up with fucking Bob lying on me was a perfect reminder of just how far I'd fallen the night before.

Sookie thought I was scum. And you couldn't blame her for not being pleased about having a baby with me. A baby that might be defective at that.

I apologised and grovelled as best I could. Sookie said it was all fine, she understood, emotions were running high. I wondered though how much more it would have taken for her to actually leave me in that car all night.

I suspected it wasn't much.

We got through the day though. We got through and we weren't any worse off, although things weren't a lot better. They were tense, and we were cautious around each other.

And I wasn't sure where I was sleeping.

Sookie went to bed and I just kind of followed her. She came out of the bathroom and got in, then turned to me. "It's OK" she said. "You're allowed back."

I stripped down to my underwear and got in behind her.

"Just…just don't ever do that again" she warned me.

"I won't. I was just…scared" I admitted, putting my arm over her. She didn't move away.

"I know. Me too" she said. And then she started sobbing. She cried and she cried and there wasn't anything I could do but just hold her, feeling every shake of her body as she sobbed.

If I thought my heart had broken the night before I'd had no fucking idea. This, this was so much worse. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't make it better for her, and no amount of running away would change it for either of us.

Eventually she ran out of tears, or energy, or both and she stopped. She reached over and grabbed some tissues off the night-stand, blowing her nose in that noisy way she has which sounds a bit like a foghorn.

Then she just relaxed back into the bed. I stroked her back and tried to relax myself. After a while she said in a small voice "I wouldn't you know. Get rid of it. I couldn't."

"I know" I said to her. And I did know. I'd been hurt, and angry and so fucking disappointed and I'd reacted badly. But deep down, deep down I knew. It was Sookie and she took care of us all. And she always would.

**Thanks for reading!**


	43. Chapter 43

**A/N Well done to everyone who made it through the sadness that was yesterday's chapter. Horrible, I know. But there's light at the end of the tunnel, I promise.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Monday dragged, it really did. My appointment was at 3pm and I just wanted to get there.

But first I had to survive a day at home with just Felicia and me. It was…weird. Once upon a time we'd hung out by ourselves all the time when Amelia was at preschool, but then I'd started running Jumping Beans classes, Felicia had gone to daycare herself, and we were out of practice of hanging out together.

More to the point, we were used to Amelia being in charge and telling us all what to do.

Felicia and I had a bit of a rocky start to the day when we stopped to buy groceries on the way back from school and I decided to let her walk beside the trolley, rather than ride in it. Felicia took her promotion to big girl in her stride. Literally. She ran off after about five minutes and I had that heart-stopping moment where I realised my child was nowhere in sight, and then I had a dash through three aisles to recapture her and drag her back to the shopping I'd abandoned.

Still, it was good to keep busy.

Then, when we'd got home and put all the shopping away I tried to interest Felicia in doing some baking with me. Amelia loved baking and often asked to do it on a Monday. Instead Felicia wanted to play with the train set which was all over her bedroom floor. The Thomas the Tank Engine set had been a birthday present, picked by Eric, and it had grown exponentially since then because Eric kept buying extra pieces of track. I really wasn't sure who got the most out of it, the adult who sat there making ever more complicated track designs complete with switches, bridges and multiple engines running back and forth or the two year-old who spent about five minutes watching the trains go around when it was done. It kept them occupied though.

So I did my best with the trains, but it was pretty clear I wasn't Daddy and Felicia gave up and wandered off. Yeah, it wasn't the same with just the two of us.

Felicia drifted outside and was very excited to see Riley in his backyard. "'Iley!" she called cheerfully. "'Iley!" I guessed he'd do in lieu of Amelia. Halleigh appeared and Felicia and I went visiting for a bit. Halleigh kept glancing at my stomach but didn't say anything.

Felicia and I went home so we could have lunch and she could refuse to have a nap. She was a bit hit and miss with her daytime sleeps at the moment and you'd never know when she might sleep for two hours, or she might just bounce on her bed then come out after five minutes.

She did, however, use the potty for me and we celebrated with a lot of high-fiving. Sometimes, I decided, it was nice to focus on just one kid. Normally I'd be trying to get Felicia to go wees, while simultaneously dealing with one of Amelia's dramas as well.

This was pretty easy stuff by comparison.

The day dragged on and at about 2 o'clock I packed Felicia in the car and drove her over to Judith and Calvin's place. We walked into the living room where Jessica was sitting on the floor with some blocks. Felicia sat down next to her and Jessica started scooping blocks towards her in a defensive move. Felicia, though, was used to Amelia and knew the rules of this game, because she started making her own pile of blocks while giggling in a way which was clearly annoying Jessica.

So they were sorted I thought.

"Thanks for this" I said to Judith. "I wouldn't want them hanging around the hospital."

"Yeah, no problem Sookie. I hope it all goes well." Judith patted my arm and looked worried. I wanted to shrug off the sympathy, but I just said "Thanks, Judith." At that point Thomas, who was balanced on Judith's shoulder, let out a large burp. "Guts!" Judith said to him. "You shouldn't guzzle your food."

We both laughed and Thomas sort of blinked at us as though he was wondering what the fuss was about.

I drove home and thought about how I might not be pregnant this time next week, or how I might be pregnant, but wished I wasn't. It was scary, but I was more than ready to do it. I just wanted to get this over with.

EPOV

Almost before I knew it, it was time to go and pick up Sookie and go to the hospital. I'd just spent the day trying to avoid thinking about it all. I just…couldn't anymore. After watching Sookie break down the night before there had been simply too much sadness. I needed…well, I needed something else. Some kind of sign it was going to be OK.

I drove home and Sookie was waiting for me, sitting outside on the steps to the house patting Bob who was standing by her feet, gazing at her adoringly.

I guess he was hungry then.

Sookie walked over to the car and got in. "Hey" I said. "How are you?"

"Oh. Fine." She took a deep breath. "Right, let's do this then!" she said, with a forced smile which was barely a smile at all.

I started the car and drove to the hospital. Sookie told me about the things she and Felicia had been doing, and how she'd run off in the supermarket and seemed a bit lost without Amelia. I half-listened, but mostly I concentrated on all the things I wanted to talk to Russell about when we saw him.

We pulled into the parking lot and it took a while to find a place to actually park the car. Sookie moaned about how there was never any parking at the hospital.

And then on the walk to the place we were going she moaned about how nasty Auckland Hospital was and how far the parking lot was from anywhere. I just followed Sookie as she diligently followed the blue line that would lead us to the elevators.

SPOV

I hated Auckland Hospital, it was really pretty nasty. And cold, always cold. The wind whistled between the buildings and you didn't have much choice but to spend at least part of the time outside as you tried to get from the carpark to the place you were meant to be, by following a wiggly blue line. Even the special children's hospital was a big, cold, empty space.

The ultrasound clinic where we ended up wasn't cold though. It was hot and stuffy and filled to the brim with pregnant women. It appeared that this was also the clinic for the high-risk pregnancies and mothers with diabetes. There were a lot of us waiting here.

I checked in and then tried to read a very old magazine. Eric just sat with his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands clasped together. He looked pensive and withdrawn. Hard to blame him really.

After about fifteen minutes Russell appeared and called me in. Eric and I followed him into a small consultation room with a few chairs and a small table. With a box of tissues on it. That's never a good sign, I thought.

"So" Russell said, sitting down. "Do you have any questions for me?"

"We'll be able to tell the sex from this, won't we?" I knew Tara could from her amnio, but she hadn't wanted to know. I did. I was bad with surprises.

"Yes" Russell said. I looked at Eric, "We're going to do that aren't we?" I checked with him. Eric nodded.

"Anything else? Russell asked. I shook my head, I was good to go. Eric, however, had other ideas.

"So I was reading" Eric said, "that the CVS has a higher chance of miscarriage than an amnio. Wouldn't we be better to do an amnio then?"

Russell shook his head. "It's a very small percentage either way, and because we perform a CVS from 11 weeks onwards you can't tell whether or not some of those women would have had a miscarriage in their first trimester anyway. Personally, I've never had anyone who's miscarried after a CVS."

Eric nodded. And then he carried on with his list of questions. He asked some more about the procedure, and then he started on how high our risk actually was. I was starting to get annoyed with him; I just wanted this over with.

Russell though was very patient, answering everything and trying to reassure Eric. And I guess that's what he wanted, some reassurance that it was all going to be OK. But none of us were getting that at the moment.

"But aren't Down's babies normally smaller than average? And ours is bigger than average? So the likelihood of it being Down's is less, surely?" Eric asked. He had really read everything on the bloody internet, hadn't he? I thought.

Russell smiled at Eric. "Eric, the only way we're going to know for sure now is if we stick a needle in there, so shall we go and do that?" he said kindly.

Eric nodded, looked down at the floor and then stood up to follow Russell and me out of the room. Yeah, I thought, let's go and stick sharp things in Sookie. That'll give everyone something else to think about for a while.

We went into another room, where there was a nurse waiting, and I hopped up on the examination table. Eric was directed to a chair next to me, where he sat, and then he grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. I'm not really sure if the hand-holding was for my benefit or his, but it felt nice anyway.

And then Russell got the ultrasound set up and started looking around in there. The monitor was mounted on the wall and Eric was transfixed, watching it. "Look" he said. "The baby's waving."

I glanced briefly, and then went back to looking at the doorway. I wasn't looking. I wasn't getting attached to it at this point in time.

Russell figured out where the best spot was to take the sample from, and then rubbed the anti-bacterial gel on the side of my tummy. And then he pushed the needle in. Yeah, that hurt. A lot. I gritted my teeth and squeezed Eric's hand. It hurt but I could do this. I'd do this for the baby I was pretending wasn't really there.

"That's a big needle" Eric said, watching it sliding into me in the picture on the monitor.

"Uh-huh" I agreed, through slightly gritted teeth.

Russell took his sample and went off to check it. "Nice and clean" he said. "That should do."

He and the nurse labelled the little test tube that contained part of my placenta. "So" Russell said, "Because it's quite late in the day, I'd think Thursday for your fast results to be back. We'll call you with them anyway."

And then after saying goodbye he left the room to see his next patient, leaving the nurse to find me a bandaid and some paracetamol.

I wasn't allowed to walk back to the carpark. I had to go and sit at the door by the main entrance. It was kind of cold and miserable sitting here, on a cold bench watching taxis driving past and wondering how long until Eric got here.

But as I sat there and sat there something happened. A little bubble of optimism welled up inside me and started getting bigger. It felt like the worst was over. I couldn't explain it, but for some reason, some bizarre reason, I felt OK. Better than that I felt like everything was going to be OK.

Eventually Eric's car appeared and pulled up. "Sorry" he said, getting out to help me in. "Everyone was trying to get out of the parking lot at the same time."

"No worries" I said brightly.

"How are you feeling?" Eric asked me, looking worried.

"A bit sore, but OK. I think I'll live" I smiled at him again.

"Well, let's go home then."

Eric drove us home and then tucked me up in bed with a wheatbag and the TV on. In order to reduce the risk of miscarriage I'd been told to definitely keep off my feet tonight, rest up the next day and then I should be back to normal. Although I was taking Wednesday and Thursday off work, which wasn't easy as it meant Irene would be running the classes alone, but Eric really wasn't keen on me throwing other people's two and three year olds around when I was helping them do forward-rolls. Yeah, so that wasn't happening. And Irene was a bit pissed off that she was stuck without me for three whole days.

That was the trouble though with having your own business. There wasn't necessarily cover for when you needed time off. I figured I'd probably have to do something about that before I had this baby.

And I was. I was having this baby. Barring a disaster like a miscarriage at this stage, I'd have it. And it wouldn't matter what the results were, it would just mean we were prepared. For however it turned out. And I was more than OK with that.

EPOV

I hated being in that fucking hospital. Hated sitting in that little room with Russell while he answered all my questions. I kept asking them, because, well. I hoped there was an angle we hadn't covered, something Russell hadn't thought of yet. Something that was going to make him suddenly realise this was all unnecessary, the baby was actually OK.

But he didn't. Instead we had to go into a dark little room while he stuck a really large needle in Sookie. Which was kind of interesting to watch on the screen and it was preferable to watch that than Sookie's face which was tensed in pain.

The most amazing thing of all though was the baby. Still in there, still wriggling away. Still totally unaware of all the drama that surrounded her. She still looked perfect. She had to be, had to be perfect.

And afterwards I had to make the fucking long trek back to the parking lot to get the car and collect Sookie. The weird thing was when I finally got back to her something had changed. Something inside Sookie. She was happier, somehow. She wasn't shutting me out anymore. She smiled, and it was a real smile. She chatted to me about how difficult it was entertaining Felicia by herself during the day.

I dropped her at home, and made sure she was in bed and then I went to collect Amelia and Felicia.

"Daddy!" Felicia screamed when she saw me. She didn't look like she'd had a bad afternoon at all.

Amelia looked a lot more worried though. "Where's Mum?" she asked.

"At home. She's resting after going to see the doctor."

"Will she be better now?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah, she will" I said. I thanked Calvin and Judith and took the kids off to buy fish and chips for dinner.

It was hard to stop Felicia bouncing all over Sookie when we got back. She was a bit worked up and I was suspicious of what Judith might have been feeding her. "Mummy's sore" Sookie explained.

"Why?" Amelia demanded.

"I, um. Well I had to have an injection. See?" She lifted up her pyjama top and showed them the bandaid on her stomach.

"That's a funny place for an injection" Amelia said. "And you still have a very fat tummy."

Sookie shrugged. "Well, it should work anyway."

I fed the kids, bathed them and put them to bed. Then I followed Sookie's instructions about making Amelia's lunch and making sure she had a clean uniform. Finally I got into bed with Sookie.

"Oh, can you heat up my wheatbag again?" she asked, handing it to me.

"Yeah" I said, getting up in order to go back to the kitchen.

"Oh, and Eric?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's have some ice cream!" Sookie looked at me expectantly.

"But…I thought you couldn't eat anything dairy? Without being sick?" I asked. She wasn't all that keen on ice cream anyway.

"Yeah, I know, but I think I'm over that. Plus, I just really want some. Which is weird. The cookies and cream one."

"Oh, OK." I turned and left the room, and Sookie called "Thank you" at me.

So when I had the re-heated wheatbag and the ice-cream I got into bed with Sookie we watched Dodgeball. It wasn't all that bad an evening really, curled up together like this.

"How do you feel?" I asked her, when the movie was over.

"A bit sore where the needle went in, but not bad. Slightly crampy, but not as bad as period pains. OK really."

She sounded OK, so I let it drop. I didn't know how long this good mood would last for and I didn't want to do anything that might cause it to disappear on me.

We lay down to go to sleep and Sookie actually turned to me and put her head on my chest, snuggling into my side. "You're warm" she said. "Kind of like the wheatbag, but maybe better."

"Only maybe better?"

"Well, definitely better then. The wheatbag didn't get me ice cream."

"It didn't make you feel sick?"

"No. Bizarrely I really liked it. I could have eaten more, but I didn't want to make a pig of myself. Maybe the baby really likes ice cream?"

I wasn't sure what to say. Was it OK to talk about the baby now? We'd been avoiding it all weekend, apart from the incident in the garage where Sookie…yeah, I didn't want to think about that. But now she was talking about it, as if it was definitely coming.

I guessed it was then. "Maybe it does. After all I like ice cream."

"Yeah I know. You were the one that started feeding it to Felicia when she was little."

"Well, she loves it. And it was just mean when she missed out." It was, she looked so sad when she realised she wasn't getting any.

"Phfft. She was fine. You just like the adoring looks you get for handing it over."

"What? It's no worse than you. You love it when Bob's all cuddly for food."

"Yeah, but I don't give him ice cream. Well, once. OK, once I gave him ice cream. He liked it. Hey, did I ever tell you about the time he ate sour cream? That was funny, he kept licking it, but every so often he'd pull this face, like it really wasn't what he expected, but it looked inviting so he kept going."

"He's a fucking weird cat."

"He isn't! He's lovely" she protested.

"It's all just a show you know, Sookie."

"No it's not. Although…he's not going to be happy about another baby. He's taken to sleeping in the cot in the study because it's nice and quiet in there."

"Fucking Bob, nothing is safe from him. Cat fur won't be good for the baby."

"Oh, the baby'll live. Amelia and Felicia did."

"Yeah. I'll just fucking shave him, that's what I'll do."

"Eric! You can't shave Bob!" She poked me in the side and I laughed. "Well you barely shave yourself half the time" Sookie continued. "So I doubt you'll get around to it. Bob's probably safe."

"Yeah, he is" I agreed. I kissed the top of her head. If we could get through the next few days we were all safe. All five of us.

SPOV

Resting at home was booooring. It drove me bananas. Eric kept ringing me to make sure I wasn't doing the laundry or anything, and I wasn't. I wasn't that stupid. We'd got this far, I wasn't risking anything.

But I was bored.

I was excited to see Irene when she turned up in the morning to collect my van which had all the equipment in it, and then really very excited to see her in the afternoon when she brought it back. The feeling might not have been mutual. I think she found it all hard work by herself. And she still had another two days to go.

So I sat around and read a bit, watched some TV. Stayed off my feet. Tried to hang out with Bob but he just wanted to sleep and ignored me.

I was really pleased when Eric arrived home, early, having collected the kids. "So what did you do at school today?" I asked Amelia, cornering her in her bedroom.

"Oh. Stuff" she replied.

"What stuff?" I asked.

"Just stuff. Reading and stuff. And…um, giraffes. We did giraffes."

"You learnt about giraffes? What about them?"

"Oh. They're tall. And they eat leaves. Hey, but Mum?"

"Yeah?"

"My sandwiches were really odd today. Why'd you put that white stuff in them?"

"Oh. Well Daddy made them. Must have been mayonnaise I guess?"

"Yeah, that was weird. I didn't like it. Who puts white stuff with ham sandwiches?"

"Well…Daddy."

"Humph. Tell him not to next time. Oh, don't worry. I'll do it myself. DADDY!" And with that she walked out of the room to berate Eric about the lunch he'd made her.

Eric cooked dinner again, with Amelia stationed next to him to make sure he didn't add anything out of the ordinary to spaghetti bolognaise. I was starting to feel a bit redundant, because really I felt fine. The cramps had gone and the sickness was pretty much gone now too. I was moving into the next stage of the pregnancy and things were looking up.

And I just had to get to Thursday and get my results.

Wednesday morning I was looking for our thesaurus so I could have a go at the crossword in the Herald when the phone rang.

It was the nurse from Russell's practice. "We have your results" she said. I plonked my bottom on the floor. "Everything's fine" she said.

"Fine?" I asked.

"Yes, it's come back negative for Trisomy 13, 18 and Down's. You'll need to wait a week or so for the full results, but everything is otherwise fine."

"OK." I wanted to ask if she was sure, but it seemed a bit rude. And then I remembered something I did want to ask. "Can you tell me the sex of the baby?" I asked.

"Um…" she said. "Boy."

"A boy?"

"Yes. Congratulations!"

I thanked her and hung up the phone. And then I dialled Eric. I barely waited for him to answer before I blurted it out, all in one breath so he couldn't mistake a pause for bad news. "Russell's nurse rang and the baby's fine and it's a boy" I said.

"Fine? All fine?" Eric asked me.

"Yeah. Well, the fast results for the main abnormalities all came back clear. We have to wait for the full ones, but that covers the less common stuff where you have a one in a million chance, or something. Anyway, the stuff that hardly anyone knows about before they have a baby."

"Oh. So…it's really OK?"

"Yeah. _He's_ OK."

"He. Yeah. He." Eric sounded like he was processing all of this.

"Jeez, I should have made a bet with you, because you were wrong on that count! We'll have to start a list of boy's names now. I still like Ryan though. And maybe Austin…no, that doesn't go with Northman. I'll get the book and have a look through anyway." I was rambling a bit, but I was happy. So incredibly happy, like a huge weight had just been lifted off me and I was suddenly floating up to the ceiling. I couldn't stop smiling. This was awesome! "OK, well I'll let you get back to work! See you tonight then!"

"Yeah, see you Sookie" Eric said. I hung up and thought about what I should do next.

EPOV

I really wasn't expecting Sookie's call. We'd been told Thursday for the results and I was prepared for that. Thursday. Not Wednesday.

So when she rang I thought it had to be bad news. Something had happened. She was miscarrying.

But she wasn't. She was OK. And so was he. And he was a he. My son. Fuck.

As happy as I was that the baby was OK, I was now, well I was fucking scared. I hadn't prepared for this; I didn't know how to be a dad to a boy. What if I couldn't do it? What if every fucked up thing my dad had ever done had somehow broken me so I wouldn't be fit to look after a boy? Fuck.

I put my head on my desk and just tried breathing for a bit. This was terrifying. Fucking terrifying.

But also just a little bit wonderful.

**Thanks for reading!**


	44. Chapter 44

**A/N Once again, thanks so much for all the reviews. I really enjoyed hearing what everyone thought about Sookie and Eric's struggles with this pregnancy. A big part of what I enjoy about writing is hearing from you guys. I think it's something a lot of published authors would be jealous of, getting such amazingly prompt response to what they write. So bravo to you!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

After I put the phone down from talking to Eric I wasn't sure what to do. It was really boring being home alone. Possibly the last time I did this…was just before I had Amelia. OK, well maybe a couple of times since then, I thought. I'm sure that Bill had taken Amelia out when she was little. I'd definitely at least once claimed a migraine prevented me from visiting Lorena, but those weren't whole days to kill.

This was a whole day. A really long day. Plus I had good news and kind of wanted to celebrate.

I figured I'd ring Tara, she didn't work Wednesdays and maybe I could go round there. After all, I was just meant to be taking it easy, it didn't really matter whose couch I was sitting on as I took it easy.

"I got my results back" I said, after Tara answered the phone. "Well, the fast ones with the main stuff. All good. And it's a boy."

"Oh that's wonderful!" Tara said, sincerely. "I'm thrilled for you, I really am. I remember when I found out Lachie was OK and I could stop worrying."

"Yeah, I don't know how you managed to wait for so long to have the amnio. I've only had to wait a few days and it killed me."

"Well, it sucked. It really did. The longer it dragged on the worse it got. You were lucky you could do this other test, they never even mentioned it with me."

"Yeah, Russell always seems to be able to sort it all out for me. I was lucky." I was really, really lucky, I thought. "So what are you up to today?"

"Oh, I have to go to a stupid freaking lunch with the other mothers from school. Where they'll all talk about their tennis lessons, and their gardeners and whether or not they should fire the au pair because she can't manage getting three kids to 27 weekly activities. And then they'll try and arrange playdates but they're never able to commit to an actual day because Tarquin's so bloody busy with his swimming and his soccer and his math tuition and his freaking life-drawing class. It's exhausting dealing with them. Especially McKenna. That woman just rubs me the wrong way!"

"Um, OK" I said, hoping Tara felt better now she'd vented. "That doesn't sound like a lot of…fun…" although I wasn't sure, at this point I kind of wanted to go to lunch with someone.

"Yeah, it's not. What are they like at Amelia's school?"

"Oh. Well I haven't spoken to a lot yet. I know Becs, Maisie's mum, because the girls were at pre-school together, but otherwise, I haven't hung around the school gates enough I guess. Friday though we're supposed to go for drinks and meet the teacher."

"Well, you'll find out then. God, I hope they're not worse than this bunch. It's hard being the poorest person there." Tara wasn't exactly poor, but she lived in a very wealthy suburb in a street filled with lawyers, CEOs and the odd TV personality. So it was all comparative I guessed.

"You have a pool now" I reminded her.

"Yeah, it's the smallest pool in the street Sookie. The people behind us have a pool _and_ a tennis court."

I gave up trying to help. "Well, have a nice time then" I said.

"Yeah, I'll try" Tara said. "Congrats again though, and good luck thinking of a name!"

"Oh yeah, we'll have to start a list. Well I would, but Eric's put the baby name book somewhere and I can't find it." I wondered where it had gone. Perhaps I should check the drawers in his bedside table I thought.

"Well if you need it, you can borrow mine."

"Cheers. OK, bye then!"

"Bye."

The phone went silent and I was stuck by myself again. That wasn't so much fun. I dialled Judith's number but there was no answer at all. She'd gone out. I guessed with two kids she probably hadn't gone far, but it was far enough.

I wondered if she'd gone to St Luke's and whether I could go there and find her. Perhaps if I tried her cellphone I could reach her, I thought. But it seemed a bit stalker-ish and desperate.

I briefly considered going to see Eric, he was only 5 minutes up the road after all, but he probably didn't need the interruption.

I sat there for a bit longer and then I remembered that Pumpkin Patch was having a 30% off everything sale. I could go to the big store on Manukau Road, I thought, and then buy lunch at the cakeshop just along from it.

Yeah, that sounded like a plan.

So I got myself ready and headed out in the car, and parked behind the shop. I thought that maybe I could look for some winter maternity clothes as I'd always been at my biggest during summer, so I didn't have a lot.

And it was nice to be out of the house.

So I browsed around and found a couple of tops, a tunic and some leggings. And then I looked at the girl's clothes and found a skirt and top for Amelia. I thought that maybe Felicia should get something too, granted we had a lot of stuff that was being handed down, but she probably deserved the odd new thing. I was feeling in a bit of a generous mood.

So I browsed a bit more and picked out a pale-blue velour tracksuit which had Sweetie written across the pants in big pink letters. It was the kind of thing you could get away with when you were 2 and had a tiny little bottom, which looked even tinier now it wasn't wrapped in a nappy. I would have died rather than wear anything like that. My bum didn't need the extra advertising.

And then slowly, I started drifting towards the babies' clothes. More specifically, the baby boy clothes. I hadn't bought boy's clothes before. Well, apart from the stuff Felicia had picked out for herself.

It was all very cute. Little tiny versions of the kind of stuff Eric wore, which probably wasn't practical for a newborn I decided. I went to look at the bodysuits and all-in-ones. There was stuff on sale, which would be even cheaper when they took the extra discount off at the cash register.

I'd be mad not to buy something.

I picked out a couple of bodysuits with a dinosaur print on them. They were cute. And then I picked up the matching hat and bootees. Put them down again. And picked them up once more. They were pretty cheap. And I probably wasn't going to put my son in a lot of the girl's stuff I had stored away.

So holding my armful of purchases for almost the entire family I wandered over to the counter. It was pretty empty in here in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday. So I had a nice chat to the woman serving me about how much you pop out the third time around and how weird it was to be buying boys' clothes after having two girls.

It was nice to be properly, publicly pregnant.

Next I wandered down the street to the Eve's Pantry that was a few doors' down. I sized up my choices in the cabinets and ordered a couple of vegetarian club sandwiches and a sausage roll. I looked longingly at the doughnuts filled with cream and custard but I knew I couldn't have one.

And I really didn't mind.

Almost automatically I asked the guy serving me if they had any potato-top pies left. They did.

I'd just drop lunch off to Eric, I decided. And not hang around. So I took the pie. And a beef filled roll.

EPOV

About 15 minutes after I got off the phone with Sookie I started to feel a bit better about the whole thing. The baby was OK. That was the most important thing. I could stop worrying about what relatives I had lurking in my family tree. What we needed though, was a bigger house.

And that required a plan.

I'd been looking on the internet for a while to see what the real estate market was like. I figured Sookie would want to stay in the same area, especially now Amelia was in school, and to be honest, I didn't know enough about the alternatives to suggest anything else. So Mt Eden it was.

I'd spoken to a realtor and had the house appraised a few weeks ago, one day when Sookie was at work. I didn't want her to think I was selling the house out from underneath her. Really, it was just research. But it gave me an idea of how much we could get for it.

Not as much as we'd have to spend on something bigger of course. We already had four bedrooms, even if one of them was barely a room. But we needed another bedroom for the new baby…well, for Sam. I kind of liked that name. I thought we'd stick with it. So Sam needed a room and then I still really wanted somewhere to work at home, somewhere that was maybe Bob-proof.

Although I guessed I'd still have to share it with Jason when he came to stay. He shed less than Bob, but he was a lot more annoying.

So I was scrolling through a bunch of real estate websites looking for any properties that looked promising and Sookie caught me by surprise when she walked in.

"Hi" she said, as she came through the door. I looked up. "Oh" I said, "What are you doing here?"

She rolled her eyes. "Bringing you lunch. Because I bet you didn't make yourself any."

I shrugged. I was over making lunches after I'd made Amelia's the night before. I'd been lectured about the mayonnaise I'd used at such great length that I was almost afraid to try again. In the end I'd settled for peanut butter and jam figuring that was a lot safer.

Sookie walked over to my desk and started putting the bags with the food down. I realised that I still had the details of a 5 bedroom villa in View Road up on the computer monitor. I quickly closed the screen.

Sookie noticed my movement and looked at me. "Getting rid of the porn, were we?" she asked.

"Well I don't need it now you're here, do I?" I asked her.

"Yeah, shut up and eat your pie, Eric."

"Aw, you mean this isn't a booty call?" I asked, taking a bite of the pie before she decided I didn't deserve it. I was fucking hungry.

"Yeah, you wish!" Sookie said, biting into one of those stupid sandwiches she always gets which are about two mouthfuls and cost $3 each.

I did kind of wish really. It had been a long time since we'd had sex. But it was probably going to be a bit longer because we had to wait a few more days to really make sure that nothing happened with the baby. And then, well, then it was up to Sookie really.

It suddenly felt a bit awkward and we looked down at our food. Sookie broke the silence. "So I feel better, do you?"

"Yeah" I agreed, "I do." Apart from the freaking out about having a son I did feel a lot better.

"I feel kind of stupid now, though. For being so upset over the whole thing. When it was nothing in the end. I just didn't know that. I feel…" Sookie trailed off, and thought for a moment. "I feel like I should have had more faith in…something…anything. I feel like I should have always felt it was going to be OK."

I thought for a minute. "But we didn't know, so you couldn't" I said in the end.

"Yeah…I guess. It's weird the change a day makes though, isn't it?"

"Yep." I finished my pie and looked in some of the other bags, and spied a roast beef sub. "This mine?" I asked.

Sookie nodded yes, as her mouth was full. "Can't eat deli meats, remember?" she said when she'd swallowed. "For about another 26 weeks. So that sucks."

"It does" I agreed. It was a good sub, so I did kind of feel for her.

"But I don't mind so much now" she added.

We finished the rest of the food and then I popped out to the café next door to buy coffees while Sookie cleaned up the wrappers from our lunch. The girl who served me knew me as I was in here every day. "Two flat whites" I ordered. "One decaf. My wife's pregnant." It felt really good to say it.

"Congratulations" she said, smiling at me, and then I moved down to wait for the order.

When I got back to the office Sookie had stolen my chair, but thankfully didn't seem to poking around on the computer. "You know" she said, as I handed her the coffee, "You should probably get your own coffeemaker. You must be spending a fortune in that place buying coffees all the time."

I sat down in the guest chair and shook my head. "No, I've got an arrangement. I pay a flat rate per week for as much coffee as I like. They're a new business so they were happy to have the regular income flowing in."

"Probably because they think you'll buy muffins in there as well."

"Probably. But I seem to get a fair few of those from home."

"Yeah, except for this week. Felicia is not as keen on helping me bake as Amelia was. I guess she's still quite little though and it doesn't have the appeal."

"I think half the appeal for Amelia was covering everything in a thick layer of sprinkles."

"Yep, cupcakes should always crunch when you bite into them" Sookie said, laughing. She sipped her coffee. "Ooh, I went shopping before I came here. I'll show you what I got."

"I thought you were supposed to be taking it easy?" I asked her. I really didn't want her overdoing it now and having anything go wrong, it would be…well, it wasn't something I wanted to think about. I was just fucking glad I'd got her to stay home from work for these two days. She'd started talking about going back the next day because she was worried Irene wasn't coping by herself, but I'd told her not to be so fucking stupid.

She'd huffed, and pouted at that, but she'd stopped arguing.

Sookie pulled out a plastic bag that was sitting on the floor next to her handbag and started pulling out…clothes. "So I got this top for me…and this one. And these leggings. It was all 30% off so I thought I should probably get some stuff now while it was cheaper and before it goes, there isn't a lot of maternity stuff around so if you wait too long you might miss out. Especially on the popular sizes. And then I got…this for Amelia. I wanted to buy her some jeans but I bought her some last year and she wore them once, and that was under sufferance. The saving grace there is that I know they'll be handed down to Felicia and she will wear them. Speaking of Felicia I got her a tracksuit…" Sookie dug around in the bag again and I briefly wondered if she was trying to make up for the previous few days of silences. It was nice though, when she was chatting away like this.

"It's cute isn't it?" Sookie said, holding up something blue. "I mean, the writing on the bum is a bit much, but I think she can get away with it because she's so little and cute. I couldn't. Oh, and there was one more thing…" She reached into the bag again. "Look." She put something small in front of me.

I looked at what she'd put there. "Is that for…?"

"The baby, yeah. Well, I'd never bought boy's clothes before. Not baby stuff, anyway. Look, it's got tiny dinosaurs on it! How cute is that? I'm only used to butterflies and flowers and fairies now. But see, I got the ones that open right up, like a wraparound so they're easier to put the baby in, because getting stuff over their heads is hard, they're all bendy and floppy and no help at all. You think it's bad when Felicia pitches a fit, but honestly newborns are worse. They're all crumpled and they haven't unfurled properly. And look! I got the hat and bootees too. It was all pretty cheap."

Sookie put more tiny pieces of fabric in front of me and looked at me expectantly, kind of like Bob does when he's brought in a skink or maybe more like Felicia when she's used the potty. Anyway, it was clear I was expected to do or say something at this point. I took another mouthful of coffee.

One thing I was sure of. I had no intention of fucking dressing anything that was small enough to fit in those clothes.

I looked at Sookie who was still smiling at me expectantly. "I like the dinosaurs" I said.

"Yeah, I thought they were cool." She picked up the tiny clothes and looked at them like she wanted to cuddle them, she stroked them a few times, and then she put them back in the bag.

We sipped our coffees in silence for a bit and then Sookie put her cup down on the desk. "Well" she said. "I guess I should get going and leave you to it." She didn't move though. She just sat there.

"Yeah" I said. "I should really get back to work."

Sookie stayed put and it was kind of hard to get anything done when she was in my seat. "Hey" she said, "Do you know where the baby name book is? I wanted to start a list."

"Um. I'll have a look at home."

"OK." Sookie still just sat there.

"So…I take it you don't really want to go?" I asked her.

"No! It's boring and I'm lonely! Honestly, I never thought I'd be so pleased to just have Amelia talk at me for a little bit. Plus if I stay here a bit longer I'll miss Irene dropping the van off. She'll be grumpy. Oh and then it will be almost time for school pickup. So I could just stay here for a bit longer?" She looked at me hopefully, with exactly the same expression as both the kids wore when they wanted me to say yes to something. "I'll go and get muffins from that café." she added, trying to sweeten the deal.

"Oh, yeah. Fine. But you have to give me back my chair."

Sookie let out an exaggerated sigh. "Fine! But I kind of like this one. It's nicer. That seat hurts my back."

"Look, if I promise to switch the actual chairs over, can I at least get back to sitting on the correct side of the desk?"

"Yeah, if you want. If you're going to be all bossy about it. Right, I'm off to get muffins then. Any preferences?" Sookie stood up and took her purse out of her bag.

"No, whatever is fine" I said, moving the chairs around.

Sookie disappeared and I sat at my desk and worked for a bit, first closing down the website with the house listings I was looking at before Sookie arrived back and got nosy. I'd deal with that later.

And she did appear after about 10 minutes carrying a white paper bag and some very dog-eared magazines. "I got blueberry and chocolate, so I thought we could have half each, OK?" she asked.

"Fine."

"They let me borrow some magazines too; I said I was just over here. They know you. They also knew I was pregnant, well, the girl serving did. Did you tell them?" Sookie looked up from breaking the muffins apart on the desk.

"Oh. Only when I went over earlier. I guess it's fresh in her mind."

"Yeah, probably" she took a bite of muffin. "It's nice to tell people though, isn't it?"

I nodded. Sookie continued eating. "The blueberry muffin's a bit dry" she said.

"Mmm" I agreed, trying to make some changes to the presentation I was working on.

"See I always put a mashed banana in mine that makes a huge difference" she added.

"Uh-huh."

"OK. I'll shut up now and read my magazine." It was silent for a bit apart from the flipping of pages. "What do you think of Eamonn for a name?" Sookie asked. I didn't answer and she just went on "But it's got the 'n' sound at the end. That doesn't work so well. Why do all the boys names end in N?" She sighed. "No wonder you got Eric. What about Michael?"

"S'alright."

"Yeah, that's what I would have been if I'd been a boy. Like Jason wanted me to be."

"I might have been disappointed though."

"Yeah, but I didn't live with you for the first 15 of years of my life. Jason kind of thought I'd let him down somehow by being female and wasn't above punishing me for it. OK, how about James? Jamie's kind of cute."

I realised I wasn't going to get much done this afternoon. "I like Sam" I said.

"Mmm" Sookie said, scrunching her face up. "It's OK. I guess Samuel is alright. I don't hate it. We'll add it to the list and come up with some others. How about Oliver?"

"Didn't you want to name a cat Oliver?"

"Yeah, cat, person, same thing."

"Not the same thing Sookie, look at poor Bob and the name he ended up with."

"What's wrong with Bob?"

"It sounds like someone's uncle or something."

"Oh, it does not. Bob's a great name, its short when you have to call him, and they can spell it when you go to the vet's. He's not named after anything really obvious. I thought it was a brilliant name."

Sookie looked at me, and I just looked back at the monitor. She was kind of confirming my suspicions though; she really sucked at naming things. It would just be better to stick with Sam. It had grown on me. And it worked for a boy too.

SPOV

I had a pretty good time hanging out with Eric. It was a lot better than sitting at home staring at the walls. And it was kind of a celebration. With muffins, although they weren't as good as the ones I made, I was sure of that. And I was pretty sure Eric thought so too.

I couldn't stop smiling though, the whole time I was with Eric. And talking. I was so, so happy. It was just nice to sit there and share it with him. Most of the time he looked happy too. Sometimes he frowned a bit, but I think he was concentrating on work. Or annoyed by the talking. I decided I didn't care either way.

When it was just about time to go and get Felicia I said goodbye to Eric and returned the magazines to the nice girl at the café. It was kind of quiet in that café, so it was no wonder they were happy taking Eric's up-front coffee payment every week.

Then I drove to daycare and picked up Felicia, where the only problem was that it took us a while to find Sockie, who'd ended up in someone else's cubbyhole. There was a spare Sockie at home, of course, waiting to sub in if required, but I tried to make sure we kept the two of them because I doubted I could replace them now. She'd notice a new sock, even if I did get Eric to wear it a few times first.

Next it was school. This was still a bit scary for me; it seemed really grown-up to have a child at school. This was a ridiculous thing to think at 35 but they say you never really feel your age. I still felt like a fraud as an adult. I just hoped Amelia's real mother turned up soon to take over.

Felicia was still a bit apprehensive about school too. I could see that she wanted to like it, that she thought it looked like fun, but the big kids, and some of those 10 year olds were nearly as tall as me, were a bit scary. And there were a lot of them. It was vastly different to daycare. But she had another 3 years before she was due to start so by then I worked out we would have done so many pick-ups that she'd probably want to walk there by herself on her first day.

OK, that made me sad.

I saw Maisie's mum, Becs, near the entrance to their classroom and went to stand beside her. "Hi!" I said, happy to see someone I knew. She was chatting to some other mums and I figured I should be a little bit sociable.

"Oh, hi Sookie. How's it all going?"

"Great, great." I took a big breath. "I have news" I said. "I'm pregnant. Due in October. It's a boy."

"Oh. Oh, that's wonderful! Congratulations!" Becs said. "You're brave though, going for three."

I shrugged. "Well, you know. We think we'll be OK. Fingers crossed."

"You will" said another mum I didn't know. "It was hard at first, but pretty soon you're through that bit. I still think I might like a fourth but my husband says no."

I grimaced. "Yeah, I don't think I'll be going that far" I said.

"Oh, while you're here Sookie" Becs said, turning to me "I should introduce you to the woman who's organising this class."

"Organising?" I guessed this was the 'class mum' thing Tara was always on about.

"Yeah, she's going to do some social events and stuff for us. Getting to know each other. So she'll be there on Friday at the meet the teacher." Becs looked over my shoulder and waved at someone.

"Yes, Becs?" said a voice behind me. I turned around. "Sookie" Becs said. "This is Debbie. Debbie Pelt."

Yeah, it had been a brilliant day up until that point.

**A/N Manukau is pronounced Man-oo-cow. Bodysuits and all-in-ones are what we call onesies and sleepsuits.**

**And if you were wondering about Sookie being competitive about her muffins, we take baking very seriously here. Tonight the new series of 'New Zealand's Hottest Home Baker' started. Yeah, they compete baking cupcakes and Pavlovas. We like to bake. And we're pretty convinced we're good at it!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	45. Chapter 45

**A/N Back again! Thanks again for all the review and the alerts, it's lovely to see that there are still people joining in with this story and enjoying it enough to want to keep up with it.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

"Oh" I said, watching my little bubble of happiness float away into the sky. "Hi Debbie. Nice to see you again."

Debbie looked at me like she was trying to place me. "Oh" she said in the end. "Yes, Sookie. I haven't seen you in…ages." She didn't look upset at that fact.

"Yeah" I said. "I've been kind of busy, plus…" I trailed off, biting back the words 'you made all the ante-natal group get-togethers bloody miserable'. I'd been sent some emails inviting me to stuff, but I'd begged off. And then they stopped sending them.

"Oh. Well, yes of course" Debbie said. "Your husband died. That must have been hard for you. Especially because of the drugs." She looked at me, as did everyone else standing there. Becs would have known about Bill dying, but I'm not sure she knew the other part. If she did, she was far too polite to bring it up.

"I haven't really seen you since the funeral" Debbie continued on. "How _are_ you doing, Sookie?" She did her best to look sincere and consoling.

"Oh, um…" I said, feeling suddenly really, really interested in exactly what Felicia was doing over by the sandpit. "Well, you know." I looked up at Debbie and thought, fuck it, what does she know? "I'm actually OK, thanks. I'm having another baby." Debbie pursed her lips. "With my new partner, Eric" I added, just in case anyone thought I was knocked up by a random stranger, which, given my obvious propensity for marrying accident-prone drug addicts, I guess they couldn't necessarily discount as a possibility.

Debbie just looked at me. "Eric?" she said, rather than the usual congratulations. Perhaps, I thought, it rang a bell.

"Um, you met him once" I tried. "At the zoo. Remember we bumped into you guys as we were leaving?"

I could see Debbie make the connection. But it would have been nicer if she'd not said what popped into her head next. "Oh yes. That was just after the funeral, wasn't it? You were with that young guy in the baseball cap."

I wanted to say that no, it was actually a good 8 months later, and I hadn't dragged some teenager away from his Playstation, but really, from the way the other women were now looking at me I might as well have been wearing a t-shirt which read Slutty Slutty Slut-Pants. I half expected them to start chanting it at me at any moment. It was like being back in school myself.

And it was horrible.

I snuck a few looks at the faces of the other mums and it was pretty obvious I was now _that_ mother. The one who got herself knocked up by multiple, loser partners. I sighed, and suddenly felt very sorry for every bad thought I'd ever had about Bill's sister Sarah. Jeez, it really sucked being her.

Although she was quite plainly pretty dumb.

Trying to change the subject I turned to Debbie. "Uh-huh. So um, I didn't realise you lived anywhere round here."

"Oh. Well. We moved" she said, airily. "We wanted Sebastian to go to Grammar like his father did, so we bought in-zone for there, and, well…here." She looked at the school buildings dismissively. I tried to remember what the hell her husband was called and drew a blank. But he did look like a Grammar boy.

"Isn't it a little early to start thinking about high schools?" I asked her, feeling like maybe she should be put on the spot too. Everyone else around us was still pretty intrigued by this exchange. Maybe they were hoping for some more good gossip on me, I don't know.

"Oh, no Sookie! The Grammar zone is just increasing in value exponentially all the time. I mean, our property in Westmere was a great investment, but the high school zone…well, we would have gone private. Whatever the cost of course I would have done the best I can for Sebastian, because you can with just one, can't you?" She eyed my stomach warily. "And I think it's so important for them to have stability in their lives. No major changes. So we've moved now while Sebastian's still young enough to cope with it all and then, well, he's a got a chance to grow and thrive without being pushed and pulled in all directions. It's bad enough for kids these days, isn't it? With all that pressure from the outside world. They don't need anything…well, anything too dramatic going on at home, do they?"

Everyone else nodded along with Debbie and I shut up and went back to watching Felicia stare down another toddler who'd come to retrieve an older sibling. I said a silent prayer that she wouldn't bite anyone, because God knows, I didn't need to look like my kids were feral at this point in time. Someone might call CYFS.

And then the bell rang. There was a minute of silence and then a horde of small children poured out of the room looking for their mums, or dads or nannies. Amelia's head appeared in the crowd and made a bee-line for me. "Where's Leesha?" she demanded, by way of a greeting.

"Over there" I said, pointing to where Felicia was walking along the little stone ledge beside a garden.

Amelia sighed. "You're not allowed to go into the gardens. Aargh. I'll have to go and tell her." She dropped her bag on my foot and ran off before I could point out that Felicia wasn't anywhere near the actual plants and I could hear her telling Felicia "Leesha, not in the garden!"

Debbie leaned over to me. "She's very responsible, isn't she?" she said. "I guess she's had to be, poor love." I opened and closed my mouth, not really sure what to say to that, but then Debbie was distracted by Sebastian's arrival at her side. He'd obviously dawdled out of the classroom at a snail's pace. "Sebastian, love" Debbie cried enthusiastically. "How was your day? Tell Mummy all about it."

Sebastian shrugged, and mumbled something that might have been about giraffes. Or it might not.

Debbie beamed at him anyway. "Well, we need to get going to swimming now. I guess you'll be going home. Bye Sookie!" and with that she was off, dragging Sebastian along in her wake.

I didn't bother trying to talk to anyone else after that. I said a quick goodbye to Becs who was busy looking through Maisie's lunchbox to see if there was anything left to eat, and then I went to retrieve Amelia and Felicia. Bloody Debbie Pelt.

EPOV

After Sookie finally left I kind of lost the impetus for working. I had too much on my mind to concentrate.

I left the office and went for a walk up to the Village instead. The whole house situation was weighing on my mind. Now that the baby was really going to be here in about 6 months I wanted to be doing something. I felt like I should be doing something anyway.

So I looked in the windows of the realtors' offices at the listings they had displayed. Nothing looked promising. I walked into one and talked to the woman who'd appraised our house. She tried pushing me to list with her again, promising lots of interested buyers, but she couldn't find me anything suitable as a replacement. And fuck knows I wasn't about to have the whole family out on the street while we were between properties.

She promised to tell me if she had any new houses come through and I left again. I still needed to figure out how to get Sookie a new car. Maybe I'd talk to her about that first, I thought.

And, as I unlocked the door to my office and walked back inside, I wondered if we'd need anything for the baby. Anything other than fucking tiny outfits, which Sookie seemed to have covered. I guessed that Sookie had some baby stuff…but, fuck. It was probably in the roof space, in badly labelled cardboard boxes that were also housing Bob's rat farm.

Maybe, I thought, we could buy new things.

But all this thinking and planning was really just a way to take my mind off the fact I had to go and see my counsellor that night. I really fucking hated going. I knew I was supposed to like it, to see it as my chance to grow and change and be a better fucking person, but I really hated talking about myself. Really fucking hated it. I still wasn't convinced that I wasn't a complete fuck-up who shouldn't be in a relationship, I really wasn't. And the more I had to talk about my actions, well, fuck. Even to me they sounded pretty bad.

I sat down at my desk and looked at the computer screen, wondering if it was going to be possible to get any more work done today. I gave up the pretence and sat staring at the wall instead. The problem, I decided, was that I really didn't want to be that guy. The one that ran away from everything. The one who drank. And it didn't really matter how much I justified it by saying that I hadn't run in months, or that I barely even drank this time.

I still fucking did it.

And when I thought about that night, which now seemed so fucking long ago but wasn't really, the worst part…the fucking worst part of it all was why I was so fucking upset in the first place. I'd thought it was life or death.

And I hadn't stayed to protect him.

I was officially the worst father ever. And the poor kid hadn't even fucking been born yet. I wasn't just as bad as Stan; I was as bad as both of them, my Mom and Dad. Combined. I was a fucking disaster waiting to happen.

So I sat there miserably going over it all in my head, steeling myself for when I had to front up with the counsellor and confess that I was nothing but low-life loser scum until my phone buzzed with a reminder, telling me it was time to leave.

And I did. Because if Sookie was going to keep her promises, I was going to keep mine.

SPOV

Luckily, neither of the kids noticed I was kind of quiet after we left school. I don't know why I always let Debbie annoy me like that. Or quite how she managed to turn everything she said to me into some kind of sly dig. I knew I shouldn't let her get to me, but the problem was she did. And even if I put into practice all those tricks I tried to learn in school, thinking that she was probably lonely, and sour and just jealous of the fact that I had three kids, or something like that, it didn't make any difference.

I still felt crappy.

And I didn't even have anyone to commiserate with or to share the story with because Eric had a counselling session. It seemed kind of redundant, given this morning's news, but when he rang on Monday it was the first appointment he could get and at the time it seemed kind of urgent.

Right now though I was inclined to just gloss over the whole fact he'd punched a wall and taken off and much more interested in having him here so I could tell him about Debbie.

Instead I had two small children who wanted to celebrate the fact they hadn't seen each other all day by arguing constantly. I was trying to cook dinner while listening to Amelia yell "No! Felicia, that's not right! That's not where the baby sleeps!" And Felicia yell "Nuh, nuh, nuh! Amala! Gissa bubba!"

I sliced some chicken breast and tried to remember why I'd thought three kids was a good idea. Maybe Debbie was onto something with the only child thing. I tried to picture what it would be like if I just had Amelia, but all I got was a clear image of her standing next to me in the kitchen telling me exactly what to do while I was making the sauce for the chicken.

Yeah, maybe two was better. And three, well. Maybe they'd stop fighting when they had a brother to poke instead.

And I really wanted to tell them now, especially when I served up our dinner and Amelia looked at my plate and said "Mum, is all that food good for you? Some foods aren't good and they make you fat if you eat lots. We learnt that in school."

But I thought it would be nicer to tell them when Eric was here, so all I did was say "I'll be fine Amelia. This isn't bad food, I made it."

Amelia poked her chicken. "I don't know if I like it" she said.

"Daddy says you do" I tried.

"Daddy?" asked Felicia, cocking her head to the side to listen for the sound of Eric coming through the door.

"He'll be home later. After you're in bed" I said to them, and Felicia pulled a sad face at me.

"Well, how does he know I like this?" Amelia argued.

"He just does. He told me before" I replied. Amelia looked at me suspiciously, like she thought I might be lying and I hadn't really checked with Eric to ensure that everything was going to be to Amelia's tastes before I planned my menu, so I just busied myself eating. In the end Amelia decided she might as well eat her dinner and Felicia tried wearing some of hers in her hair, before making a pattern with the sauce on the tablemat.

I really missed Eric after dinner when I had to get the pair of them clean and into bed. I was feeling a bit less tired now, but even so, I wasn't really up to dealing with bathtime and then having to go back to making Amelia's school lunch and checking her uniform was clean. It wasn't of course.

I'd just got as far as packing up the toys in the family room when Eric came home. Well, when he came into the house anyway. I was pretty sure his car had pulled up a bit beforehand but he usually sat out there and…processed, I guess. He needed the time to work it all through.

It seemed like the least I could do for him.

He walked into the family room and crouched down to kiss me, before sitting next to me on the floor. "How was it?" I asked. I was never sure what to ask about these sessions, but I felt I should show some interest.

"OK" Eric said thoughtfully, and I realised that was probably all I was going to get out of him. "How were the kids?" he asked me.

"Alright, apart from the usual squabbling, Amelia's refusal to eat dinner, and Felicia's desire to finger-paint with it."

"So pretty standard then."

"Yeah. Tomorrow though, I think we need to tell the kids about the baby. Amelia's getting really suspicious. And tried to put me on a diet tonight, she probably got that idea from Lorena. I actually wonder if she suspects, because by a weird coincidence she decided that they were playing babies tonight, which is why I'm stuck here folding up doll's clothes."

"Oh, OK" Eric said, frowning at the pile of clothes I was folding. "I was kind of worried they were for the baby."

"Yeah, nah. These are even smaller than that. Most of them belonged to my dolls, Gran made them. See? This one…" I laid out a little orange chenille dressing gown, "…was made from my dressing gown when I outgrew it. And this nightie was mine, but I got plum juice all down the front of it and it couldn't be salvaged. I think blue nylon is probably not particularly stain-resistant. So Gran cut it up and remade it for Amy. She was my doll. And these two…" I laid out a couple of a-line dresses in matching fabrics, one was blue with a pattern of red strawberries, the other red with the same pattern in yellow strawberries, "…were made from off-cuts from dresses Gran made me. Only mine had really big white vinyl Peter Pan-style collars. Very stylish. In the 1970's anyway."

I looked at Eric and he was just staring at the clothes. "Huh" he said in the end. "So, uh, you kept all of these? All these years?"

"Yeah, they ended up in a box somewhere, like most of my stuff" I smiled at Eric. He hated having to find things in the roof. "And then when I had Amelia, I pulled out all the toys and things she might want."

Eric fingered the dressing gown and thought for a bit. "I don't have anything" he said.

"What?" I asked, packing the rest of the clothes away in their storage container and holding out my hand for the dressing gown.

"I don't have anything to, uh, pass on…" he said, handing it to me.

"Oh" I said. Shit, I'd probably really bummed him out and he hadn't looked that great when he walked in the door. "I don't think it really matters" I said. "I mean, it's just a bunch of doll's clothes."

"It's more than that though, isn't it Sookie? I mean, they're all connected to you in some way." He was right, they were. I did kind of like the memories they all evoked. Apart from marvelling at the bad fashion moments I'd lived through it took me back to a time and a place I loved to visit. I could so clearly remember sitting at the dining room table of my parent's place, with the early evening sun coming in the windows, eating my plum and grinning at Jason who was doing the same. I could remember how our competition to see who could eat the fastest had ended up with me covered in juice, and how Mum had come in and tutted, and changed my nightie before I'd gone to bed in my little room which was stinking hot, because it only ever got afternoon sun and I'd looked at the wallpaper with it's shiny blue flowers and cuddled Amy and fallen asleep, secure in the knowledge that my parents were just out there. I could probably even hear them making that celebratory cup of tea they always did when Jason and I were finally safe in our rooms for the night. I thought they'd always be just there.

And then they weren't.

I wasn't sure what to say to Eric. I didn't want this evening to turn sad. Despite Debbie's attempts to derail me this afternoon, I was still feeling pretty good. And, as much as I missed my parents and felt sad at the thought of them, it was a sadness I'd had for a long time now. It wasn't getting any better, but it wasn't getting any worse.

I put the lid on the storage box and looked at Eric. "I feel like I should have something…to pass on to…him" Eric said, looking as though he was struggling to grasp the concept of the baby being a boy. "Like, you know, a baseball glove or something."

I got up on my knees and shuffled over to Eric, before rather awkwardly climbing into his lap. He put his arms around me and held me against him. "I don't think the things matter. I don't think Amelia gives two hoots about the legacy these clothes have. She doesn't even really know. I think all that matters is you, and what you do once he's born. That's the important stuff, the future, not the past. OK?" I looked up at Eric, and watched his face change as he obviously resolved to move on. "OK" he agreed, kissing my head.

"Plus" I added, climbing off him so we could both stand up, "A baseball glove would be totally redundant here. But it's OK; he can have my cricket bat!"

Eric muttered "Fuck!" as he stood up, but he was smiling as he said it. "Yeah, I guess you're right" he said.

"Well, go and get changed" I said to him, "I'll get your dinner out of the oven."

EPOV

I felt kind of empty after the session. It didn't matter how many times we went over the same old shit, and tried to come up with strategies to help me cope with stress, or ways to communicate my feelings better or any of the other shit we did, there was a part of me that just ended up hating myself more by the time we'd re-hashed everything. So I left, with promises to return and perhaps bring Sookie back again and I drove home and I sat in the car and I contemplated whether or not I should go inside or whether they were better off without me.

I guess it was a measure that we were making some progress in that it took me less and less time these days to decide I'd risk going in. Because although the counselling helped a small amount, really, it was Sookie. Sookie made it better. She might yell at me from time to time, but she didn't hold a grudge, she didn't tell me that because I'd fucked up this time she couldn't trust me anymore.

And if she had faith in me, well. I guess I could at least try to have faith in myself.

So I sat in my car, with Bob watching me from his spot on the wall, probably ready to do some kind of happy-dance if I did just reverse out of the driveway, and I talked myself into going inside.

It was worth it, it always was. Sookie looked happy to see me. She was putting away some of Amelia's stuff and she ended up telling me the story behind all the clothes Amelia's dolls wore.

It brought home just how little I had to offer my kids. All I came with were some fucking huge demons, and, if Sookie was to be believed, a weird accent. But she didn't seem to mind. She still seemed to be in the same good mood she was when we had lunch, teasing me about having to play cricket and fetching me dinner.

Maybe Sam wouldn't mind either.

SPOV

It was nice to have Eric back home so I could finally tell someone about Debbie. I sat down at the table with him while he ate. "So, guess who I saw at school today?" I said, but then I realised he probably had no hope of getting it, so I carried on. "Debbie Pelt!"

Eric looked blank and just took another mouthful. "Who?" he asked with his mouth full. He was just lucky Amelia was in bed and not around to tell him off.

"Um. She was in my ante-natal class coffee group. She's…well, she's a bitch. You met her."

"I did?"

"Yeah, on that trip to the zoo."

"Which trip?" Eric was shovelling his dinner in so fast I was lucky I was getting the responses out of him that I was. God knows what it would have been like if I hadn't taken him lunch.

"_The_ trip to the zoo. The first one, when you were all hungover and miserable and didn't know what the hell to do with Amelia. Remember we ran into a group of women as we were leaving and you thought Debbie's son Sebastian was defective? Well now he's in Amelia's class. And she's running the class…or something. Organising the mother-help days and stuff like that. And she still manages to make everything she says to me sound as though she pities me for being the complete loser that I am. But she's not actually mean with it." I stopped and sighed. "I don't know what to do. Now all the other mums think I'm some complete dropkick."

Eric shrugged and took another bite. "I like this" he said.

"Yeah, it's the Moroccan chicken again. I thought you did. But that doesn't help me with Debbie."

Eric finished the last few mouthfuls and looked thoughtful. "How long did it take you to figure out what she was like?"

I shrugged. "Not long. I think she got up my nose in about the second class we had when she went on and on about her birth plan."

"Well, I think you'll just have to put up with it, and hope everyone else eventually comes to the same conclusion" Eric said.

"What? But they all think I'm a slut now. I don't want Amelia to have a slut for a mother."

Eric frowned. "I think you're safe. I'm sure everyone knows Debbie's just talking shit." He picked up his plate and walked into the kitchen. I followed him.

"Do you want tea?" he asked me, putting his dishes into the dishwasher.

"Yeah" I said, "But I kind of also want you to go to school and sort Debbie out for me."

He kissed me on the head. "I think you'll be fine, Sookie. Don't let her get to you. Not with..." he put his hand on my stomach and looked down at it. "Just, not now. Don't get stressed."

"I won't" I said, and Eric turned around to grab some cups. "Although it's easy for you to say, you're not being branded the whore around here" I grumbled.

Eric didn't say anything, he just grinned at me and handed me my tea. "Well at least you're coming on Friday, aren't you?" I asked him.

"Um, I might be a bit late. But yeah, I'll be there."

"Well that's good. You might be the only person I can talk to who isn't going to judge me by the things Debbie said."

"You'll be fine, Sookie. I'm sure she's not that bad. But yes, you can always talk to me" Eric said, carrying his coffee through to the living room. Yeah, it was easy for him to say I'd have to deal with her, but he'd find out come Friday night when he met her again.

EPOV

Sookie's problems with some woman called Debbie took my mind off everything for a bit, but the worries returned with a vengeance when it was time to go to sleep. And I couldn't sleep. Not at all. I just lay there staring at the ceiling.

I'd tried cuddling Sookie, but the truth was I really wanted to do more. I wanted sex. I wasn't as much of an ass as to come out and say it, not knowing that we were still in some danger of the baby miscarrying after the CVS, but I wanted that…connection. I wanted to know it was OK between us, that she really did want me back when she came and brought me in from the car.

Plus, it would have helped me sleep. I was pretty sure of that. Instead I was still awake in the early hours of the morning and I gave up staying in bed. I eased myself away from Sookie and got out of bed. I checked on the kids, and found Felicia was sleeping across her bed again. I moved her around and half-hoped that she'd wake up and keep me company.

But she didn't. Instead Bob followed me into the kitchen, but even he didn't want to hang around longer than it took me to put more cat food in his bowl. He wasn't really interested in my problems.

So I ended up in the living room, in the dark, my mind just whirling around with all the stuff that had happened in the last week. I'd gone from on top of the world, to rock bottom and back again.

And as I sat there I realised something. I'd come through unscathed. We'd pretty much come through unscathed. The world still went on, Sookie still made me dinner and wanted me to tell her she was strong enough to withstand a few insults, Felicia still couldn't sleep straight, Amelia still thought I made shitty sandwiches and Bob was still fucking hungry every five minutes.

And Sam was still here.

So it was OK, it was going to be OK. It really was. And properly, for the first time since Sookie had rung that morning I started to feel happy. And excited. Really fucking excited. I was getting everything I wanted.

Except the new house. But I was working on that one.

**A/N Auckland Boys Grammar School is one of the most highly desirable public schools to go to in Auckland (along with Epsom Girls Grammar School). It's known for his high academic standards and sporting achievements. So you pay more, much more for houses in the Grammar Zone.**

**CYFS is Child, Youth and Family Services. Child welfare, basically.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	46. Chapter 46

**A/N Right, I didn't get this out yesterday because I got a bit side-tracked by the earthquake in Christchurch, and watching the coverage on TV (it happened about 1pm our time). It hit the central city and did a lot more damage than the one last September. There's 39 confirmed deaths, but they're still digging people out as we speak. Awful. My dad was there on business, in a carpark, as it happened. He luckily managed to drive straight out and make it to Greymouth, which was his next stop anyway. It's kind of scary though. I have a friend who's brother had to dig his way out of one of the collapsed buildings. And he's one of the lucky ones, of course.**

**So thanks to those of you who thought of me, and here's wishing the rescuers a lot of luck today.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Thursday was really, really boring. If I'd had any other type of job, well, one like I used to have which only required me to sit on my bum all day, I would have been fine, but having a job which meant I was on my feet, lifting equipment and kids was just a bit too much of a risk.

And as time marched on it was becoming clearer and clearer that the baby was here to stay. The crampy feeling I'd had on the night they'd done the test had disappeared by the next morning and that was it. I felt fine. I didn't even really feel sick anymore.

Irene was looking exhausted when she came to collect the van on Thursday. I really felt for her. I'd done it all by myself when her daughter had her tonsils out and it wasn't easy. Still, I confessed everything that had happened and that cheered her up a bit. She'd guessed I was pregnant, it was a bit hard to miss given how sick I was most of the last three months, but she'd done the decent thing and not mentioned it.

But when I explained about the scan and the test on Monday and the needing to take it easy for this week, she'd been a bit more understanding about the crappy week she was having. Still, it did make me realise that I was going to have to come up with some kind of a solution for when I actually had the baby.

I thought about it for a while, because really, I had sod all else to do. Well, I did a bit of sneaky washing because if didn't no one was going to have anything clean to wear, but that was about it. I read the paper, I read my book, and I did the crossword, sort-of. I managed about 6 clues and gave up.

It was rainy, so I couldn't sit outside on the deck. I was stuck inside. Bored, bored, bored. I wished I'd been into crafts like Gran, she was always knitting or sewing or doing a tapestry or a cross-stitch. She took up macramé for a while, in the '70's. We had a lot of pot-holders. And she'd buy magazines and follow their instructions for making things like pictures of owls out of macaroni and seeds, and ragdolls with fancy dresses, and door stops that looked like sausage dogs and all sorts of things. She usually made something each year for the League of Mothers to raffle off.

But that gene somehow bypassed me. God knows where it went, because I hadn't yet seen sign of it in Amelia or Felicia. I guessed there was still time though.

In the end I lay down on the bed and tried to take a nap, reasoning that it was probably a good use of my time. After all, I was growing a baby. Bob thought that was a great idea and came to join me, but I couldn't really get to sleep. I just dozed for a bit and then got up.

I thought about my plan to tell Amelia about the baby that night and ended up spending some time on the internet looking up what I should tell her. I made a plan for dinner. And then it was time to go and get the kids again, and go on to Amelia's ballet class. I just hoped Debbie wasn't at school today.

EPOV

When I got home Sookie was bustling around in the kitchen. "I thought you were supposed to be taking it easy?" I asked her.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah" she said, taking a lid off a saucepan and checking on something.

"No. Not 'yeah, yeah, yeah'. Just be careful."

"Oh, phfft. I'm fine. Really." She put the lid back on and moved over to the kitchen counter. "Seriously, Eric. You don't need to worry" she said looking at me.

I kissed her cheek and went off to get changed. Well, I got tackled in the hallway by Felicia who yelled "Amala wenta school!" at me, as though it was still news. I guess it was to her. She probably thought it was a one time deal.

"Yeah" I said, agreeing with her as I grabbed her hands to swing her around.

Amelia poked her head out of her bedroom. "Oh" she said. "You're home. Where's Mum? In the bathroom?"

"No, kitchen" I said, throwing Felicia in the air and catching her. It was getting harder to do that these days because she'd enthusiastically launch herself backwards and almost out of my reach. A couple of times we'd come close to disaster..

"Huh" Amelia said, watching as Felicia squealed and giggled. "She's not sick?"

"Nope" I said, having to lean forward a bit to catch Felicia. "That's enough Leesh" I said.

"Noooo Daddy! Onemore, jus' onemore?" Felicia cried. I threw her again. Amelia's head disappeared into room sometime between me catching Felicia that last time, and carrying her into our room so I could throw her on the bed in the hope she'd let me at least get out of the fucking suit.

It wasn't until I took Felicia to wash her hands, after Sookie had yelled that dinner was ready, that I discovered that Amelia was actually in the bathroom. With two big fat tears running down her cheeks.

Fuck, she was so like her mother it wasn't funny.

I put Felicia down on the floor carefully, as I'd been carrying her upside down by her feet so I had to make sure she did a kind of wheelbarrow manoeuvre to get down safely.

"What's up, Ames?" I asked her. Felicia got off the floor and took a long look at Amelia before beating a hasty retreat out of the room.

Amelia had wedged herself between the toilet and the bathtub and didn't look comfortable, but she wasn't coming out either. "Mum's not right" she said in a really small voice.

"Right about what?" I asked. I guessed there'd been some kind of argument before I got home.

"Just…right" Amelia said, looking at me like I was stupid. "She's sick and then she's not and she's gotten really fat, and that's not looking after yourself properly. I learnt that at school. And now…now she's all happy." Another tear trickled down Amelia's face. "Will she be sad when she leaves me?" she asked.

Fuck. I wasn't sure what to do and I really hoped Sookie would turn up shortly to find out what was happening. Instead Felicia arrived back in the room and tried to give Sockie to Amelia. "Sockie?" she asked her sister.

Amelia shook her head. "No" she said. "Sockie is _yours_." Yeah, that fact didn't stop her hiding Sockie from Felicia when she wanted to really upset her sister, but right now, she needed something else. And she was looking to me to give it to her.

Felicia sat down on the floor and looked at me. Amelia was still looking at me. "Your mum's fine" I said.

"You keep saying that!" Amelia threw back at me. "But she's not!"

"Yeah, she is. She's out there making dinner and singing. She's fine."

Amelia sniffed loudly. "I don't think she is."

"Will you feel better if she talks to you?" I asked Amelia.

Amelia shrugged. "I don't know. She won't tell me."

"She will. Hang on." I left Felicia in the bathroom with Amelia and walked back to the kitchen.

"Are they ready yet?" Sookie asked me. "Because I'm about to dish up."

"Amelia's in the bathroom" I said. "Crying." The last bit got Sookie's attention and she wheeled around.

"What happened? Was it school?" Sookie asked.

"No, it's you."

"Me? What did I do? I asked her to take her uniform off, but I didn't think she was that upset about it."

"She thinks you're sick. Or dying. Or something. I don't know…you were sick, and now you're happy and she thinks you're not looking after yourself or something."

"Shit" Sookie said. "Shit, shit, shit. God knows what she remembers from Bill. He was all about the being sick and then going slightly manic for a while there." Sookie sighed loudly and switched off whatever it was she had cooking on top of the stove. "I guess it's now or never then, isn't it? Hopefully dinner waits for a while. Come on, then. Let's go and do this."

I followed Sookie down the hall and into the bathroom. Amelia was still stuck in her spot and Felicia was just sitting there watching her, waiting to see what she did next.

"Hey, hun" Sookie said, lowering herself down to the floor. "You don't have to worry about me."

"Well I do. You're not looking after yourself." Amelia huffed. "Bad food is…bad…" she trailed off, looking for a better description.

"It's not really the food Amelia. I've been sick because I'm having another baby."

That shut Amelia up. Temporarily, anyway. "Another one?" she asked. "But you had Felicia."

"Yeah, and now she's grown up, we want to have another baby. So we are." Sookie explained, looking at me. I just nodded.

"When?" Amelia demanded.

"Um, October. That's in about 6 month's time. Well, 5 and a half, really" Sookie told her.

"How many sleeps?" Amelia demanded.

"Lots and lots. Too many to count" Sookie said, trying to dodge that one. "It's a boy. So you'll get a brother this time" Sookie continued.

"Huh. Felicia's a girl" Amelia said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, and so are you" I agreed, feeling like I needed to say something rather than leave it all to Sookie.

"So you needed a boy?" Amelia said.

"It wouldn't have mattered. We just wanted another baby, however it came" Sookie said.

"Is it in your tummy? Felicia was in your tummy" Amelia said. "I remember that."

"Yep" Sookie said, lifting up her t-shirt to show the bump that was there now. The girls were both quite interested in that. So was I. It still seemed a bit unreal despite the fact I'd seen the baby with the ultrasound. But somehow looking at Sookie's really rounded stomach it seemed like it was really going to happen.

Amelia crawled forward so she could get a better look. Felicia toddled over and sat on my lap, then reached out a hand to Sookie's stomach. "Bubby?" she asked.

"Yep" Sookie confirmed. "There's a baby in there. A really tiny one, but he'll get bigger and bigger and then, when he's ready, he'll come out."

Felicia didn't say anything to that; she just kind of patted my hand. Amelia looked thoughtful.

"OK" Sookie said. "Time for dinner now. I hope it's still OK. It's bangers and mash."

"Yay" I said. "It's your favourite, Amelia." Well, it was one of my favourites anyway. These days I even knew what it was.

Amelia wrinkled her nose. "Really?" she asked.

"Uh-huh" I confirmed, before moving Felicia off of my lap, so I could stand up and help Sookie get up herself. It was kind of awkward given how many people where now in the bathroom, but we managed.

Dinner was fine, despite Sookie's worries that the potatoes might be a bit soggy. "Not soggy at all" I said to her, as I helped myself to seconds.

"So, it's a long time until the baby comes?" Amelia asked. She was still stuck on the subject.

"Yes. He has to get bigger and bigger until he's ready to come out."

"Do I have a baby in my tummy?" Amelia asked.

"No" Sookie said. "You don't get one unless you want one. And I did."

"Again" Amelia added. Sookie ignored that bit. I guessed Amelia figured Felicia was enough in the way of siblings and Sookie should have just stopped with her. Never having been there, I couldn't imagine suddenly being told what you were splitting two ways was now going to be in thirds. Quite frankly I wouldn't want to share Sookie with even one other person, so I could kind of understand Amelia's dilemma at this point.

I wasn't really sure how much of this Felicia was grasping. Sookie said it kind of washed over Amelia for a while when she was having Felicia, and then towards the end Amelia had started introducing herself to shop assistants, then adding 'And this is my mummy and she has my baby sister in her tummy', but I wasn't sure Felicia was quite that kind of kid.

Fuck, I hoped she wasn't like that, anyway. One was enough.

SPOV

I wished I'd managed to tell Amelia before she'd worked herself into a tizzy in the bathroom, but it felt good to have done it. Poor kid. I'd been so worried she thought I might die when I was throwing up and in the end it was the fact I suddenly perked up that sent her over the edge.

She always said she didn't remember a lot about Bill, and what she did say about him tended to be phrases I'd said to her that she'd parrot back, but you did have to wonder what was buried in there.

But it felt good to have it off my chest and out in the open. I wasn't sure Felicia was really with the program yet, but that was to be expected. Amelia had taken a while to really understand, and then of course she didn't quite get the reality of the situation until Felicia actually made an appearance and suddenly I wasn't just her mummy anymore.

And Eric seemed better than he had done the night before. I'd felt him get back into bed at some time in the early hours of the morning and I was a bit worried he was working himself into a state over something. He wasn't like him to be awake at night. But he seemed excited to be telling the kids too.

So I was feeling pretty good about it all, and looking forward to a nice evening with Eric, with everyone feeling happy and relaxed when Amelia cornered me in the bathroom. I'd barely had a chance to flush the toilet.

"Why are you out of bed?" I asked her.

"How?" she asked. "How does the baby get in there? Into your tummy?"

Oh poo. I washed my hands, stalling for time. "Well…" I said, thinking about it. "Well when you want a baby very much, just like I wanted you and Felicia then, um, that's where you grow a baby, in a special place called a womb. All women have them." I congratulated myself on my use of specifics and avoidance of the gory detail with that answer.

Amelia looked at me. She was thinking hard. "So, I have a womb?" she asked. As she asked that Eric stuck his head around the door, then disappeared again really quickly. Yeah, thanks mate, I thought. You just bugger off.

He was so doing the next one.

"Yes" I said.

"But I don't have a baby?"

"No. No, you don't get a baby until you want a baby." I figured we'd cover baby-avoidance at a later date. I was really good at that, after all. I'd made it to 35 with four planned pregnancies and no unplanned ones. I gave myself a mental high-five, thinking that some of the girls I'd gone to school with were grandmothers now. Yeah, that didn't bear thinking about.

"So…when I'm a grown-up, I'll want a baby?" Amelia asked.

"Not everyone does, and that's OK." I didn't want to freak her out and force her to contemplate a life chained to a pushchair. It wasn't for everyone. "You don't have to have babies. It's hard work."

Amelia nodded and said "OK". "So back to bed now" I told her, and we walked back to her bedroom, where she climbed into bed.

"But Mum" she said, after I kissed her on the forehead. "I still don't know how it gets in there."

"What do you mean?"

"Into the wo...wob…what that thing is you said was in your tummy. If you want a baby, what do you _do_?" Amelia looked at me expectantly. I wished she was 2 again. Felicia was probably fast asleep right now. Eric was probably having a nice time in the living room too. I think maybe Grand Designs is on, I thought. I love Grand Designs. Eric will even discuss the use of ecologically sound building practices with me, and whether it's a great idea to use old tyres to build the walls of your house.

Yeah, I was hoping Amelia would magically forget what she'd asked and fall asleep on me.

"Um" I said, rather eloquently. "Um…well…" I tried to remember what I'd looked at on the internet earlier in the day, but I went a bit blank. "Well, there has to be a mummy and a daddy, who both want a baby" I tried, "And, um, well. It's a special cuddle. Not like the cuddles we give you, something only grownups do."

"When they want a baby?" Amelia asked.

"Uh-huh" I agreed, lying through my teeth. We'd cover that later, too. But maybe after baby-avoidance.

"OK" Amelia said. "Night, Mummy."

"Night then, sweetheart" I said, kissing her before I left the room.

I found Eric in the living room watching something that wasn't Grand Designs. "But my program's on" I said, a bit huffily, sitting down beside him.

"Mmm, it wasn't a very good episode" he said. "The house they were building was just coming as a kit-set from Germany." I had no idea if he was making that up or not, but he didn't make a move to change the channel.

"So what are we watching then?" I asked, reaching for the cup of tea that Eric had made me while I'd been dealing with Amelia.

"It's a documentary. On prison gangs in South America."

I looked at Eric. "You pick the _best_ shows to watch!" I said, slightly sarcastically. Probably a lot sarcastically.

Eric shrugged it off. "Maybe they'll wallpaper a cell or something" he said consolingly.

"What? With the blood of their enemies?" I asked. Eric just laughed. But he didn't change the channel. I gave up.

"I didn't see Debbie today" I said.

"Well, that's something" Eric replied, sipping his coffee and not moving his eyes from the TV.

"But she'll be there tomorrow night because she's taking names for mother help and stuff. No doubt she'll try to suggest I'm too stupid to be allowed to help out a classroom of 5 year olds."

"But you're not, so what she says doesn't matter" Eric said.

"Yeah…I know. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way."

"I don't think you're stupid."

"You just think my choice in TV programmes is stupid?" Eric didn't answer that one; he just kept drinking his coffee.

I finished my tea and moved over on the couch so I was closer to Eric. He lifted his arm so I could snuggle in. That was nice. It was all going back to normal. Well, sort-of. I just hoped Amelia didn't ask too many more questions about how I got a baby.

"I noticed you decided to skip the conversation in the bathroom earlier" I said to Eric.

"I'd done my bathroom time for the day" he replied.

"Yeah, but you wussed out of the difficult one."

"I don't know. I thought Amelia thinking you might die was a pretty difficult subject."

"But it didn't involve telling her she had a womb."

"No. Well…" Eric thought for a minute. "It's probably better coming from you."

"You can tell this one all about babies" I said patting my stomach.

"Mmm-hmm" Eric agreed, probably feeling secure in the knowledge he had many years' reprieve on that front.

I'd left my hand where it was on my tummy. There was definitely a bump there now. It was nice to know I didn't have to hide it anymore. I'm sure everyone was wondering why I'd been pretty much constantly wearing my one empire-line t-shirt for a few weeks now.

Eric brought his hand to rest on top of mine. I looked up at him and smiled. For the first time since I'd done the test I could actually allow myself to think this might really happen. It might actually work out for us.

I was pretty sure Eric was feeling a lot better about it all too. He was so much more relaxed now. I hated that he'd been stressed the night before, and wandering around in the middle of the night. I knew he didn't like the counselling sessions. I'd been to a couple with him, after the big fight we'd had about having a baby, and honestly, I was surprised the woman put up with Eric. Maybe she'd had worse, but he certainly couldn't have been her easiest client to deal with.

But he kept going. And I loved him for it.

An ad-break came on, which was a bit of a relief, because the documentary was pretty harrowing and not really my cup of tea. Of course once upon a time ad-breaks were the time that Eric used to pounce on me. He was normally OK if he was being entertained by TV, but as soon as the boredom set in, he'd turn his attention to me and I'd get grabbed and tickled and generally felt-up until either the programme started again or it led on to other things.

He hadn't been doing that lately. I'd felt crappy for so long and he'd backed right off. Tonight though, for the first time in a long time, I realised I kind of missed it.

But I thought about the bloody great big needle they'd jammed into my placenta earlier in the week and I worried about how tenuously the baby was anchored inside of me. I just needed to give it a bit longer I thought.

It did feel nice to be this close to Eric though.

Obviously the ad-break still bored Eric senseless because he decided to start a conversation during it. "So" he began. "There's something I wanted to talk about."

"OK" I said, wondering what it was. Hopefully he wouldn't need me to tell him where babies came from.

"We're going to have to change your car" he said.

"Mmm" I said in agreement.

"You don't sound thrilled" Eric commented. "But you know you have to. It's not like your cellphone."

"Yeah, I know." Eric had tried to persuade me to upgrade my phone a while back. He'd offered to make it a birthday present. But honestly, there was nothing wrong with the phone I had and I didn't need one that could browse the web. I'd never figure out how to use it. I wasn't big on gadgets. The phone I did have had once been Bill's work phone and although I'd had it for years, I still struggled with all the features. And it still came up with Bill Compton on the screen every time I switched it on, because I didn't know how to change that…although, now that I thought it about it, the phone had stopped doing that sometime in the last year or so. Huh.

"It just seems a shame to get rid of a perfectly good car" I said in the end.

"It won't fit three carseats in it, Sookie"

"I know! But honestly, carseats are probably over-rated. Jason and I used to just sit on the bench seat in the front of Dad's Cortina and we're fine." Eric looked at me and raised his eyebrows. "Well, _I'm_ fine!" I amended. I sighed. "I just like that car. We have a lot in common. It's not the flashest car, but it's really reliable and it has a big boot."

Eric burst out laughing. "What?" I asked. "Oh, well you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do. I like your boot" he said, patting me on the backside. "But you can't put a baby in the trunk of a car, Sookie, no matter how big it is."

"I know."

"So we'll get another car."

"Maybe you could have that one, and I could have yours?" I asked. That didn't seem so bad.

"Maybe" Eric conceded. Eric's programme had started again and he turned back to watching it. I gave up all pretence of following it and just closed my eyes for a bit. For all that I hadn't been able to take a nap earlier in the day, sitting here on the couch, leaning against Eric, listening to a stream of aggressive Spanish coming from the TV, I dozed off in no time.

**A/N Grand Designs is an English TV show about building houses, it shows people who take on quite large projects and how they manage them. We get a lot of English TV shows here, as well as the most popular American ones and a lot from Australia. We don't have a huge TV industry so we're used to hearing lots of different accents. Although, I have to say, it was a surprise to find out the other week that there's a channel here that broadcasts the news in Dutch. The baby had the remote control for a while there and she's good at finding this stuff out for me!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	47. Chapter 47

**A/N Right, managed to still write my chapter for today after yesterday's one got a bit delayed. The news from Christchurch is a bit of a mixed bag, some people are being rescued but the death toll is rising. Ugh. And even if you're one of the lucky ones, the toilets are unusable and there's no power so life isn't exactly easy for them.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

The best thing about Friday was that I didn't work anyway, so I didn't have to feel guilty about Irene doing it all alone, and I was going to have Felicia for company.

The worst thing about Friday was that Amelia was still working through the baby thing. I had hoped she might drop it after sleeping on it overnight, but she didn't.

As Felicia and I were walking her to school, she brought it up again. "So it's a magic cuddle that makes the baby?" she asked. I looked over at her. She looked so grown-up with her school uniform on and her Disney Princess backpack that she insisted on carrying herself on her back. I sighed. She used to be my baby. A really cute, friendly baby who'd throw herself at strangers and just assume they'd love her as much as everyone else did.

I sighed again, and watched that Felicia didn't poke herself with the stick she'd picked up and was dragging along. "Special cuddle" I said.

"Yeah, that. So…how does a cuddle make a baby? Is that magic?" Amelia looked at me hopefully. I really wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell her that the stork brought babies, that you found them in strawberry patches, basically anything that would keep her as my little baby for a bit longer. But I knew that wasn't really an option. She'd just find out from someone. And God knows what she'd find out at that.

"Well there's a bit more to it than that. Um, remember how I said the mummy has a womb?" Amelia nodded; Felicia whacked a fence with her stick. "Careful Felicia" I warned her. She ignored me and kept whacking the stick until it broke in half and then she was stuck just running what was left in her hand along the fence seeing what kind of noise she could make with it.

"Well" I continued, "Inside the womb there's a kind of egg." I looked at Amelia's face. "Not like the eggs we eat" I added, hastily. "It's a special kind of egg that only makes people. And the baby grows from that."

"What about the special cuddle?" Amelia asked suspiciously.

Bugger. I was tying myself up in knots a bit here. "Um, well, the special cuddle helps the egg grow into a baby by, um…by…well…"

"Well what?" Amelia asked. She was getting a bit grumpy with me stalling now.

I glanced over at Felicia, hoping she'd be doing something dangerous and I could stall for a bit longer. She was, of course, trudging along beside us for once. Bugger again.

"The daddy has a…a…kind of seed, and that needs to meet up with the egg in the mummy to make a baby." Please don't ask how that happens, I thought.

"OK" Amelia said. "So what's in my lunchbox?"

The rest of the walk was fine, Amelia seemed to be over the whole baby thing again and instead wanted to talk about school. Felicia started dragging her heels when we were almost there and had to be cajoled into walking the rest of the way. I could see I'd be piggy-backing her at least part of the way home. It would have been nice to have brought the pushchair, but she wasn't keen on it these days. It required far too much sitting still for Felicia's liking.

We got to school and I helped Amelia put her bag away in the cubby hole outside the classroom. It was just like the cubbyholes at pre-school, except that it wasn't. She was a big girl now. We took out her reading book from the night before, and her writing list for this week so she could hand them in and I went to kiss her goodbye.

"How?" Amelia said. "How does the…daddy-seed get in there? If it's a cuddle. I don't get it Mum."

She looked at me expectantly, and the bell rang. "OK" I said. "Well you better go now. Um, we'll talk about it later on. After school."

Amelia nodded, and started to turn around. "Oh, but Amelia?" She turned back to me. "Don't, um, don't start talking about babies with the other kids, will you? Their mummies and daddies will want to tell them…themselves…" I trailed off because I'd lost my audience. I hoped she'd heard the important part of that, which was don't open your mouth on the subject. I couldn't be sure.

I turned back to Felicia. "Anything you want to know?" I asked her.

"Piggyback?" she said cheerfully.

"Yeah, go on then. Climb on" I said crouching down and turning round.

We made it back home in one piece and I thought about how Felicia and I would fill the rest of the day in. Felicia seemed kind of keen on spending a lot of time on the trampoline, but I couldn't exactly join her in that activity.

"Hey, Felicia" I asked her, through the net that went around the tramp. "Want to go to the shops?"

"Nuh" she said, bouncing around some more.

"Um…we could go and buy Amelia a book?" I suggested. I'd figured out that might be my best bet on the whole how babies are made thing.

"Nuh."

"You could get a new book too?"

"Nuh." Felicia bounced some more.

"Maybe there might be ice cream?"

Felicia stopped bouncing. "Ice cream?" she asked.

"Yeah. But only if we go out in the car for a bit."

Felicia bounced a few times more. "OK" she said in the end, coming over to the side of the trampoline so I could help her get down.

EPOV

It had been nice having Sookie cuddle up to me the night before. She hadn't done that in a while, she'd been keeping her distance because she felt so uncomfortable and sick the whole time. I'd learnt after the first couple of times that she didn't like it when I tried to grope her during commercial breaks anymore, either. I didn't mind watching an actual programme, well, as long as it didn't involve too much wallpapering or cooking, but the ads were always fucking boring and I was used to Sookie providing the entertainment.

But recently, I'd had to entertain myself while she'd sat there looking white, or green or any number of unnatural colours.

Last night, though, I wasn't even really watching the documentary I'd picked on TV, the one Sookie kept grumbling about watching. Mostly I just looked at Sookie, especially after she fell asleep on me. Her t-shirt had ridden up a bit and you could see the bump sticking out over the waistband of her pants. I'd run a finger over the curve and she'd stirred slightly, but hadn't woken up.

In the end I'd had to wake her to tell her it was time for bed. "Oh" she said. "Crap. I couldn't fall asleep earlier today, and then I just did. You're really warm. I think it made me sleepy. Bob won't let me lie on him. I think that was the problem earlier."

"Uh-huh. Course it was."

Sookie sat up slowly and blinked. "Who won?" she asked.

"What?"

"On that show on the TV. You know, the gangs? Who won?"

I shrugged. "It wasn't really that kind of show."

"Yeah, I know."

She'd shuffled off to the bathroom, yawning, while I'd checked on the kids and made sure the door was locked. It paid to with the way Sookie's memory had been recently. There'd been one night where I'd discovered her keys were still in the lock, on the outside side of the door. I didn't fancy having to wake up and deal with burglars who'd been practically invited into the fucking house.

By the time I got to the bedroom Sookie was in her pyjamas and tucked up in bed. I was kind of disappointed that I'd missed a chance to get a look at her boobs. Not that she was exactly showing them much these days, and half the time she insisted on wearing one of those stupid bras to bed under her pyjamas, but you never knew. Tonight I might have been lucky.

I got ready for bed myself and contemplated reading for a while, but figured I should probably sleep too. I lay behind Sookie and reached around to put a hand on her stomach. Sookie didn't seem to mind that, and, after a while, I felt a bit bolder so I worked my hand under her pyjama top so I could touch her skin. That felt even better.

"Your hand is warm too" Sookie muttered. She sounded almost asleep again. After a while her breathing evened out, and she didn't say anything else. I fell asleep too, with my hand still on the place where Sookie was keeping Sam safe.

Friday morning though I didn't have much time to think about Sam or Sookie's boobs or anything else interesting. I was stuck thinking about work. Somehow, I'd managed to book in to see two clients at opposite ends of Auckland. The first was in Albany the second was in…"Is it Pa-pak-you-rar?" I asked Sookie, studying the notes I had on my phone while trying to simultaneously eat cereal and not spill any on my tie.

Sookie looked at me and tried really hard not to laugh. She couldn't stop the big grin she had though. "It's Pap-ah-coo-rah."

"Are you sure?" I asked, peering at my phone again. It didn't seem right somehow.

"Jesus, Eric. I think I know how to say Papakura. I'm not making it up so you'll look like an idiot." I looked at her to make sure she'd only just come up with that idea. Yeah, she didn't look that guilty. Maybe she was right.

And so I'd headed off to Albany on the North Shore, which had meant driving over the Harbour Bridge. Fortunately, I was going in the opposite direction to most of the traffic. Unfortunately, they switched the lanes to let more cars come into the city so it still took a long time for me to get across. And there were roadworks, of course. There are always fucking roadworks in Auckland.

The meeting had gone well but I'd been a bit late leaving and it was a fucking long drive to…Papakura. I just hoped I wasn't going to be too late for that thing at the school that night.

SPOV

Felicia and I had a rather successful trip to Border's at Sylvia Park. I'd found something that was going to be suitable for Amelia I thought, although there was quite a bit of detail…but really, the way things were going and the questions she was asking, we were going to have to get to the detail eventually.

I just hoped she didn't hate me after that.

Felicia had run around Borders for a while and looked at lots of the books, before choosing two Thomas the Tank Engine stories for herself. "I've gotta Thomas" she said.

"Yep, you do" I agreed.

After that we got an ice cream before grabbing a few things in Pak N Save and heading home. Once upon a time I used to buy sushi for myself and the kids on a Friday as an end of week treat. Felicia always made a huge mess with hers and ended up covered in sticky rice, but she loved it all the same. And Amelia would have practically drunk soy sauce if I hadn't insisted that she at least pretend to dip the sushi in it. But I wasn't eating sushi for the foreseeable future, and it seemed a bit of a waste to just buy it for Felicia.

So we went home and had a rather boring lunch of marmite and cheese sandwiches and then Felicia had a nap for me, worn out after three days of daycare, and I phoned Eric to make sure he was OK for that night.

He sounded a bit grumpy on the phone, although it's hard to tell when he's in the car and using the hands-free kit. He was complaining that Papakura was 'a fucking long way out' and he didn't think even think it was really part of Auckland.

I agreed, and said it was totally up for debate, which I don't think helped the problem. He did promise he'd be there for the meet the teacher night, but he couldn't say when. It depended on the traffic. And on whether he could follow the trail of breadcrumbs he'd left back to the city, apparently.

I told him to be careful of wayward sheep coming down the main street of Papakura and hung up.

It was a bit of a rush to get everything organised so I could be back up at the school by 4.30pm. I collected Amelia and took her home and fed her and Felicia some toasted sandwiches for a very early dinner, and then I packed them next door to hang out with Halleigh. In all the rushing, Amelia seemed to forget that she still wanted to know how babies are made. But I still had to field a few questions from Halleigh. She'd been asking me about school constantly given that it wasn't long now until Riley started too. I'd done the best I could, but honestly, a lot of it I was still figuring out. Halleigh, though, was one of those people who liked to be prepared.

I raced into the classroom feeling a bit hot and bothered. Annoyingly, all the other mothers looked all cool and calm and like they'd just stepped out of a boardroom. I felt like a big sloppy mess in my Capri pants, which only just did up, and my t-shirt. Not to mention the fact I wasn't wearing high-heels.

Yeah, I'd failed Amelia totally.

Debbie was in the middle of a group of other women, all of them as polished as each other. I hoped to avoid her totally, but she spotted me and waved me over with a rather officious shout of "Sookie!"

I sighed and trudged over, feeling like a kid called to see the teacher.

"Good, you're here" Debbie said. "I can't find anyone to do Mondays for mother help. You don't work, do you? So I can put you down." The last part wasn't a question. She just started writing my name on the sheet attached to the clipboard she was holding.

"Um, sure" I said, feeling put on the spot. "I can bring Felicia, can't I?"

Debbie looked at me and sucked in her breath through her teeth. "You haven't got someone to leave her with?" she asked.

"Well, no. Normally I'm home on Mondays. I work other days though."

"You do?"

"Yeah. I own a Jumping Beans franchise." Several of the other mothers nodded in recognition. Actually a couple of them looked familiar and may have been to my classes, although I wondered if I would have maybe recognised their nannies more readily.

"Oh. Right" Debbie said. "Of course Sebastian went to a private tutor in Ponsonby who instructed him in music and movement. He finds group situations a little overwhelming. And you don't get the personal attention. He benefitted so much from that." She beamed at me, obviously wanting me to acknowledge Sebastian's cleverness.

"Uh-huh" I said. "But anyway, I can bring Felicia?"

"Oh, I suppose so, Sookie. We'll…we'll figure it out." With that she was off and somehow I felt that instead of thanking me for actually volunteering to help out I'd just been found a nuisance for having another baby in the first place.

Stupid old Sookie.

One of the other women sighed. "Thanks God she's gone. I'm officially the worst mother in the world for working fulltime and not being able to help." She turned to me. "I'm Tanya" she said. "Tanya Grissom. Emily's mother"

"Sookie Stackhouse. Amelia's mine" I said, shaking her hand.

"So Jumping Beans? That must be interesting?" she asked.

"Yeah, it is. Well, I like it anyway."

"I don't know how you do it" she said. "I couldn't hang out with kids all day. It's bad enough in an office." She rolled her eyes.

"I remember those days" I agreed.

"Yeah, you did well to get out. Me, I need the money since my ex split on me."

"Oh." I didn't really want to get into the specifics of nasty breakups. "Um, where do you work?"

"For the City Council. I work in HR. It's OK" she shrugged. "I need the job really. Em's an expensive creature. It's nice not to be paying for full-time daycare anymore for her, but the afterschool care is mounting up I have to say."

"Mmm" I felt a bit sorry for her, stuck working fulltime while her kid was being looked after by someone else.

I kind of hoped Eric would arrive soon, but he didn't. I stood around for a while hearing more about Tanya's life story. It didn't sound good. The ex was apparently useless and she'd had a run-in with cancer a couple of years earlier. It was all a bit uncomfortable.

Eventually it was time to take our seats and listen to the Principal and the new-entrants teacher Mrs Garfield, who looked like she'd seen all of this before. Many, many times.

I sat next to Tanya, who surveyed the room. "The problem is" she whispered. "You can't really meet men at these things." I looked at her, a bit dumbstruck. She was here to meet men? She shrugged. "Well I got off work early, there has to be some benefit, surely?" she grinned at me.

Cool, I guess we sluts had to stick together then.

The Principal, whose name was Kevin Pryor, was young and English and looked really nervous as he stood at the front of the classroom. He droned on for a long time about the values of the school, and how happy he had been to emigrate here with his family and take up this role at a school with such a great reputation. Mrs Garfield stood to one side, surreptitiously glancing at her watch from time to time.

Tanya sat next to me, laughing at a text on her cellphone. I thought that was rude, but I couldn't really say anything.

Finally, it was Mrs Garfield's turn. She was all warm assurances that she'd been doing this for a long time and there wasn't anything she hadn't seen or heard before, but if we had any problems we could send her a note or call in.

"Or email her" Kevin added. Mrs Garfield pursed her lips. "Or email" she agreed, giving Kevin a rather annoyed look. Maybe that fell outside the realms of what she'd been doing for the last 30 years, I thought. She probably liked it when teachers were a bit harder to get hold of.

I kind of knew when Eric arrived down the back of the classroom by the glances that suddenly started getting thrown in his direction. And that was from some of the women who were there with their husbands. Tanya turned around. "Hope that's a single dad!" she said to me, happily.

I turned around, caught Eric's eyes, and raised my hand in greeting. He nodded at me. "He's with me" I told her.

"Really?" Tanya said. I tried not to be annoyed at that. I failed.

"Yep" I said, as definitely as I could.

"Bummer" Tanya said, turning around to get another good look at him. "I really thought my luck was in there. Oh well!" she laughed, and had another sneaky look around. I really wished she would stop doing that. It was kind of annoying. And rude.

She went back to her phone. I guessed manners weren't her strong suit.

"I've got to respond to this. It's from work" she whispered to me. "Let me know what I miss." She squeezed past me and headed to the back of the classroom.

I just stayed put and tried to listen and not turn around to make sure that she hadn't somehow managed to coerce Eric to leave with her. God knows he might be tempted. I'd possibly been more trouble than I was worth recently. Plus, who knew what the whole no-sex thing might push him into.

I was still feeling a bit sorry for myself when Mrs Garfield finished and I could finally stand up and walk over to Eric. He was deep in conversation with Tanya. Of course.

"Hi" Eric said, leaning down to kiss my cheek.

"Hey, you made it back from the wilds of Papakura then."

"Yeah, but the traffic was shit."

"The traffic's always shit in Auckland!" Tanya said, laughing as though Eric was the funniest person ever. Sometimes I thought he was too, but I didn't go all stupid like that.

Tanya saw me looking at her. "I was just introducing myself to Eric" she said, "seeing as I'd met you earlier." The unspoken implication was that I was the less interesting member of the two of us, obviously.

"So, do you want to get a drink?" I asked Eric, hoping we could ditch Tanya.

"Yeah, I guess" Eric said, looking over my head at the table where they had a selection of drinks set out. "You want juice?"

"Yep" I said, ready to follow him. But instead he turned to Tanya and said "Can I get you anything?" Stupid, annoying American politeness. For a brief second I missed Bill's sullen quietness in social situations, that might have got rid of Tanya. But then he didn't get a lot of women throwing themselves at him. Not in quite the same blatant manner, anyway.

"Oh, a sav for me, thank you very much" she said, beaming. Eric went off to get the drinks and I was left with Tanya the man-hungry cancer-surviving single-mother. Brilliant. I kind of wished Debbie would come back. At least she wasn't interested in anyone other than herself and Sebastian and was unlikely to try to steal Eric from me.

"How did you meet an American round here?" Tanya asked me. I was tempted to give her the website answer but it seemed mean. "Oh, well I worked for a bank for a while. Eric was here on business."

"Oh. Does he know any others?"

"Americans? Probably. But none who live here."

"Pity" Tanya sighed, as Eric arrived back with our drinks. "You not drinking?" Tanya asked me. "Jesus, I need it at this time of the day!" she laughed.

"Sookie's pregnant" Eric said, smiling at me. The smile was nice, but I could have done without him answering for me.

"Oh, well yes. Although I drank when I was having Em, and she's fine. I think they over-react."

I decided not to comment. Eric decided the opposite. "I think Sookie's very sensible" he said. "No one really knows what the long-term effects of the mother drinking are."

Tanya shrugged at that, and looked a bit defiant. "I don't think one would really hurt" she sniffed.

Eric shrugged then. "It might" he said. "And this way we don't have to worry about it."

Tanya narrowed her eyes. "Well, I might go and mingle. Nice to meet you both." With that she buggered off.

Eric squeezed my hand. "So did I do OK?" he asked. "Getting rid of whats-her-face? The one who upset you the other day?"

I sighed. "That was Debbie the other day. It was Tanya whose choices during pregnancy you just cast aspersions all over."

"Shit. Sorry" Eric said.

"That's OK, I didn't like her anyway. She seemed to think this was a speed-dating session or something."

Eric nodded, but didn't say anything else. We sipped our drinks for a while and chatted, which was nice. But as tempted as I was to stay glued to his side I realised I needed to mingle a bit so I drifted over to Becs, who'd arrived late too, to say hello. I pointedly ignored the fact I could hear Debbie complaining to Mrs Garfield that some 'little minx' had been telling her Sebastian about how babies were made with magic cuddles and didn't she have a better grasp of what was going on in her classroom.

Yeah, I made a mental note to talk to Amelia again about that one.

I chatted to Becs for a while, and watched Eric work the room. Lots of the women wanted to talk to him, but it was the Kevin the principal who finally baled him up to talk at length. Perhaps it was because Eric was one of the few dads who were there, I don't know, but at any rate, Eric seemed to have a new friend.

And it couldn't hurt to be friends with the principal, could it?

Unfortunately Debbie found me again when Becs left so she could get a drink. "So you'll be able to come on the class trip to the zoo, won't you Sookie?" she asked me. Or rather ordered me.

"When is it?" I asked.

"Tuesday after next."

"I can't do a Tuesday" I said. I would have liked to go on Amelia's first school trip, but I couldn't let Irene down again quite so soon.

"Mmm. That's very inconvenient" Debbie said.

"Sorry" I said, not really sure what I was apologising for but feeling like it was required. Eric drifted over and stood beside me. "Oh, Debbie. You remember Eric?"

Eric stuck out his hand and Debbie took it but she was frowning at him all the while. "Oh" she said. "You're not what I remembered." Yeah, he did look different in the suit and without the hat.

"Funny. You're just how I remember" Eric said. Debbie blinked and then looked back at the clipboard. "I'm short parents" she muttered.

"For what?" Eric asked, quite nicely I thought.

"For the school trip to the zoo. Sookie can't go." She managed to make it sound as though the entire trip was in jeopardy because of my selfish need to work.

"I'll go" said Eric.

"Really?" Debbie and I said, almost simultaneously. I knew Eric was OK with our kids now, but I wasn't sure he really wanted to go to the zoo with a bunch of other people's kids.

"Yeah, why not. Kevin already asked me anyway." Eric nodded in the direction of the principal.

"You know Mr, uh…Kevin?" Debbie asked.

"I do now" Eric replied. "So put me down. I'll give you my card." He pulled out his wallet, which I noticed was sporting a Cat in the Hat sticker, courtesy of Amelia, and handed a business card over to Debbie. She studied it for a bit and then looked back at Eric. "OK then, Eric. I'll talk to you later" and then she turned on her heel and left.

"You really want to go to the zoo?" I asked Eric when she'd gone. "With a bunch of 5 year olds?"

Eric shrugged. "It stopped her giving you a hard time. More to the point it stopped Kevin lecturing me on positive male role models when I told him I'd do it."

"Yeah, I guess. It seems a high price to pay though."

"It'll be OK. So can we go home now? I think I'm all meet and greeted out."

"Yeah, let's go home. I just hope Amelia hasn't told Riley the facts of life as she knows them while she's been next door."

"Yeah, that doesn't sound great at all" Eric agreed as he took my arm and we walked out the door, watched by Tanya and Debbie.

**Thanks for reading!**


	48. Chapter 48

**A/N Thanks to everyone who said they were thinking of me after the Christchurch earthquake. I'm quite safe, as is everyone I know but lots of people aren't that lucky. It's New Zealand's second largest city, but still only has a population of about 350,000 so obviously something that hits on this scale, with the death toll currently at 98 and so many still missing is pretty huge. It's hard to imagine. And I'm sure we all send our love to them!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

It was pretty much like having the old Sookie back again. I couldn't believe that she'd just stopped throwing up like that. "Yeah, well I said I would" she said to me, when I questioned it. It just seemed…odd, that all of a sudden her body didn't mind her being pregnant.

Sookie shrugged. "Hormones settle down I guess. Or something."

I'd come home from taking Felicia to soccer and discovered Sookie itching to get a storage box of maternity clothes out of the space in the roof. Apparently it was all go on the baby front.

"Why is it everything you own ends up here at some point?" I asked her, as I climbed the ladder.

"It's storage, I guess. Storage is great."

"But surely it would be easier to just get a bigger house?" The words were out of my mouth before I really thought about them. Fuck.

"This is a big house" Sookie said indignantly. "It has four bedrooms."

"Felicia's room is practically a cupboard" I said, pushing around the boxes in the roof.

"It might be bigger without the train set of course" Sookie said. "Plus we have two bathrooms _and_ two living areas. It's a really big house. Do you even know how much more you'd have to pay for a bigger house around here?"

Actually, I did. "Well, we'll have to do something about bedrooms" I tried. "What does this box look like?"

"Oh, it's one of those long, flat boxes for storing under the bed. What do you mean about bedrooms?"

"Well, where's Sam going to sleep? Is the top of it yellow?"

"No, I think it's blue. And the baby can sleep in the spare room. Where the cot is. But that's not for a while anyway. He'll be stationed in our room to start with so I'm not traipsing through the house in the middle of the night. I need to sort out a bassinet, though. Tara gave hers away. Any luck?"

"I can't see a blue one. Are you sure it's blue? And if Sam has that room, where do I get to work?"

"Oh. I thought it was blue. Are you sure there are no boxes with blue lids? And I thought you had an office for working in anyway."

"The only blue lid is on a much smaller, square box. See?" I lifted the box down so she could see it.

"That's not it" Sookie said. "Maybe it wasn't blue."

"Maybe it was yellow?"

"Well, bring the yellow one down then" Sookie said. "Maybe it was that one."

I held the box in one hand and got part way down the ladder before the lid came loose on one side and a shower of clothing hit the ground. "That's the box" Sookie said, scooping up armfuls of the clothing.

"How much had you stuffed into that one box?" I asked her.

"Oh, you know. Just a bit. But I need to find my maternity jeans, ooh, there they are" Sookie scooped up something denim and wandered off to find a home for all her new treasures.

Amelia appeared. "What exploded?" she asked.

I held out the storage box. "Huh" she said, and then she wandered off again.

So everything was going well. Sookie hadn't even really argued about the house. Well, she'd argued, and possibly she thought she'd won, but she hadn't stomped. So it wasn't a total disaster. She'd come around.

And then it was Sunday. And Sunday was officially Sad Day. It was Sookie's designated day to be depressed because it was the anniversary of Bill's death. Yeah, so that was going to be a fucking fun day.

I of course, hadn't bothered keeping track of what day of the year Sad Day actually was. I should have, probably, because it had fucking blindsided me the year before and it took me ages to pry out of Sookie why exactly she kept disappearing off to the bedroom or the bathroom to cry. She didn't really want to tell me and I couldn't figure out what the fuck I'd done.

Sad Day just made me all a bit uncomfortable really. I wasn't fucking sure what to do. Last year, after a few missteps, I'd kind of backed off a bit and let her be, I didn't want to make her feel bad for feeling sad, even though I really fucking hated it that she was. And I wasn't that fucking fond of Bill in those moments either. Asshole. Eventually, though, she'd pretty much cried herself out and just lain in bed letting me hold her. I was glad she'd come back to me in the end.

This year I was really pissed off that Sad Day was coming so soon after everything else, the previous weekend had been a fucking pile of shit with the worry over the baby and now this hit. Fuck. Fucking Bill. Why couldn't he just die and that be the end of it? I wondered how many more years of Sad Day I had to look forward to. Fuck. I really needed to put it in the calendar in my phone.

It wasn't until we'd had breakfast that I even knew it was Sad Day. Sookie stared out the door of the family room and looked a bit wistful. "Its two years today" she said.

"What?" I asked.

"Since Bill died" Sookie replied, looking at her cup of tea and not at me.

"Oh" I replied, taking a sip of coffee and watching to see what Sookie did next.

"I feel a bit…sad" she said. "I guess because it's Sad Day."

"Yeah." I wasn't sure what else to say.

"But only a bit. It's been a busy two years in a way."

"Yeah." I figured brevity was good about now. The less I said, the less I could put my foot in it. There'd been a nasty hour or so the previous year when I'd suggested that maybe Sad Day didn't need to involve quite so much crying.

"I feel like I should be really sad" Sookie continued. I stayed quiet, not really wanting to give my opinion on the matter. "But I don't…not so much. I've moved on. Do you want first shower or can I have it?" Sookie turned to me.

"Um…you can go if you like" I said. Sookie smiled and stood up and, after, taking her cup to the kitchen, went off to have her shower. I was tempted to follow her to make sure that she didn't cry in the shower in the hope that I wouldn't be able to hear her.

I finished my coffee. I took the cup into the sink. I fielded Amelia's request for a cookie and told her she'd only just had breakfast. I told Felicia we could play trains in a little while.

And then I realised that it might be a good idea to brush my teeth. That surely wouldn't be spying on Sookie?

As I headed to the ensuite bathroom I realised there was noise coming from there, over the sound of the shower. Fuck. As I got closer though, I realised it wasn't crying, it was singing. Sookie was singing...well I had no fucking idea what it was she was singing, most of her songs sounded the same and often she just made up words when she was singing to the kids, but it was singing all the same.

I walked in the door. "You're singing" I said.

"What?" Sookie asked, lifting her head from under the water.

"You were singing."

"Was it that bad?"

"Depends on what it was."

"Oh, ha ha. No one ever appreciates my singing." Sookie turned the water off and reached for the towel she had over the stall to wrap around herself. Fuck, I'd been distracted by the singing and missed getting a good look at her boobs.

"But you're singing. On Sad Day" I said, feeling a bit like an idiot. She probably knew she was singing, but I couldn't figure it out. Last Sad Day she'd been so fucking sad, and now, now she was kind of…normal. Even happy.

Sookie opened the door to the shower and shrugged. "I said I didn't feel that bad. I guess it's the time thing…life moves on blah di blah di blah." She stepped out and looked at me. "What are you in here for?" she asked.

"Teeth."

"Well hurry up then, so I can get to the cupboard when you're done."

I brushed my teeth still feeling none the wiser. And, annoyingly, Sookie managed to get dressed out of the view of the mirror on the front of the cabinet above the sink, so I didn't get to see her boobs then either.

The rest of the morning went OK. Felicia and I played with her train set. I still couldn't quite get the track right so the trains didn't keep crashing into each other, for some reason Thomas was a lot slower than Percy. I tried to get Felicia to work the switches, but she got a bit confused, so I enlisted Amelia's help, but she just wanted to know where the trains were going and then she tried to rename Percy and call him Giselle instead, because she thought that was prettier.

She really didn't get the point of the train set.

Sookie made us all sandwiches for lunch. She kind of looked wistfully at the ham the rest of us were eating in ours, but didn't actually look all that sad about anything else. I kept looking at her to make sure. After a while I think she figured out what I was doing and kept frowning at me.

I just wasn't sure what was going on. She was meant to be sad on Sad Day. If she wasn't sad, was it a good sign or a bad sign? Was she bottling stuff up? Going to explode at any moment? Really over Bill and we need never mention his name again?

I didn't have a fucking clue.

After lunch Sookie looked a bit thoughtful. "If you're OK here, I might go out for a bit" she said.

"Um, yeah. Where are you going?" I figured I'd better check in case she thought it was a good idea to go and commiserate with Lorena or something and was likely to come back a miserable mess. Or angry. Or both.

"St Luke's. I need to get a new maternity bra. Well, a couple. These old ones are tight, plus they're a bit grotty."

"OK" I said. They were possibly grotty, but, really, I'd only glimpsed them. I hadn't been allowed to study them in any great depth. And I was kind of curious how they worked.

Sookie grabbed her bag and her car keys and kissed the girls goodbye. Amelia asked if she could go, but Sookie pointed out there be lots of sitting around in a shop while Mummy tried stuff on.

"Oh. Nothing for me?"

"No, nothing for you."

"We can't go to Smiggle?"

"It's closed on Saturdays" Sookie lied without blinking. Well, she blushed a little, but Amelia didn't catch on.

Amelia sighed exaggeratedly. "OK then. I'll stay here" she said, sounding rather mopey about it.

Sookie almost skipped out the door and left me with the kids. Who all disappeared for a while, meaning that I was stuck with nothing to do but worry about what Sookie was doing.

Eventually it stopped being quiet and I noticed the amount of shouting coming from the backyard. I got drafted in to referee the fight that was taking place in the playhouse. It turned out Sookie had worked out some kind of fucking weird arrangement for the two kids to share it, which was now under dispute. "She's on MY side!" Amelia complained, pointing at Felicia who looked completely unrepentant and just held onto her T-rex. "Rar!" she said waving it at Amelia.

"That's not nice, Felicia! I'm supposed to stay on this side, and she has that side" Amelia complained.

"But dere's da table" Felicia pointed out. "Dis side."

"We're supposed to have half the table, Felicia. Unless I'm having a tea-party. That's when I get all the table. But Felicia's allowed a chair. Except when I need it for playing schools. Then I have the chairs and she can have the table. Except when I'm playing cafes. Then I get the table and the chairs and Felicia is supposed to be a customer and wait to be seated. If I have room. But she's not doing it!"

"RAR!" Felicia roared.

Fuck, I was pretty sure it hadn't been this complicated to carve up Europe after World War II. Both their little faces looked at me, waiting for me to rule on who got what and under what circumstances.

"You know what?" I said in the end.

"What?" Amelia asked.

"I'm not really interested in who has what and when and for how long."

"But, that's not fair!" Amelia complained. "You're supposed to..." I cut her off. "What I am interested in" I continued "Is having a really quiet day. Because it's Sunday. And it's not quiet at the moment."

"No, because Felicia won't…" Amelia started at the same time as Felicia let out another "Rar!"

"And if it's not quiet" I said, talking over the top of them, "Then I'll have to shut the playhouse."

"Shut it?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah, just close it down. Like noise control. So basically, if I can hear you, something's wrong, OK?"

"But…but that's not right" Amelia said.

"Yep, it is" I said standing up. "It's completely right. So remember, if I can't hear you, everything's good."

"But what if she comes on my side?" Amelia wailed.

"Mmm, if you're very quiet, perhaps she won't know you're there. Good luck."

I turned around and walked back into the house before they found something else to complain about.

Sure enough, it was a lot quieter after that. I had no idea what was going on in the playhouse, or whether both of them were going to make it out in one piece, but at least I could worry about it later.

I went back to worrying about Sookie. It wasn't that much longer until she came home. "How did it go?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "Alright" she said, quietly. And then she walked towards the bedroom. I waited, and I waited but she didn't come back. I wasn't sure whether or not I should follow her so I thought about it for a bit. Maybe she just needed time to be sad.

I went into the bedroom. Sure enough Sookie was sitting on the edge of the bed. She swiped a hand across her cheek when she saw me. I sat down next to her and pulled her against me.

"It's OK" I said, hoping that would just cover everything.

"It's not" she said. "It's horrible."

"Well, it probably always will be, but I guess…well, time will pass and eventually Sad Day won't be this bad." Fuck, I really hoped that was true. I'd be fucking happy if it stopped being sad about now.

"Oh. It's not _that_" Sookie said, kind of dismissively.

"Um, so what's wrong?" I asked her. Sookie didn't reply, she just sat there for a bit and stared at her lap. After a while I realised she was crying again. Fuck. I was completely lost now.

"It's my _boobs_!" Sookie said quietly.

Yeah, still completely fucking lost. "What happened to them?" I asked.

"Pregnancy, Eric" Sookie said, like I was being completely dense.

"Oh" I said, not sure what to say to that. And how much of it was my fault.

"Yeah. Now I'm like some hulking great cow with the world's most enormous udders. It's just a good thing Jason isn't here or he'd try to hook me up to one of his milking machines!"

"They're not…well, they're not that big" I said, slowly, not really sure one way or the other. They were definitely bigger, but not ridiculous I thought. But then, I hadn't had a good look in a while.

"Apparently Eric, they are. They measured me. And then they measured again. And then they conferred amongst themselves. And then…and then…" Sookie's voice started to break a bit. "And then they announced they'd have to order a maternity bra in my size in specially. Because they don't normally carry them."

"Oh" I said again, still not really sure what to do.

"It's not fair!" Sookie wailed, in the same way Amelia does. "I don't see why I'm such a freak. Surely there are other women who get this big in pregnancy?" Sookie looked at me and I nodded in agreement. She sighed. "It's the problem with living in a small country. If you're at either end of the scale, you're stuffed. It's like you trying to find jeans the right length." She sighed, and stood up. "Where are the kids?" she asked.

"Oh, out in the playhouse. I think."

"Really?" Sookie asked. "But they're being so quiet."

"Yeah, they're fine though." They probably were. It was possible there'd been a fight to the death in there, but at least it had been a quiet one.

Sookie walked off and that was the point at which Sad Day officially became Stomping and Muttering Day, because although she said she was resigned to the fact she was a 'freak with enormous mammary glands' it didn't really seem like she had.

I just watched from a distance. I couldn't tell if this was better than the sadness, or worse.

Sookie kept up the muttering and the stomping all through dinner. She kept glancing at me, but I maybe wasn't on board with the whole 'we hate Sookie's boobs' movement as much as she was.

"It's alright for you" she spat at me, after the kids were in bed. "You like boobs, but you don't have to have them stuck to your chest. And the way those women in the shop looked at me, like I did this on purpose. I mean, they're not implants or anything. It's just genetics. Amelia and Felicia are probably going to hate me in a few years when they get theirs. God, hopefully I won't have to take them back to that lingerie shop. I just don't get it; I mean those women work with boobs all day, what makes mine so bloody different?"

"They're yours?" I tried.

"Well of course they are, but I could do without them about now. I'd like smaller models that could buy maternity bras straight off the rack, without all the drama I had to go through today. Ugh. I tell you, I'm NEVER doing this again."

"What? Buying bras?"

"Having a baby. I have to warn you, this might be it for me. It's just…it's just too much." Sookie looked down at the kitchen counter she was wiping.

"Yeah" I agreed. I wasn't really going to argue with her. The whole scare with the baby had been, well it had been fucking scary really. I wasn't sure I was up for doing this again either. If we could get Sam here safe and sound that would be enough for me.

"So that's OK?" Sookie said, looking up at me.

I put my arms around her "It's more than OK. We'll just get through the next few months and meet Sam and take it from there."

"OK" she said, against my chest. "OK, but we still need to do that list of names. I'm not sure about Sam. I'm sure we'll come up with something though."

"Mmm" I said, resting my chin on Sookie's head. It was odd hugging her now; there was definitely something there, between us. Well, someone I guessed. Sam. I supposed I wasn't going to be able to get this close to her for much longer.

So I should probably make the most of being able to feel her boobs. Yeah, they were definitely larger. Definitely.

I was quite enjoying the moment when Sookie pulled back. "I'm just being silly, I really am. Worse things happen at sea, as Gran would say. And of course I have had worse." She sighed. "Two year's ago everything was really bloody bad."

And we were back to Sad Day.

"But I'm not going there again" she said. "I think…I think I've done my time with that whole chapter of my life. I think that really. Well, let's concentrate on the new life that's going on at the moment." She patted her stomach and Sad Day was officially cancelled due to lack of interest. Yay!

Stomping and Muttering Day lasted a bit longer. We watched a film on TV, well, we watched part of it until Sookie started yawning and said she might go to bed, and I thought I'd follow her. Just in case. She went into the bathroom and came out, before standing sideways in front of the mirror. "I don't get it" she muttered.

"What?" I asked from the bed.

"Oh, nothing" Sookie muttered. She wandered over to the drawers and pulled out a pair of pyjamas, before she started to head back into the bathroom with them. I decided to try something.

"I think you'll have to show me" I said.

"What?" Sookie asked, turning around.

"Show me" I said, getting off the bed and coming over to where she was standing. "So, you know, I can judge whether you're really that…um. Well, just to see."

"Who made you the expert on boobs, Eric?" Sookie asked.

I shrugged. Who else around here was really going to fill the position? Sookie thought for a moment. "Fine!" she said, before she put the pyjamas down on the bed, and lifted her t-shirt over her head. I took a step back and studied her. "OK, now you're making me feel like a freak. I've had enough of that today."

"I think you'll have to lose the bra" I said. "Yeah, that will definitely have to go."

Sookie sighed. "I don't know."

I stepped closer to her again. "Come on. It's only me. And I want to see."

Sookie bit her lip. "They're…I don't know if they're…" Fuck, I realised I may have miscalculated, she looked like she was about to cry again. I figured I'd have to pull out all the stops now. I lent down so I could whisper straight into her ear. "Sookie, don't. Just…show me. They'll be fucking fantastic. Trust me."

Sookie blinked a couple of times, and then reached around to undo her bra. "There" she said, a bit defiantly. "That's what they look like. Happy, Eric?"

"Very" I said truthfully. They were different, certainly. And really fucking big now. But they were lovely. And really sexy.

And I really wanted to have sex with Sookie.

I reached out and cupped one with my hand. Sookie flinched slightly at my touch, and I pulled back.

"Sorry" I said. "Did I hurt you?"

Sookie shook her head. "Not at all" she said, looking up at me. "I liked it" she smiled. I smiled back.

I cupped both her boobs this time. "They feel…heavier" I said. "Kind of."

"Yeah" she said quietly. "It's not easy carrying them around. And it'll just get worse. When my milk comes in."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

We were silent for a bit, as I ran my thumbs across her nipples, watching them harden and Sookie watched my hands.

"You're so lovely" I said to her, and I kissed her, deeply. She put her arms around me and held me close. "You really are" I said when we pulled apart.

"So are you" Sookie said.

I dropped a hand to her boob again. "I kind of like these" I said. "Can we keep them?"

Sookie laughed. "I don't know, I think we might have to give them back at some stage. Plus they come with a fat bum and a huge tummy and I think those might get old too, after a while."

"Oh, I don't know. The ass I like" I moved one hand down to give it a squeeze. Yeah, it was still good.

"I'm just going to get fatter" Sookie said. "Fat and horrible."

"You won't be either and you know it" I told her.

"I just…you haven't seen this before. Seen me like this before" Sookie said quietly.

"No. It's fucking great though." And it was. She looked, all round and just, I don't know…I couldn't really describe it. But I knew I liked it, and whether it was because it was Sookie or it was my baby that was in there I couldn't tell you, but right now every fibre in my being was telling me I needed to have sex with her. I just hoped Sookie was feeling the same way.

"Is it?" she asked.

"Yeah. It is." I kept my hands moving over her body, feeling where it had changed. It was endlessly fascinating. Who knew this could happen?

"Eric?" Sookie asked. "Eric, do you want to have sex?"

I looked at her. I wasn't sure whether that was an invitation or the start of her shutting me out. I kept my hands where they were and decided that honesty was the best policy. "Yes. Yes I do. Very fucking much."

"OK then."

"OK?"

"Yeah, I do too. I didn't for a while there…"

"You felt shitty."

"I did. And then…well, everything happened and we were being careful…"

"Yeah."

"But I think it's OK now. I think he's staying in there."

"It's probably nice in there. I don't blame him" I said. Sookie laughed at that.

"But it won't be weird, will it? Because there is someone in there? Tell me now if you think it will be weird."

I thought for a minute, would it be weird? I ran a hand over her stomach. "No. No, I don't think it's weird. I mean…it's supposed to be like this, isn't it? We're not supposed to stop…loving each other just because we did this before. And it worked."

"No, no we're not."

"So, OK then. Lie down."

Sookie lay on the bed and I pulled off the stretchy pants she was wearing, along with her underwear. I lay down next to her and just ran my hand across her boobs and down her stomach. She was all curves now. She was soft and she was amazing.

Sookie looked at me. "I think you have to be naked too" she said.

"OK" I agreed.

I pulled off my t-shirt and kicked off my jeans and underwear and lay back down. Sookie looked nervous. "Just, um…just tell me if I hurt you, OK?" I said to her. "I haven't…well, we haven't done this before. Not with the bump anyway."

"Yeah, you're good so far" Sookie said smiling.

I moved down the bed and parted her legs. I kissed up the inside of each of her thighs and then placed my mouth on her clit. Sookie moaned, and arched slightly which made her bump stick up a lot more. I wondered how it was going to look in a few months' time. And then I decided I'd concentrate on more important things.

It felt really good to be doing this again with Sookie. To make her moan, and writhe around and say my name. To make her happy.

After she came, with a great shudder, I moved back up the bed to lie next to her. "OK?" I asked.

"Better than OK" she grinned. Yeah, she was definitely happy. "How are you?' she asked.

"Pretty fucking horny" I said, taking one of her nipples into my mouth. I kneaded the other one with my hand. Yeah, they were fantastic.

"Um" Sookie said. "I think I'll have to be on top. Because of the baby."

"Sure" I said. I wasn't really disappointed.

"Still OK?" I asked, as Sookie lowered herself onto me.

"Uh-huh" she said as she started to move. "Really, really, really OK". Yeah, fuck. I loved this. I loved being inside Sookie. I loved the look on her face and the way her boobs moved and just fucking everything.

"I don't think I'm going to last long" I confessed, feeling my orgasm building.

"Me neither" Sookie said, as she moved faster until she came again. I followed straight after.

Sookie lent down and kissed my chest. "I love you" she said.

"I love you too" I said, running a hand down her back.

Best fucking Sad Day I'd had yet.

**Thanks for reading!**


	49. Chapter 49

**A/N Um, I don't have a lot to say today. The news from Christchurch is still a bit grim and it's a case of getting through the next few weeks for everyone who's down there. But, on a brighter note, my baby has taken her first steps. Today she brings you the letter Q, which she is fond of hitting on the laptop keyboard. So any random q's are not my doing (sure it's probably mean to blame a baby, but it's true!).**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

It felt a bit like we were getting back to normal. Well, if your normal includes the fact you are doomed to wearing jeans with big elastic panels in them because your arse won't fit in anything else.

Even Sad Day wasn't as sad as I thought it was going to be. That probably made me a bad person. Sure, I thought about what it might be like if Bill was still here. It could quite possibly be horrible if he'd spent the last two year's on drugs. It could have been uncomfortable, if he'd pulled himself together a bit and was, say, around for Amelia's dance recitals. Sitting behind Eric and me. Or maybe it could have been…well, kind of lonely. For me, anyway. If we'd gone back to the way things were before, tried to patch it up and try again. Maybe not lonely, because most of the time we got on OK, as long as we weren't discussing his family of course. But it would have been empty somehow. Something would have been missing.

Eric would have been missing in that scenario.

And that was the thing, I didn't want to go back to the way it was before. I didn't want to trade Eric for Bill, not even Bill at his best.

So while I was sad for Bill on Sad Day. And sad for Lorena. And sad for Amelia and Felicia. I wasn't really sad for me anymore. I was doing OK. I'd come through. I was the one who got the new beginning, after all.

And part of that new beginning was the baby.

It was nice to finally allow myself to think that the baby was going to be here. I'd spent those first 13 weeks trying so hard not to get attached, just in case I miscarried. You tell yourself it will be OK, happens to lots of women, it's just one of those things. But all the while you're feeling sick and disgusting and just hoping that it's not for nothing.

And then of course we had the scan and it looked as though things might be so very different than what we'd planned.

But now. Well, now the sickness had gone and the baby hadn't. And I was thankful for that; despite the fact it meant my boobs were enormous now and only going to get bigger. Buying a maternity bra, or trying to buy one, had turned into a trial. The shop assistants had all been a bit flustered and I'd just felt like a freak. It wasn't a lot of fun.

And then I made the mistake of mentioning it to Eric. The vain part of me didn't want him to think of me as a great hulking monstrosity. He wanted to see, of course, because its boobs and they're endlessly fascinating if you don't have your own pair.

So I let him see, which led to touching, and led on to…well, to sex. Which we hadn't had in a while. It was lovely, being together again, after the rather crappy time we'd been having. And it seemed to bring down some of the barriers there'd been between us, when I'd been sick and when I'd been heart-broken. Eric had been a bit wary of me, treating me like I was a bomb about to go off at any moment. But now, well, now I was back to being the entertainment during all the ad breaks on TV. I kind of liked it.

Not that I'd let Eric in on that one. Instead I squirmed and tried to swat him away, and pulled grumpy faces and told him to keep his hands to himself. None of it bothered Eric.

It was nice to have a non-bothered Eric around the place again. I could put up with the odd boob-grab for that.

EPOV

Sometimes it's good to work for yourself, and not have a bunch of fuckers like Clancy and Victor breathing down your neck and watching everything you're doing. Especially when it comes to the time you're spending on the internet.

It wasn't the case that I wasn't doing any actual work. I was still seeing clients, still putting together proposals and recommendations and presentations, still liaising with contacts from both banks I now dealt with to see what prospects they could send my way.

But when I wasn't doing any of that, well, I was in the middle of a lot of research. I researched cars and tried to work out what was going to be the best choice there given we needed a certain amount of space. And it needed to be safe. I spent a lot of time looking at realtor's websites to view the houses they had listed. Most of them were going to auction, which told me fuck all about the price they wanted and mostly the realtors just talked vaguely about current valuations, which always fucking meant they wanted at least another 200 grand on top of that.

And then to top it all off, I was busy researching maternity lingerie, something I'd only just discovered existed. It had taken me a while to pry out of Sookie exactly what size they'd measured her at, she'd been reluctant to tell me because apparently 'it was a ridiculous size that only porn-stars should ever have to wear'. But it obviously wasn't that ridiculous a size because I found a couple of New Zealand websites who carried plenty of stock in that size.

Sookie always scorned shopping off the internet because she thought you could never get what you wanted. Well this kind of proved her wrong. But maybe I wouldn't gloat.

Too much.

The really interesting thing was that in looking at all these sites I finally figured out how the things worked. There were clips, and panels and the upshot was you could pull the front down. That was kind of a neat trick. And not something you'd want to be researching in an office full of other guys.

It was also something that probably required some hands-on investigation. All the time that Sookie had been wearing those really ugly bras I hadn't realised their hidden design features. And, sure, it was a design feature that wasn't put there for my benefit alone, but it was one I was going to take advantage of, that's for fucking sure.

We were sitting on the couch watching one of those crime shows that always seem to be on, every night of the fucking week, when a commercial break started. Sookie, who'd been leaning on me up until that point, started inching away slowly.

I turned to look at her. "Where are you going, Sookie?" I asked.

"Um, nowhere. But, you know the other side of the couch looks empty…Oi! What are you doing under there?"

I'd had one arm around Sookie's back and I'd manage to work it so it was under her t-shirt. When I reached her bra she really started wriggling in earnest, but actually, I'm pretty sure that just helped me get that clip thing undone.

"Hey! You're not supposed to do that!" Sookie complained as I got a handful of boob.

"I don't see why not" I said, trying to settle back without letting go of her.

"But…but, it's for feeding not for groping!"

"Shh! Quiet. Look, the show's started again" I said, trying to direct Sookie's attention back to the TV and away from what I was doing.

She sighed, and she huffed, and she squirmed a bit, but in the end she gave up. I was pretty sure she liked it. Later on I discovered just how much she did like it.

SPOV

The sickness may have gone, but I was still kind of at the mercy of my hormones. Stupid hormones.

It was definitely my hormones that decided it was perfectly OK for Eric to hijack my maternity bra and use it to get a better grope in on Tuesday night when the ads came on. Stupid ads. Stupid Eric and definitely stupid hormones. Didn't they realise I was already pregnant and no amount of sex was going to make extra babies at this point?

Clearly they didn't. Because they thought that sex was a really good idea about now. Sunday night when Eric had asked to look at my boobs, I'd indulged him. But of course he'd wanted to touch as well, and that touch, well, I really wanted to have sex with him after he touched me.

Stupid boobs.

I'd worried after that though, that maybe we'd jumped the gun a bit. After all it was only a week earlier that I'd had that big needle stuck into me. I didn't want to jeopardise anything. But Monday came and went and nothing happened. The baby was fine.

And then on Tuesday Eric taught himself how to work a maternity bra. Of course he would. My hormones all jumped up and down and yelled 'yay!' in the background at the prospect of more sex. Well, they would, wouldn't they? It's like having a bunch of sex-starved teenagers in control of your body.

Eric's grip on my boob didn't loosen until it was time for bed and he reluctantly moved his hand away. "I don't think there's much wrong with the bras you have got" Eric said.

"Yeah, apart from the fact I can't get my fist into them. I need to be able to get a fist into the cup to allow for the milk to come in." I pulled up my t-shirt, reattached the front of the bra and demonstrated for him.

"Oh. That big?" he asked me, still staring at where I'd tried to shove my hand into a cup.

I shrugged. "Perhaps. It's the rule of thumb, anyway. OK bedtime." I hauled myself off the couch, which was getting a bit more difficult to do these days. Eric helped by putting a hand on my bum and shoving. And maybe squeezing slightly. I turned around and glared at him, but he didn't look repentant at all.

I shuffled off to the bathroom while Eric checked on everything around the house. I'd been banned from doing it since the incident with the keys left in the door. Of course that was the time Eric found them before we went to bed, he didn't know about the first time it had happened when I'd found the keys stuck out there the next morning. Yeah. Luckily we obviously don't have gangs of burglars roaming Mt Eden looking for easy targets. Or, if we do, they had that night off. Either way, leaving your keys in the outside of the door is not a good move and Eric had appointed himself in-charge of household security and I was leaving him to it.

By the time Eric arrived and told me that he'd had to move Felicia back under the covers of her bed and she'd half-woken up to tell him goodnight, before falling asleep again, I was ready for bed. But maybe not ready for sleep.

Eric wandered into the bathroom. I was by now kind of used to the fact that he didn't feel the need to shut the door, so I gave him a minute or two to use the toilet, because there were limits to how much I wanted to share, even with Eric. But when he moved on to brushing his teeth I figured he was fair game.

Well he had been groping me all night.

As I walked back into the bathroom Eric turned his head to watch me, but didn't say anything. Possibly because he had a toothbrush stuffed in his mouth of course. I stood behind him and grabbed his backside. Eric probably squirmed less than I did when I got groped. He may have even wiggled a bit.

So I got a bit bolder, and I snuck a hand between his legs, which Eric obligingly moved apart for me, and ran a hand across his balls. Eric kind of shivered, but he didn't say anything. He just spat toothpaste into the sink. So I did it again. And then I lost my nerve and ran into the bedroom to get into bed. Stupid hormones. It was all their idea.

Eric followed me after a minute. "So are you going to give me a head start then?" he asked, coming through the door.

"What?" I asked.

"Well, you know. If you want to chase me around for a bit."

I snorted. "Yeah, I don't think so. Jeez, if I gave you a head start I'd never catch you."

"Well…" Eric said thoughtfully. "I could go really slooooowly."

"I think you're missing the point. I'm not chasing you round." I folded my arms under my bust.

"That makes your boobs look really big" Eric commented, sizing me up. "That's pretty much an invitation." He got onto the bottom of the bed and started crawling up it towards me.

"Um. I don't know where you got that idea" I said, all the while cursing my stupid hormones who were practically doing a Mexican wave in the background.

Eric reached me, which didn't take long given the bed wasn't that big really, and then he stretched out alongside me. "Sookie" Eric said quietly. "There was a serious amount of groping going on in the bathroom tonight. I can distinctly remember butt-groping, and, if I'm not mistaken, there was some ball-cupping as well."

"Yeah…I don't think it was that bad…" I said.

"Oh, it wasn't bad, Sookie. It was very, very nice in fact", Eric ran his hand lightly over my arm.

"You can't keep your hands to yourself, can you?" I asked him.

Eric shrugged the shoulder he wasn't leaning on. "I think you'll find it was you getting all touchy-feely just now."

"Well…" I said, watching Eric's hand as it started creeping away from my arm and towards my boob. "I was just giving you a taste of your own medicine, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and all of that."

"I hate to break it to you, Sookie, but I wasn't groping you in the bathroom." Eric's hand was very gently stroking the front of my breast.

"Phft. You spent all night groping me in the living room."

"Ah. Now that was just an investigation into the, um…well, into the engineering achievements in modern lingerie manufacturing."

"Yeah, right. You were grabbing my boob, Eric, and using my maternity bra for your own purposes there."

"Mmm. But you liked it." Eric moved to nuzzle my neck. I sighed a bit, but I didn't disagree. It was true. I had kind of liked it. "I liked that you liked it" Eric murmured into my neck. "I liked it that you liked it so much you couldn't keep your hands off me."

I opened my mouth to protest, but Eric kissed me instead. I definitely liked that. I just melted back into the pillows and gave up thinking for a bit.

"It's nice that we like each other" I whispered, when Eric let me up for air.

"It is" Eric agreed, looking at me. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead he just brushed some hair out of my eyes. After a while he said "And what else would you like?"

"Sex" I said, without hesitation. The hormones had kind of taken over at that point.

"OK" Eric said. "I'd like that too." And then there was a lot less talking about what we liked and a lot more actually doing the stuff we liked. Having broken the ice on Sunday night, this was a lot less frantic and a lot slower and more tender. It was lovely. I had a fleeting moment of self-consciousness when I had to climb on top of Eric, I could have done with hiding myself away in the missionary position about now, but the baby bump didn't really allow that. And quite frankly, I had more lumps and bumps than I cared to count.

But Eric pushed himself up so he was sitting too, and lent forward to kiss me. "I've missed you" he said. And then I stopped worrying and just let the hormones do what they wanted for a while.

Of course, there were a few things I should have been worrying about. Like, where Amelia's curiosity about baby-making had gone. Since Friday she'd been quiet on the matter. But it wasn't going to last.

I made the mistake of wearing a t-shirt that was probably a bit too tight for me now around home on Thursday evening. I had been doing some ironing, followed by cooking dinner so I wasn't exactly dressing to impress. I certainly didn't impress Amelia.

"Your tummy's really big!" she complained, standing in the kitchen, looking me up and down.

I looked down. "Yeah, but it'll get bigger" I said, pushing the stir-fry around in the wok.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Don't you remember?" I asked her.

She looked thoughtful. "A little. But I don't remember that you were really big… that'll really happen?"

"It really will."

"Huh. I remember…Felicia looked funny when she was born. And she cried. A lot! I used to hear you at night."

"Did you?" I asked. I wasn't sure whether she really had or not. She'd appeared out of bed a few times, but most of the time she slept pretty soundly.

"Yeah…I think so. I remember you there, and I remember you feeding her…hey, it was just us, wasn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"No Eric."

"No. No, Eric."

"So…what about the seed? And the magic cuddle? Hey, you said you were going to tell me that. And you didn't!"

Oh. Poo. Yeah, it was all my fault for enjoying the fact she'd forgotten for a little while, and not daring to bring it up again myself. Bad mummy, obviously. "Um..." I said, moving over to get out the plates for dinner. "Well, I bought you a book…" Just then Eric arrived in the kitchen and asked if he needed to get Felicia to wash her hands.

Amelia turned around to look at him. "Mum's going to tell me how babies are made" she announced.

Eric looked a little pale. "OK" he said slowly. "But it's dinnertime, right?"

"Right" I agreed. "So we'll talk about it later, Amelia. At bedtime."

Amelia sighed. "But I want to know NOW!"

"The facts of life aren't going to change in the next hour or so, Ames" Eric said to her.

"What facts?" Amelia asked, utterly confused. "I want to know about babies, and how the magic cuddle gets the seed in there" she pointed at my stomach. "You know" she continued "The seed that makes an egg into a baby." She glanced up at Eric, who was still looking kind of pale. "You _do_ know, don't you?"

"Um. Yeah." Eric didn't sound convinced.

"Mmm" Amelia said. "I think Mum better tell me because I'm not sure you know."

"Yeah, we'll talk about it at bedtime" I said. "There's a book we can read."

"We already read _There's a House inside My Mummy_, that doesn't show how the baby got in there." Yeah, that was the book she'd been happy with when I was pregnant with Felicia, and it was working for Felicia this time around, although I thought she was still pretty oblivious to what was happening.

"It's a different book, now go and wash your hands please."

"Fine!" she huffed, and then she flounced out of the kitchen.

"Um, are you sure it's a good idea? For her to know?" Eric asked me.

I shrugged. "What am I supposed to do? She keeps asking, and we've gone so far down that road now I think I have to go through with it before she adds anymore more weird imagery to what she does know. If she asks another kid she could end up hearing anything. I don't want her to be one of those kids who are the last to know." Or the first to know. That wasn't ideal either, although at least she didn't have an older brother to spill the beans.

"Yeah, but she's not exactly…um, discreet…" I could see Eric was imagining he'd be the recipient of many lectures on baby-making, and I didn't think he really fancied telling her that he was there at the conception to shut her up. Eric may have been OK with leaving the bathroom door open, but I guessed even he had limits to the amount he wanted to share.

"I'll talk to her, and swear her to secrecy. Don't worry. Now, go and make sure that Amelia is actually washing her hands and not just standing there singing into the mirror, and grab Felicia and get her to do hers too, OK?"

"Yep. OK." Eric left the kitchen and I finished dishing up dinner.

We made it through dinner without Amelia getting back onto the subject, mainly because I asked her what happened at school and she went into a long story about how Sebastian didn't believe that giraffes had spots and she'd had to correct him. I almost felt sorry for Sebastian.

Felicia only interjected occasionally, and mainly contented herself by eating stir-fry with her hands, which takes a long time. Eric kept trying to tempt her to use a spoon, but she wasn't buying it, and in the end it was just easier to let her pick up individual noodles and florets of broccoli.

After their bath I could hear Amelia telling Felicia that she was getting a special book tonight. "You can't see it!" she said to her sister.

"No story?" Felicia asked Eric worriedly.

"We're still reading a story, Leesh" Eric assured her. "But, um, Amelia's doing a different story. With Mummy."

"Tiger story?" Felicia asked.

"No, it's about babies!" Amelia told her.

"Oh." Yeah, to Felicia that sounded lame, as long as she wasn't missing out on _The Tiger who Came to Tea_ or anything, she was good.

I kissed her goodnight and sent her off with Eric, and then Amelia and I headed into her bedroom and sat on the bed. I got out the book I'd bought her and we read through it. Twice. Just to make sure.

It was a nice book, and, I hoped, pitched at the right level; quite specific but not so in-depth as to give Amelia ideas she didn't really need right now. It mentioned animals and humans and talked about private places on your body. That was quite a useful bit, I thought.

After the second read-through Amelia was a bit quiet. "So, do you understand Amelia?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said quietly.

"And you understand that there's, um, parts of your body that are private and that you don't share with everyone?"

"Yeah" she said, squirming a little bit.

"So, um any questions?" I asked, hoping she'd say no. Instead she bit her lip and looked thoughtful. "But…Eric wasn't here?" she said in the end.

"When?"

"When you had me. It wasn't Daddy here; it was…the other Daddy. The one who left." She turned to me, realisation dawning on her face. "You did _that_…" she said, pointing to the cover of the book, "…with two daddies. Because there has to be a daddy and a mummy…" She looked at me and I nodded. "So there were two daddies here, and you made babies, with the magic cuddle. With both of them!" Amelia looked kind of horrified at my sluttiness, and I wasn't feeling that great about myself either.

"Um…yes." I finally said. "But they weren't here at the same time…" Thank God, I thought.

"But…you said it's _private_, and it's for special people only to do together. But you did it with two people. So they can't both be special!"

"Well…they sort of can…" I wasn't really sure how to explain it all to her. The mechanics of sex was one thing, but trying to explain attraction, falling in and out of love, and moving on with your life after a painful breakup were really not subjects I wanted to go into with a 5 year old. I especially didn't want to go into how they all pertained to my life, and, more specifically, my sex life.

"Amelia, I loved your daddy…your first daddy a lot. And because we loved each other we had you. And Felicia. But then…well, he left us. And that doesn't mean I can't love anyone else ever. So now we have Eric, and you have a new daddy, and because I love him I'm having another baby with him." I really hoped that covered it, but Amelia still looked a bit dubious.

We were silent for a minute, both gathering our thoughts, when Eric stuck his head in the door. "All done?" he asked. "I came to say goodnight."

"I think we are" I said, looking to Amelia for confirmation. She looked at me, and then she looked back at Eric. "Did you know about this?" she asked Eric.

"What?"

"How babies are made. That the daddy puts his pe…"

"Yes" Eric answered, very quickly and kind of loudly.

"So you know. That _she_…" Amelia pointed an accusatory finger at me, "…did it with two daddies. When it's private. And for special people. That you love."

Amelia looked at Eric, waiting for his agreement that I was a terrible slut. Eric looked at me, stunned by the whole situation he'd walked into. I looked from one to the other, not sure what to do. This wasn't covered in the book, bugger it. Why did I not look to see if there was a version that mentioned having babies after a second marriage as well?

After a while Eric sat down on the bed and said "I don't think it matters, Ames. I mean, if Sookie hadn't, then, you wouldn't be here. And neither would Felicia. And that would be sad, well, I would be sad about that for one. So I'm kind of grateful that your mom did, um…" he trailed off and looked at me for help. "Um, love someone else."

Amelia looked thoughtful. I was pretty sure she spent a bit of time contemplating a world without Felicia in it, but I was fairly sure that a world without her in it was beyond the pale. For one thing, poor Sebastian would have been wandering round all confused about giraffes.

"Amelia, I wouldn't worry so much about it tonight. Just remember that we love you very much, we love Felicia and we love the new baby too. You're all very special to us and that's the important thing" I said, putting my arm around her. Eric did the same, so she was sandwiched in between us.

Amelia sighed. "OK" she said. "I guess."

"So if you have other questions, you can ask me sometime, and we can always look at the book again, but just remember that it's not something to talk about at school, the other mummies and daddies will want to tell their children themselves, OK?"

"OK" Amelia said again.

"And we won't tell Felicia, either. This is something just for big girls, who go to school" I added.

"She is very little" Amelia agreed.

"And now it's time for bed, I think" Eric said. Amelia lay down and we both kissed her goodnight. I just hoped that I hadn't put a whole bunch of ideas in her head that were going to keep her awake all night.

Still, at least she hadn't heard the Jason Stackhouse version of how babies were made. That was really scary.

I walked out of Amelia's room and then I headed to our room to drop off the book. Eric followed me. "Do you think it was the right call?" I asked him, as I sat on our bed. "I'm a bit worried now that I've done it too soon. But she kept asking, and I heard it all from Jason when I was about 6 or 7 and that freaked me out, so…I don't know…maybe you were right earlier."

Eric sat next to me. "I think it'll be fine" he said.

"Really? I wish I had your confidence on the matter."

Eric shrugged. "She's young. She'll cope."

"What? With finding out her mother is a slut?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't think you're a slut, Sookie" Eric said, putting his arm around me.

"Even though the proof I had sex with someone else is currently sleeping in the two other bedrooms."

"Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it" Eric said slowly.

"Well, I think that's how Amelia sees it."

"Could be worse, I guess" Eric said. "At least she thinks you've only done it three times."

I turned to look at him. And then I burst out laughing. "Oh, she probably does too!"

"Yeah, she has NO idea you're chasing me round every night."

"What? Oh Eric, you do have an imagination" I said, still giggling slightly.

"No, I'm really not imagining that Sookie. I'm pretty sure that's actually happening. Does it say anything in that informative book of yours about what I should do?"

"Um, no. No, I think you're on your on your own with that one, mate" I said, mustering as much sympathy as I could for him.

Eric sighed. "Then I guess I'll just have to take it like a man then" he said, flopping back onto the bed, and putting his hands behind his head. "Go on, Sookie. Do your worst. Show me what you learned from that book."

I stayed where I was, sitting on the edge of the bed, and just looked at him. "Really, Eric?"

"I have a very hard life Sookie. You have no idea."

I didn't want to, but I giggled. "It's very, very hard Sookie" Eric said, shaking his head. I giggled some more. And then I did give him his very own demonstration of Sookie's baby-making techniques.

**Thanks for reading!**


	50. Chapter 50

**A/N 50 chapters, huh? Boy, Sookie and Eric do waffle on a bit, don't they :) Rest assured, at some point in the near future we will skip a bit of time of the pregnancy, once we've got the initial adjustments to it under control and it's business as usual. Then when this stories done, well I have LOTS of ideas. Really, tons of them. But I am always open to suggestions. Lots of what I have written has been suggested by things people have said in reviews or elsewhere, so feel free to have your say and let me know if there's anything you want to read about. I wouldn't have got this far without you guys all sticking with these characters so I'm more than happy to return that favour and share with you what I know about their history. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but they do tell me all their secrets!**

EPOV

Friday started off kind of good, when a couple of delivery guys arrived at the office with all the lingerie I'd ordered for Sookie. When I sized up the packages I realised there was every possibility I'd gone fucking over-board, but I wasn't sure what she'd like, and figured she could maybe send some back. Plus, of course, it was good to show her just how much was available on the internet, if you actually looked for it.

I was reaping the benefits of Sookie's sudden change in sex-drive. Every time I thought I had the hang of this pregnancy thing, it all changed on me. One minute Sookie was falling asleep on the couch every night and the next she wants to jump me as soon as I look at her. I didn't really want to complain, but I was definitely the one who was feeling tired now. Fuck, the last time we'd had this much sex I hadn't been working, it had been in that nice vacation period we'd had when I first arrived. I hadn't had to get up and go to work every fucking day. It was taking it out of me.

Although it was pretty cool all the same. The bump certainly made it interesting and meant we'd had to try a few different positions. I was getting really attached to that bump. I'd come home on Thursday and Sookie had been wearing a very tight t-shirt and it was suddenly so prominent and just, there. Fuck. I kind of hoped she'd go out like that, because, really, I was fucking proud of that bump. I figured I'd had quite a bit to do with its existence, after all. I guess it was proof of my virility or something, but whatever it was, I fucking liked it.

So I hadn't exactly been doing a lot of work in the office on Friday morning. Mostly I'd been making use of my unlimited coffee refills from the café next door, and I'd been reading up on car safety reports, which was about all my brain could handle. I was fucking grateful I hadn't set up any client meetings all over Auckland, like I had the previous week. So I was kind of glad of the break when the realtor I'd been dealing with, Maudette Pickens, called me and asked if I wanted to view some properties with her. I figured I might as well, given I was actually getting fuck all done in the office.

I walked up to Maudette's office in the Village and she grabbed a pile of papers and some keys and we headed out to her car which was parked around the back.

"So have you been to many open homes yet, Eric?" she asked me, as she started the car.

"No. Not really. I…uh, well I just haven't had the time." Plus the fact it was going to be fucking hard to hide the fact I was doing that from Sookie on a Saturday.

"Well, they can be very busy of course. It's probably just as easy to take a look around when there's no one else there."

We were quiet for a while and I looked out the window of the car. Really, the first clue I got that maybe Maudette hadn't quite absorbed my requirements for a house was when we drove along Mt Eden Road and right past the end of our street, heading up the hill and continuing on past the big Mt Eden sign on the side of the road.

Yeah, maybe Maudette hadn't quite grasped what it was I actually wanted. Eventually she pulled into the driveway of a large bungalow with a very manicured front garden. I got out of the car and looked around.

"What suburb is this, Maudette?" I asked her, across the roof of the car.

"Oh, um. Well, it's Eden/Epsom border, really…."

"Uh-huh. What's the high school zone?"

"Oh. Well it's in-zone for Three Kings Primary school, and, um…Onehunga High…"

"Yeah. Not this one, then. Let's see the next one." I got back in the car.

"You don't even want to go in?" Maudette asked me, leaning into the car.

"Nope" I said. She got in and we set off again.

We drove on and ended up in the next road up from where we currently lived, looking at an almost identical bungalow. Sure, it was one street closer to the Mt Eden village, but I couldn't really see the point.

I did look through this one with Maudette though, and spent the time trying to ignore her rather enthusiastic chatter about how lovely the crown mouldings were. That may have been the case, but the renovations that had been done here were pretty crappy and the fourth bedroom was actually what Maudette called a sleep-out, which translated to a shed in the back garden. Yeah, no fucking point at all.

After that she took me to see what she described as a villa. It looked lovely from the outside, and was certainly more in the area I was interested in, but it had three fucking bedrooms, and when I asked about the possibility of extending it, Maudette got a little evasive and started talking about heritage streets. So we could scratch that one off the list too.

The next property was a villa as well, and it had already been renovated to a very, very high standard. It was beautiful, high ceilings, good-quality bathroom fittings. I was particularly taken with the size of the shower. It was everything I wanted.

But the price was fucking out of this world too. We'd be mortgaged to the fucking hilt, and that was assuming a bank was going to lend us that much money in the first place, given we were both self-employed.

The last property we looked at was a brand-new house they'd built in the middle of Mt Eden. The area looked OK, and the only problem seemed to be the huge pile of mud in the section next door which was about to be turned into a identical house to the one I was viewing.

"Now, I think, Eric" Maudette said, as we walked in "That you'll like this one. It has five bedrooms, two living areas, chef's kitchen, great indoor-outdoor flow and it's in the Grammar zone." She looked a little smug at finally having met all my requirements.

I wandered past the kitchen. I couldn't really tell if it was indeed a chef's kitchen, but everything looked pretty new and shiny. I carried on through the family room and stopped at the bi-fold doors that led to the backyard. Except that it wasn't a backyard. It was a paved courtyard, and the wall started about 10 feet from the fucking door.

I opened it and stepped outside. "So you get the, uh, morning sun out here" Maudette droned on, having followed me out. "Be nice sitting out here, having your morning coffee, wouldn't it?"

I looked down the side of the house. There was a narrow strip of grass with some stepping stones on it, and nothing else.

"There's no backyard" I said, walking back to Maudette.

"Oh, well there's no upkeep, is there?" she said, smiling brightly. "Much easier in the long term."

"Yeah, except that I have three kids, a trampoline and a playhouse that I have to find some space for. And this isn't enough space. There isn't even a washing line." I figured Sookie would be pleased I was noticing stuff like that. Once upon a time it never would have occurred to me to even fucking check, but times had changed, and fuck knows I didn't want to spend half of fucking winter living in a Chinese laundry because Sookie hated the dryer and we had to hang all the clothes inside.

"Oh, well you could put one in down the side there" Maudette said, helpfully, gesturing to where I'd just looked.

"Yeah, I don't think that will work. What else can you show me?"

Maudette looked a bit stunned. I guess she'd obviously thought that she'd found a winner with this place. "Um, well…" she shuffled through her sheets of paper. "Um…I'd have to check with a few other people and see if there are some others we could view…"

"You know what? Let's just call it quits for today. I need to get back to work."

"Oh, OK." We walked back through the house and Maudette locked it up, before we got back in her car and drove the couple of minutes back to her offices.

As we got out of the car, Maudette seemed to compose herself. "So, I'll keep an eye out for other properties in the area, shall I? And let you know when I have some others to view?"

I walked around the car to stand beside her. "You, uh, you get commission if you sell me a house, don't you Maudette?" I asked.

"Yes" she answered, slowly.

"Great" I replied, thinking that for once something in this fucking country made sense. "So let me give you something to help you." I pulled a sheet of paper out of my pocket. It was a map of an area of Mt Eden I'd printed out before I left to meet her.

"Can I borrow your pen?" I asked Maudette and she handed it over. I drew a circle around part of the map and wrote some prices on there. "This" I said, handing the paper to Maudette "Is where I want to live, and that's my price-range. Give me a call when you have something that meets those requirements."

Maudette studied what I'd given her. "That's not going to be easy, Eric" she said, looking back up at me.

I gave her the best smile I could manage under the circumstances. "Well, it wouldn't be the same, would it, if you didn't have to earn that commission?"

Maudette sighed, and I was pretty sure she was thinking a whole range of less than pleasant thoughts about me in that moment, but, fuck it; it might be a hard ask, but it wasn't an impossible one. Somewhere out there was a house for us.

I checked my phone on the walk back to the office. There was a message from Sookie, saying she'd rung the doctor's offices and got the full results of the CVS, which were all clear. Sam didn't have anything wrong with him. Well, nothing that showed up with any of the genetic tests they'd done, anyway.

I grabbed another coffee before I unlocked the office and sat back down at my desk. I still didn't really feel like doing any work and now, I just felt a bit…well, useless. Sam would be here in about…I tried to work it out in my head. In about 25 weeks anyway. Fuck. I really wanted to be doing something, anything to get ready for that.

I switched the computer back on. Maybe I'd concentrate on the car issue for now, I thought.

SPOV

I was slowly getting into the swing of hanging out with just Felicia again. Although slow didn't exactly describe anything Felicia wanted to do. Felicia wanted to pelt full speed through St Luke's when I went there to do some errands and it's not easy to chase her when you're carrying two of Eric's suits, a bag of library books and a baby. It wouldn't have been so bad if she'd at least pretend to be contrite when I finally caught up with her, but honestly, I think she just thought I was lame for not catching her quicker.

And then after we'd changed our library books, and dropped off the dry-cleaning and been to the chemist shop and wandered through Farmers to start stocking up on winter clothes for her and Amelia, well mainly Amelia, Felicia decided she was tired and needed to be carried for a bit.

It was actually all very, very familiar. I remembered that Amelia had been pretty much at the same stage when I was pregnant with Felicia. Now she was less interested in running away from me and far more interested in how babies were made. After the big revelation the night before she seemed to have dropped the subject, although I caught her glancing at me a few times over breakfast and I was pretty sure she still thought I was a slut. I wasn't sure how we were going to get past that one; I couldn't change what had happened for a start. We'd all just have to live with it.

You would think that running around a mall would have worn Felicia out, but it didn't, so naptime was a no-go this Friday, which was a pain in the bum, quite frankly. Mummy wanted a sit down and a nice cup of tea while watching TV. Mummy did not want to have to go out and play in the back garden.

Thankfully Riley appeared and I could dump Felicia over the fence for a bit and sit and chat to Halleigh. Ruby was walking now and followed Felicia around. Felicia looked annoyed at that, and kept saying "Go 'way baby!" to her. Yeah, being Amelia's little sister had definitely taught her to be kind and caring, that's for sure.

I'd had the final results back from the CVS and they were fine. These ones were for the really rare conditions, the ones very few people knew their baby had until it was born. But our baby didn't. We were very lucky.

Felicia and I picked Amelia up from school and I hoped I wouldn't hear any stories about her having told all the other kids how babies are made. She still seemed to have forgotten that conversation entirely, or maybe she was pretending it had never happened, but at any rate she had another concern. She'd just figured out that while she was at school, Felicia was home with me, some of the time anyway.

"Did Felicia go to daycare today?" she asked me, as we were walking across the school playground towards the gate.

"No, we went to St Luke's" I replied.

"Really? But I was at school."

"Yeah. You go to school every day of the week. Like Daddy goes to work."

Amelia thought about that one for a minute. "But you don't go to work every day?" she asked.

"No" I replied. "Sometimes I stay home."

"With Felicia?"

"With Felicia. She's too little for school."

"And you stay home to look after her?"

"Yeah."

"And…um, do the washing?"

"Yeah." I hoped I was making it all sound really boring and not like we were having a good time without her, at all.

"And you'll stay home with the new baby too?"

"Yeah. I will. The new baby will definitely need me; I'll probably have to stop going in to work for a while." I really needed to sort out some cover for that.

"Because the baby will be really little?"

"Yeah."

"Because it has to come out of your vagina?" Amelia asked, quite loudly. There was another mother nearby who turned around at that. Thankfully she wasn't anyone I knew.

"Yes, but that's…well, that's not something you really have to announce to everyone."

Amelia frowned. "Why?" she asked.

"Well, they know where a baby comes out, so, um, it's just not something we talk about."

"Well, if they _know_ then why can't we say it?"

Bugger, that kind of stumped me. "We just don't" I tried. "It's not a part of, um, someone's body you really talk about."

"What?" Amelia asked, now completely baffled.

"Vagina" I half-whispered. God, this was worse than dealing with Eric and his whole 'tell me what you want' thing. At least that was in the privacy of our home. Not out in the street.

"But you said it's a body-part, like, you know, your hand or your leg, so we need to use the right word for it. I was just using the right word for it, like you said" Amelia huffed.

"Fine, Amelia" I replied, hoping she'd drop the subject.

"Vagina's _just_ a word" Amelia tried. We'd talked about that when we'd gone through the book together. I'd tried not to make a big deal out of it all, but somehow she now thought it was all fair game.

"Yes, but it's the word to describe a private place on your body. And part of keeping it private is not shouting vagina at the top of your voice!" I was getting a bit loud now.

"I'm not shouting. _You're _shouting" Amelia huffed back at me. "You're shouting vagina!"

I decided to let that one go. It was pretty clear I wasn't going to win. Felicia, who had been trotting along in front of Amelia and I, turned around at that point. "'gina?" she asked. "'gina?"

Yeah, really wasn't going to win today.

After we'd all trudged home, I had to persuade Amelia to take off her school uniform, and then she and Felicia disappeared out to the playhouse to play schools. Things were relatively peaceful for about twenty minutes, and I got three-quarters of the way through my cup of tea, before I had to go and reiterate the rules of the playhouse. The trouble was that Amelia was keen on taking full advantage of the fact she was better able to argue her case and in the end, she just argued me into a corner. Felicia was literally sitting in the corner, yelling "'gina!" every so often, which I think was her way of letting us know she wasn't happy with the proceedings, but it was hard to get Amelia to back down once she had an idea in her head.

I ended up reminding Amelia that it was nice to share, tried to remind them that they had to split the playhouse evenly if they weren't going to play the same game, and crawled in so I could help rearrange the furniture to try to ensure it was all equally distributed. It was exhausting. Before I left them to it, I reminded Felicia that she hadn't liked it when Ruby busted into her games, so try not to be too annoying. Felicia just looked blank at that one. I told Amelia that she was the bigger sister and sometimes had to be the bigger person. She looked like she wanted to have a ten minute debate on that topic, so I tried to just back away at that point, with her still talking to me.

I just didn't know how Eric got them all to shut up and behave quite so effectively.

By the end of all of this I was pretty tired, so I rang Eric again. This time he answered his phone. "Can you bring dinner home?" I asked him, "I'm too stuffed to cook."

"Yeah, sure. What do you want me to get?" he asked.

"KFC" I replied. I really, really wanted KFC.

"Really?" Eric asked. "But you never want KFC, Sookie. Are you sure?"

I sighed. "It's not me, it's the baby. The baby wants KFC. I'm just the food delivery mechanism."

"Uh-huh. Sure you are. Well, if that's what you want…"

"What the baby wants, Eric. What _your_ baby, with it's American DNA wants."

"Yeah…OK. I'll buy your story, Sookie. Sure I will."

"It's true!" Eric gave up arguing with me at that point and just said he'd be home soon.

And he did as I'd asked and brought KFC with him. The kids were pretty excited at fast food they didn't normally get arriving in the house, and Bob was very enthusiastic about the smell. So enthusiastic, in fact, that he tried to cut Eric off as he was coming in the front door and Eric's arrival was pretty much announced by the shout of "Fuck OFF, Bob!" from the hallway. Poor Bob, he'd thought all his Christmases had arrived at once and it wasn't his fault that it was being delivered by Eric and not Santa.

Eric didn't say anything else about my choice of food but he did make a comment on how much of it I'd managed to eat, as we were clearing away what was left. "It was the baby, Eric. The baby ate that much of it. Actually, the baby eats a lot. Like you. Shit, how much did you eat as a teenager?" I had a sudden vision of all the food Jason could put away when he was growing up and I wondered if size made a difference. Eric could eat a fair amount now…so, crap. I might be doomed to having one of those houses where the teenage boy ate everything going. My grocery bill was going to be enormous.

"Um…I don't really know" Eric said, shrugging, before he bent down to put some dishes in the dishwasher.

And then I had another thought. "Who fed you, anyway?" I didn't mean it to sound quite that blunt, but if he didn't have a mother and his father was next to useless then what had Eric been eating. I was really curious.

I put some of the leftover chicken on a plate for Bob, who was winding around my legs, while I waited for Eric to answer. He straightened up and stared at the wall. "Well, you know.." he began. "I, uh, well I fed myself. I liked cornflakes. I ate a lot of sandwiches. TV dinners. And then, you know, I had friends. Their moms would feed me."

"So, what? You just used to follow other guys home from school and stay in the hope you'd get dinner?"

Eric shrugged. "Sometimes. The best ones were the kids who had large families anyway. They didn't normally notice an extra person at dinner."

"Oh, OK." I was suddenly wondering whether I was not only going to give birth to someone who was likely to eat everything in sight, but whether his mates were going to come home with him and help too. I wondered how many loaves of bread you'd have to buy a week.

"Don't worry, Sookie" Eric said, putting his arm around my shoulders. "I don't think Sam's going to come out and start fighting you for the last drumstick."

"Yeah…I guess I've got a few years."

"You can stock the freezer for him."

"Uh-huh. And you know we haven't actually picked a name yet, don't you?" Eric shrugged. "So find the book and we'll make that list." Eric ignored that completely and just asked who was going to put the kids to bed.

As the night wore on Eric started to get antsy about going to bed. I'd done bathtime and story for a change, and afterwards Eric and I had sat in the living room watching TV. But he'd started to ask repeatedly about whether or not we were going to bed soon, and I was really enjoying the program I was watching, and really really enjoying the fact I wasn't nodding off in the middle of it. I'd obviously created a monster by having all that sex with him. Now he was starting to expect it.

"Soon. When this finishes" I told him, when he asked for about the fifteenth time whether it was bedtime yet. He was hopeless. It was like dealing with the kids when they wanted something.

"But there's something I want to show you. In the bedroom" he'd replied.

"I know what it is, and I've seen it. It's very nice, and maybe you can show it to me later on, but, right now, I'm watching this."

Eric pouted a bit. "It's just a stupid cooking show" he mumbled. "There'll be another cooking show on tomorrow night."

"No, this is Masterchef, and if I don't watch I don't find out who's going to be eliminated."

"Well, I'm making coffee then, because that's the only fucking thing that's going to keep me awake for this" Eric wandered off to the kitchen and came back after a while with his coffee and a cup of tea for me. He sighed and looked at the screen. "Has anyone set fire to anything yet?" he asked. "Or cut a finger off?"

"No" I said, "But they had a really interesting trip to the seafood market and now I'm wishing I could eat sashimi again."

"Uh-huh. That's really fascinating, Sookie. Really fucking fascinating."

"Oh, shut up. Not everything has to involve blood, death and gore to be interesting."

"Yeah, but how interesting is it really, watching a housewife from…fuck, I can't even pronounce that place name, roast a chicken. If I'm going to watch anyone roast a chicken I want it to be you, because then at least I'll get to eat the fucking thing at the end of it. This whole show is just a fucking tease."

"Really? You're that hungry? After we had all that KFC for dinner?" I asked Eric. "And she's from Eketahuna. Eh-kit-ah-hoo-nah. It's not that difficult."

"No, I'm not hungry. I just…well, someone ate all the chicken."

"I said it was the baby, and that's the story I'm sticking to."

"You do that Sookie."

We sat there in a silence for a bit, watching the TV and the contestants on Masterchef struggling with their challenge. After a while Eric said "That doesn't look right, what she did to those prawns."

"No" I agreed. "I don't think it is"

"I think she'll be eliminated" Eric said. "She's totally fucked it up now, look."

"Yeah, but the other guy, the weedy one from the Shore, he's going to run out of time to get everything done. He spent too long at the start faffing around with the preparation."

"No, it'll definitely be her. She'll give someone food poisoning and that's bound to do it."

"Well, we'll just wait and see, shall we Eric? I think I know what the judges are looking for."

Bugger it, but he was right. At the end the under-cooked prawns got the slightly tearful woman who cooked them booted off, and the guy who faffed around got to stay. Eric tried not to look too gleeful, but failed miserably.

"What do you want?" I asked him.

"Bedroom. Now" he said, grabbing my hand and pulling him along behind him. I had just enough time to grab the remote and turn the TV off, he wasn't hanging about at all.

Probably because he knew it was Grey's Anatomy on next.

Not that I was really complaining about being dragged off to the bedroom to have sex. I was really, really keen on sex at the moment. I'd heard about the phenomenon of pregnant women getting really horny, but I'd never experienced it myself, until now. It was kind of weird, but kind of nice at the same time.

If I didn't think about what my body looked like, of course.

But when we got to the bedroom I wasn't quite prepared for what was all over the bed. Lingerie, and lots of it, in just about every colour under the sun. I wasn't sure what to say. What good was it going to do me at this point?

I looked at Eric and he was just beaming at me. I figured I'd better say something. "Thank-you" I tried.

"You like it?"

"It's lovely…it's just…" I picked one of the bras up, and suddenly twigged. It was maternity lingerie. All of it. In my stupid, ridiculous, honking great bra size and everything. "Where did it come from?" I asked Eric, still holding the bra I'd picked up.

"Well" Eric began, moving some of the stuff to clear a space so he could sit down on the bed. "There's this wonderful invention called the in-ter-net, Sookie, and people go there to…"

I cut him off. "Yeah, very funny. But you got all this sent over from the States?"

"Nope. It's from New Zealand."

"Really? I didn't know." I didn't either. It never occurred to me to look for stuff on-line, mainly because I could never find anything I liked, or liked when it arrived. I preferred actually seeing and touching what I was spending my money on, and not having to worry about somehow returning it to a warehouse in Palmerston North if it turned out to be totally different to what I thought it was going to be like.

"Yes, see in a small environment like New Zealand, it's a valid distribution strategy to sell on-line, where the overheads are minimal and…"

"Yeah, I get the picture Eric. Thank-you!"

"Well, I'm just making sure you really do, Sookie"

I looked through the stuff laid out on the bed, while Eric watched me. "So…is it OK, then?" he asked me. He sounded slightly less confident than he had when he'd been lecturing me on the wonders of the internet and the New Zealand retail environment.

"Yeah, it's great."

"So…do I get a fashion show, then?"

"You want me to put it all on? For you?"

"Yeah. You'll have to try it on anyway. It'll be like the Victoria's Secret show. Except it's in my bedroom." He got himself into a comfortable position, leaning back against the pillows.

"Yeah, and instead of Heidi whatsherface, you get me. Can you even believe she's had four kids?"

Eric shrugged. "I'd rather have you" he said.

"Yeah, but you're kind of stuck with me now." I pulled off my t-shirt and stared down at the bump. "With both of us."

"Yep."

"And one of us eats a lot."

"Sam won't mind. He might even be proud to have the mother who can put away half a bucket of KFC on her own."

"I didn't eat _that_ much" I mumbled.

"So it wasn't Sam then?" Eric asked.

"Shut up and watch your show" I said, unhooking the rather sad, old, tired bra I was wearing and trying on something in a kind of purple with a lot of lace. "It's really pretty" I said, when I had it on. I looked down to see how it fitted. Actually, pretty well I thought.

"So are you" Eric said. I looked up, expecting to see he'd been staring at my boobs too, but he wasn't. He was looking at my face. Damn him. The heat started behind my eyes.

"Oh no, no lip wobbling, or chewing, or rapid-blinking, or crying, please!" Eric said, coming over to put his arms around me. "These were meant to be cheer-up presents, not make-Sookie-cry presents."

"Sorry" I mumbled into his chest. "They're all lovely. And so are you. And I'm hormonal."

"That's OK" Eric said. "But just, can we get the horny hormones back again, because I liked them better?"

I smiled and looked up him. "Even if I chase you round?"

"Especially if you chase me round. Hey, try on the nightgown." Eric picked up a pink, lace negligee from the pile of stuff on the bed.

"You really like these pull-down cups, don't you, Eric?"

"They are a fucking fantastic invention, Sookie. I think we can both agree on that." I stopped crying and started laughing. And then I tried the nightie on. The cups did indeed pull down.

Later on, as Eric lay behind me in bed, investigating the cups on my new nightie more thoroughly, I thought I'd try to tackle him on the name thing again.

"So I thought of a name, for the list. Despite the fact we can't find the book" I said.

"Mmm?" Eric replied, wiggling his hand in so he could get a better grip on my boob.

"Yeah, Daniel. Then he could be Dan. I like that one. Still not sure about Sam, although I notice you're attached to it." It seemed to come up a lot, but honestly, I thought we could do better.

"Mmm" Eric said, kind of thoughtfully. "It rhymes."

"What?"

"Samuel-Sam and Daniel-Dan. They rhyme."

"Well, we're not going to use them at the same time. They're just, um, options."

"Yeah. But if it just rhymes with Sam I can't see the point of having both of them." Eric started playing with my nipple, which was kind of distracting.

"So, what you're saying is that your choice is better?"

"I just like Sam. It fits him" Eric said, nuzzling my neck. My head was going a bit fuzzy now. He was very distracting. "So these horny hormones of yours" Eric asked "are they still in charge of you?"

"I guess" I said, leaning back so I was pushing my bum against his groin.

"So you'd be up for trying again then?" Eric said, as he started to rub his groin against me.

"You are?" I asked, although there was definitely some evidence he was. "I thought you were complaining you were worn out from running away from me?'

"Mmm, I've got my second-wind I think" Eric said rolling me over to face him, and taking my exposed nipple in his mouth.

"Well, OK then" I replied, forgetting entirely that I was trying to discuss names with Eric. We had a few months though, I figured. It wasn't like we had to decide already. Eventually, we'd find a name for the baby.

**A/N Chemist shop is the name for a pharmacy. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	51. Chapter 51

**A/N Phew this took a while to write today! Hope you all enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Still not mine, but I did make some of them go on a school trip to the zoo.**

SPOV

I think I was more nervous about Amelia and Eric's first school trip than they were. Amelia was so excited she was practically vibrating as I got her ready on Tuesday morning. "I'm going to the zoo!" she shouted at me. "With Daddy!"

"Yes" I agreed, taking the sandwiches I'd made her out of the fridge and putting them in her Disney princess lunchbox.

"We're going to see giraffes! Leesha, we're going to see giraffes. You're not!"

"No da'raffes?" Felicia asked. Yeah, giraffes had never been more popular in our house; Amelia was doing a good job of selling their appeal to her sister.

"Well, maybe you can draw a giraffe at daycare?" I suggested to Felicia. She gave me a look which said my ideas were stupid, and wandered off clutching Sockie.

I finished packing Amelia's backpack and went to check Eric was OK. He'd shunned the idea of taking a packed lunch himself. I hoped he wasn't thinking he'd be able to share Amelia's.

"So are you sorted?" I asked him, when I tracked him down to the bedroom.

"Yeah. It'll be fine. I'm basically just giving some kids a ride there, and then, I don't know, making sure no one climbs into the tiger's enclosure or anything. I think it'll be fine. Don't worry." He went back to searching his bedside table, lifting up books and random pieces of paper. He was on a hunt for either his keys or his phone I figured.

Trouble was that I did worry just a bit. I'd done parent-help the day before for the first time and it was bloody hard work trying to get a table of five year olds to write stories. Sebastian showed zero interest in putting pencil to paper at all, and mostly just stared at the wall. Amelia wanted to know how to spell all sorts of bizarre words and somehow me trying to tell her that her giraffe could just be bright and not fluorescent didn't cut the mustard. Chloe spent twenty minutes chatting to Emily, and then had a bit of a tearful moment when she realised she hadn't done anything and had to be persuaded it was all going to be OK, and then I had to hold her hand as she painstakingly wrote three sentences about her dog. Emily argued with me over whether 'with it' was one word or two. And Maisie just kept saying "Meela's mummy? Meela's mummy? You've got a fat tummy."

It was just lucky that Amelia and I had had another little talk in the weekend and I'd done my utmost to persuade her that private body parts were for talking about at home, and not at school. She looked like she wanted to butt in and tell Maisie a few home truths a few times but she managed to keep her mouth shut. And I got thoroughly sick of the sound of my own voice as I tried to deal with 5 kids who all wanted my attention. Well, except Sebastian. He just looked like he wanted to be left alone. He did produce a lovely picture of a giraffe. With stripes. But he wasn't so hot on the writing.

And all the while I was managing my table of kids I had to keep one eye on Felicia. At least Eric wasn't going to have to worry about her running off, or being too loud, or generally creating mayhem today. Felicia was annoyed about that, but I wasn't sure Eric was. Although I was still convinced he hadn't really grasped just what he was getting himself into. For one thing, I knew the kids had worksheets to complete while they were there. Given my insight into just how miniscule the attention span of some of these kids was, I wasn't sure that Eric wasn't going to be doing a lot of the work.

He stopped picking stuff up and looked at me. "Have you seen my phone?" he asked.

"Was it in the bathroom? I thought I saw it in there."

"Oh. OK." Eric wandered into the bathroom and came out clutching his phone.

Amelia burst in, carrying her backpack. "I'm ready!" she announced. "Are you ready?"

"Um. I think so" Eric said. I was inclined to disagree slightly, but from this point he was kind of on his own.

Felicia came in next and just stood there looking sad until Eric picked her up. "You have a good day at daycare" he said to her. She put her head on his shoulder and looked even more miserable. "I no gonna zoo" she said sadly.

"No, not today. It's for Amelia's class today. The kids who go to school" Eric tried explaining. Felicia wasn't buying it.

"I wenta school yes'day" she said. "Wif Amala."

"We're going to see the giraffes and the hippos and the lions and the zebras and all the animals that live in Africa! But they're in the zoo, aren't they Daddy? And we'll see them!" Amelia was still bouncing around full of excitement and completely oblivious to Felicia's feelings on the matter.

"I wanna see da'raffes" Felicia pouted.

"Um" Eric said, his eyes flicking to me. "Um, well how about I take you to the zoo on Saturday? After soccer?"

"OK" Felicia agreed after a few seconds. And then a grin of pure triumph flashed across her face. Yeah, Eric missed that because she still had her head on his shoulder, but, boy, he'd just been played. Felicia was learning a few things. I was pretty sure that if he could have figured out how to get a giraffe on the internet, one would have been winging its way to our house about now if he thought it would put a smile on Felicia's chubby little face.

Amelia wasn't thrilled about sharing the attention with Felicia. "But we're going _today_ aren't we, Daddy?"

"Yes, we're going today. In fact we're going right now. Bye Leesh." Eric kissed Felicia's head, and put her down on the ground. "Come on, Ames, let's go and find these giraffes."

"Yeah, and lions and zebras and rhinos…"

"Yes, them as well." Amelia grabbed Eric's hand and started dragging him out of the bedroom, well; I guess he was letting her drag him along. Eric managed to slow Amelia down long enough to kiss me briefly, and then the pair of them were off.

EPOV

Amelia was buzzing about the trip to the zoo. It was probably a good thing one of us was excited. Me, I just wanted to get through it and get back to the office. I figured I'd just be driving the kids there and then following them round a bit. Sounded really boring. And now I'd agreed to take Felicia back on Saturday because she was feeling left out of the whole thing. I was probably going to be totally over giraffes pretty soon.

I followed Amelia into her classroom to find it was full of a bunch of other kids who were all displaying similar levels of excitement. Fuck, it was noisier than the fucking zoo in here.

The woman that keeps annoying Sookie came bustling over to me. "Oh, good. You're here" she said to me.

"Yep" I agreed.

"One of the other dads who was supposed to come pulled out at the last minute, saying he had a meeting. Honestly, who can't make time for their children? "

"So is your husband here instead?" I asked.

"What? Oh no. Charles couldn't make it. He's far too flat-out at the moment. It's nearly tax-time of course. That's why I don't work of course, so that one of us is always available. No, Tanya agreed that she'd do it instead."

Tanya came over and I recognised her as the kind of flirty mother from the meeting at the school. "Hi Eric" she said. "Hi Debbie."

"Hi" I replied, wondering if she was going to get into another debate about the risk of alcohol during pregnancy. She didn't, she just stood there for a moment.

Debbie handed us both little piles of paper. We had a list of the kids we were looking after, nametags for them, tickets for those without their own zoo passes, and a map of the zoo. OK, remember to label kids before letting them run around.

Debbie left and I surveyed the classroom and briefly wondered how I'd ever remember which kids were with me. They were all dressed the same for a start. I sighed. Amelia would have to be in charge of that bit. I'd concentrate on transportation.

"Ugh" Tanya said. "I'm really not looking forward to this. I can't say I'm that fond of other people's kids."

"Yeah…" I agreed.

"Of course Sookie said she works with kids, doesn't she?" Tanya asked.

"Little ones, yeah."

"God, that would be worse I couldn't do that. What do you do?"

"Oh, well I've got my own consulting business" I was wondering if it was a bad thing that I'd lost sight of Amelia in the crowd of kids. "What about you?"

"I'm an HR manager for the City Council. So you'll be like me, then. Glad to be out of the office today, at least. Unlike Debbie over there" she nodded towards the bossy woman. "She's probably had to give up a tennis lesson to do this."

"Yeah" I agreed, finally spotting Amelia in a group of other girls.

I thought Tanya might say something else, but the teacher announced at that moment that we were all to make our way outside and take our groups to the carpark to start heading to the zoo.

Amelia came bouncing over. "I'm with Maisie!" she said, and I noticed she was holding onto Maisie's hand really tightly. I wondered if she was likely to cut off her circulation.

"Yep" I agreed, checking my list. "And…Chloe, by the looks of it."

Amelia sighed, rolled her eyes, then looked back over her shoulder and screamed "Chloe!"

After a bit a really tiny blonde girl with pigtails appeared out of the crowd of kids and shuffled towards Amelia. When she reached us she just stood next to Amelia and blinked a few times. "You're with us, with Maisie and me" Amelia informed her. "So you have to stay with us and not go off, OK?"

"'K" Chloe agreed. Then she looked up at me and blinked a bit more. I surveyed the three girls, trying to memorise what they all looked like. Yeah, I had no hope really, but I did note that I had a blonde, a brunette and a redhead so at least I had a complete set. Yay me.

"OK, well you guys had better stick your labels on" I said, handing them their name tags. Chloe managed to put hers on upside down, but I figured it didn't matter. We collected Maisie and Chloe's booster seats, from outside the classroom, and then we trooped out to the car. Amelia and Maisie skipped ahead, but Chloe dawdled along and seemed to be in a little world of her own.

After everyone was settled in the car, it was just a matter of actually driving to the zoo, and ignoring the chatter from the backseat. If Amelia on her own was loud, three of them in a small confined space were deafening. Even Chloe seemed to come around at this point and joined in a particularly rousing version of The Wheels on the Bus.

I looked at the clock in the dashboard. I estimated I had another three hours of this. At least.

I was probably going to need coffee.

We pulled up at the zoo, parked the car and joined the rest of the class inside the gate. The teacher was saying something about worksheets but I was kind of occupied by making sure Amelia and Maisie's skipping around didn't lead to running off.

Eventually people started to drift towards the ticket booth. "OK" I said. "I've got Amelia's pass, a ticket for Maisie and Chloe, have you got your pass?"

Chloe looked at me, blinked a few times, and then burst into tears. Fuck, this was all I needed. The sooner I could get the kids actually inside the zoo, the sooner I could give them back to the teacher. "Um" I said crouching down so I was on her level. "Is it in your bag?"

"I don't know!" she wailed.

"She can use my pass" Amelia said, helpfully.

"No, she can't Ames. You have to use your pass."

"Oh, yeah" Amelia agreed, and then she lost interest totally and ran off with Maisie to climb on the big lizard statue.

I was stuck emptying Chloe's bag onto the pavement and hoping against hope she had a pass in there and I didn't have to pay for a ticket for her. She had a fair amount of junk in her bag. The bruised apple was particularly nasty, and most of what I was pulling out was coloured orange due to a felt pen that was lurking at the bottom without a cap. But there was no zoo pass. Fuck.

"I don't think it's in there" I said to Chloe. "Do you know if your mom put it in there?"

"Who?" she said quietly.

"Um. Your mummy, what did she do with it?"

"I don't know!" she wailed, and then the tears started again. Fuck. Why did I get the weepy kid? I started to put the big pile of crap back into the bag. There was something that looked like a tissue, perhaps partially used, and I passed that to her to use, but she just cried harder.

By the time I had everything back in the bag, none the wiser as to where the cap for that pen was, Amelia and Maisie had come skipping back to us. "Are you guys ready yet?" Amelia asked.

"No" I replied. "We can't find Chloe's pass."

"I'll have to stay out here?" Chloe whispered, looking at me through wet eyelashes.

"No, I'll get you a ticket" I said, looking over at the kiosk where they sold them. I could see this was going to be an expensive trip as well.

Amelia frowned, and looked at the back of Chloe's neck. "It's here" she said.

"What?" I asked. Amelia reached out and pulled the cord that Chloe had around her neck. Tucked down the front of her sweater was the zoo pass. "Oh" Chloe said, as it appeared. "Yeah."

"OK, let's get going then" I said. We were the last ones left now, as all the other groups had gone through and were now well out of sight. I handed over the passes and tickets for the kids, grateful at least that Amelia's pass got me in for free, and then we walked on and down towards the Pridelands group of exhibits.

By the time we caught up to the rest of the class, they were all assembled on a platform which jutted out over the enclosure and were listening to a zookeeper talk about giraffes. I hoped we hadn't missed anything important.

The talk went on for a bit, and I decided I might as well just enjoy the fresh air. I lent against some of the fencing and thought about the car situation. Maybe I could get Sookie to come out this weekend and look at cars with me? Well, check out the make and model I'd picked anyway. And then that just left the house problem. I hoped Maudette came up with something soon, although I wondered if I should try contacting a few other realtors, just to make sure I had everything covered.

I was still lost in my own thoughts when the zookeeper finished talking and the kids were given the opportunity to feed pieces of vegetable to a bunch of rather hungry giraffes and slightly worried looking zebras. The giraffes managed OK in this exchange, because they could reach the platform we were on and take the food out of the kids' hands. I was a bit worried they might knock a couple of the kids off in their enthusiasm for the bucket of food, but no one got flattened. The zebras had the worse deal, as they were stuck with being pelted with the rest of the food that wasn't handed to the giraffes. Some of the boys were rather obviously aiming at the animals and I watched them for a bit before I suggested that maybe they watch where they were throwing. I saw Debbie glare at me when I did that, but the geriatric teacher didn't seem to care, and I'm pretty sure the zebras were kind of thankful.

After everyone had had a turn at feeding something, we carried on to the lions where there was another talk. Maybe Sookie was right, and I was overly concerned with blood and gore, because this talk was slightly more interesting. Although the lions themselves looked pretty bored of it all. They were all asleep in the sun and didn't even look our way. Also, there was no feeding at this exhibit, although one little shit decided he'd pass the time by kicking me repeatedly in the back of the leg and I was tempted to throw him over the barrier and see how he fared in there.

"Knock it off" I hissed at him. "What?" he asked, rather belligerently.

"You know exactly what you were doing, don't push your luck kid" I said back to him. We stared at each other for a moment and then he ran off. Amelia looked at me "That's Connor" she said. "He's naughty."

After the lions it was on to see the rhinos. They had to be the least exciting animals here. Then the cheetahs, who spent their time stalking up and down in front of the glass sizing up which child they could outrun and pick off, and the hippos, who were completely submerged and we could barely glimpse at all.

When she'd finished her spiel on how many people hippos killed a year, the zookeeper took off and the teacher stood up in front of the group of kids and parents. I did another quick check to make sure we still had Chloe with us, and was pretty satisfied that I'd done my job well, and we could all go get back in the car in a minute.

"So" the teacher began "As I said at the beginning, Katie gave us the answers to lots of the questions on the worksheets in her talks, so I hope you've been paying attention class. Now it's time to make sure you have all your answers filled out before we go back to school. Find your group and your parent will help you complete the sheet using the information boards on each enclosure. We'll meet at the seating area in front of the café by the elephant enclosure at midday to eat lunch."

Fuck. The worksheets. I had forgotten about that. Maisie and Amelia started pulling very crumpled pieces of paper out of their backpacks but Chloe just stood there. "Chloe, have you got one?" I asked her.

"No" she said, a tell-tale quiver in her voice. Shit. I walked over to the teacher and grabbed a spare copy, glancing at it as I walked back to the girls. Fuck, there seemed to be a lot of questions for a bunch of five year olds. Just how long were we supposed to be spending here today?

I decided we'd work backwards and start with the hippos. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea and there was a crowd of kids around the information board when we got there. It took a while, but we got the questions answered, although it took a lot of coaxing to get Chloe to write anything down and she had to borrow a pencil off Amelia so everything wasn't written in orange.

Then it was back to the cheetahs. I saw that Debbie was stuck with that kid Connor, and he was banging on the glass. I was kind of wishing he might break it and get eaten, but I guessed someone would miss him.

Or maybe he came from a big family and they wouldn't.

"Don't do that, Connor" Debbie tried, but Connor ignored her. "Connor!" she tried again. "I said not to do that. The cheetahs don't like it."

Connor kept on banging. "I want them to come over HERE!" he yelled. Debbie gave up and looked the other way. "Sebastian, sweetie, how are you going?" she asked her kid. He kept staring at Connor who was poking his tongue out at him and pulling a face. I was really fucking sick of Connor.

Next we went back to the rhinos. They still didn't seem to be doing much. And there were some weird, jumpy deer-things with huge antlers in there with them. "What country are the, um, springboxes from?" Amelia asked me.

"Fuck knows" I replied, peering at the information board. "South Africa it says here. And they're springboks, Ames"

"Like Uncle Calvin?"

"Guess so."

"Em's dad's South African. Wanker" said a voice next to me. It was Tanya, she'd arrived with her group of kids trailing behind.

"Oh, right" I said, not sure what else to say really.

"Although he was quite good when I had cancer and he looked after Em a lot for me, the treatment left me pretty flat, but now he's got a new girlfriend and a baby on the way, well, it's alright for him."

I really fucking wished she would stop talking right about now because I didn't need to hear all her personal problems, and there wasn't anything I could fucking do about the ex.

"He moaned all the time about being here when he was with me, but now he's with _her_ he bloody thinks New Zealand is the greatest place ever. Do you like it here, Eric?" she asked.

"Yeah. I do."

"I'd give anything to go to the States. Furthest I've ever been is the Gold Coast. And now of course I can't afford any trips anywhere. No when we only have the one income. And renting in Mt Eden in so expensive. We're only in a one-bedroom flat and it's costing me the earth, but I don't want to move out and make Em change schools and have to face the motorway to get to work in the morning. It's such a hassle."

Tanya looked at me. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. "Yeah. It must be." I said in the end. I felt sorry for the woman, but, fuck. She was kind of draining the life out of me.

Luckily she got distracted at that point by one of the kids in her group asking her a question. I stood behind Amelia and hoped we'd be done soon. She seemed to be chatting to a new girl who, from the look of her, had to be Tanya's daughter, the particularly badly named Em.

"Look" Maisie yelled, pointing at one of the rhinos. "I can see its willy!"

Amelia turned to Maisie. "It's not called a willy, Maisie. You have to use the correct term, it's a penis."

"Same thing" Em said, dismissively, which made Amelia pout.

"I don't think that's on the worksheet" I tried. "Let's just worry about the questions on there." I was really questioning the whole 'let's tell Amelia where babies come from' decision about now. Sookie had been so adamant it was the right way to go, given the questions she'd been asking, but now I was a bit afraid she knew too much. And so was Sookie, who kept asking me if she'd done the right thing. I told her she had, but quite frankly, who knew? I was just as worried as Sookie that Amelia was just going spend the next few months telling all and sundry all about sex, and right at this point in time, I was really fucking worried. Especially when I saw where that male rhino was headed.

"Hey" I said. "Is it time to go back to the lions?"

"In a minute" Amelia said, looking down at her worksheet. And then she looked back up at the rhinos. For a minute I thought she might not notice, but no, she was pretty fucking observant. "Look!" she shouted, pointing. "They're doing that thing! Sex!"

"What's sex?" Maisie asked, looking from Amelia to the rhinos.

"That's enough, Ames" I warned her, but she ignored me in her determination to share her new-found knowledge with her best friend.

"It's…it's _that_! What they're doing. It's like a…magic cuddle with a penis and a vagina and mummies and daddies do it in bed and make babies." She turned to me. "You did it, didn't you? With Mummy? That's what made the baby?"

Fuck, could she be any louder. Tanya was now clutching my arm and doubled over, trying not to laugh out loud, and Debbie, who was now standing a little way further down the fence, glared at me as if it was all my fault. Fuck.

"Um, let's just talk about it at home, Ames" I tried.

She opened her mouth as though she wanted to say something else, but instead Em butted in. "Is that adult nap time?" she asked. "Mum has naps with her friend Terry. And sometimes with her other friend Cam. Josh comes over too, sometimes. I have to be quiet, and stay in the living room. Don't I Mum?"

Tanya had stopped laughing now. She straightened up and pressed her lips together. "Um, it's not quite like that, Em"

"It is!" Em argued. "You take really long naps. It's so boring."

"My parents don't have naps" Maisie said, trying to work it all out.

"And I don't think you need to worry about that" I told her.

"You won't get a baby then." Amelia informed her.

"Oh. I want a baby sister" Maisie complained.

"You can have mine" Amelia volunteered, helpfully.

"Really?" Maisie asked.

"No" I said. "Felicia is not free to a good home."

Amelia sighed, exaggeratedly. "Fine!" she said.

Chloe, who'd been mostly quiet this morning, apart from the random outbreaks of crying, now decided to join in the conversation. "My mummy says it doesn't matter if you love a boy or a girl, as long as it's love and not just sex. I have two uncles, Uncle Chris and Uncle David. They sleep in our spare bed when they come to stay, but Mum says that's OK. Except sometimes they move a lot of furniture around at night and keep us all awake. That's not OK."

OK, this was getting way too enlightening for me.

"Two daddies?" Amelia asked no one in particular "I don't think that's right." Yeah, I wasn't going to explain how that one worked to her. With any luck, she'd forget for a while and ask Sookie later.

"So are we done here?" I asked, hoping we could just go and there'd be no further embarrassment. The male rhino had finished now and wandered off, probably to sleep in the sun content in the knowledge that none of his kids were ever going to start talking about his sex-life in front of random springboks.

"Almost" Amelia said. "So will there be baby rhinos now? Now that rhino put his pe…"

"I don't know Amelia, but I'm pretty sure it's not on your worksheet. Let's concentrate on that for now."

"OK" she said, looking back at it.

Tanya seemed to have recovered from her earlier embarrassment and lent over to me. "Kids! They think it's all so simple, don't they? It's really not." I looked at her, I wasn't sure if she was trying to tell me not judge her for the seemingly endless stream of guys she was taking naps with, or whether she was simply trying to commiserate with me. In the end I went with the old standby. "Yeah."

"OK, done" Amelia announced brightly and the four of us trudged over to the lion enclosure. I was glad to leave Tanya and her kids behind because, fuck, quite frankly I think we both knew more about each other's sex lives than was really necessary. Not that I was exactly ashamed of having sex with the woman I was actually married to, and knocking her up. And I was still kind of proud of the fact I'd done that, of course. But all the same. I didn't really need what we'd done to be compared to a couple of rhinos, a woman with a string of nap-partners, and two guys who were obviously way too enthusiastic for their own good.

So I was hoping that little interlude was behind us.

Instead of Tanya though, I was now stuck back with Debbie and her group. Fuck. I hoped there wasn't going to be any more sex-talk because she'd given us all a few evil glares before and I was pretty sure she'd murder Amelia if her precious Sebastian found out the facts of life. Poor fucking kid.

As it was he had to contend with that fucking Connor trying to make his life miserable. Sebastian was sitting there drawing a lion when Connor wandered over and knocked the pencil out of his hand. "Ow!" Sebastian said loudly.

"Connor!" Debbie admonished. "We say sorry to our friends!" Connor gave her a look which made it pretty clear that he didn't think Sebastian was his friend and he certainly wasn't going to say sorry. Instead he wandered off to run his hand up and down the railings, which made a rather loud noise. "Connor" Debbie tried again. "Have you finished your worksheet?"

Connor shrugged, and then wandered further up the path towards us. Debbie just let him go, and turned back to Sebastian. "That's a lovely drawing, darling, but maybe we should try writing some words?"

Amelia was having no problem coming up with words she wanted to write. "How do you spell aggressive?" she asked me.

"Oh, can't you just say mean?" I countered.

"No. I want to spell vicious too. And blood-thirsty."

"I don't know that they're blood-thirsty Ames." The largest male was lying with his belly in the air in exactly the same way Bob did, satisfied with the knowledge he had a harem of women bringing him his dinner every night. He didn't look particularly threatening. But I wasn't volunteering to go in and pat him.

I was busy helping Amelia write her long spiel on the hunting habits of the female lions, and missed what Connor got up to next. I heard the wail from Chloe though. She was sitting on the ground in tears. "He pushed me!" she sniffed, before bursting into tears again.

Amelia sighed. "She cries a LOT."

"Well, she's sad, Ames. Do you have any tissues in your bag?" As Amelia was digging out the packet of tissues Sookie stashed in there, Connor looked over at me and sneered. Fuck, I'd never wanted to hit a five year old more in my life. Probably not since I was five years old myself.

I'd fucking had it with that kid.

Connor continued up the path and back towards the giraffes and zebras. "You guys stay here and finish up the stuff on the lions" I said to Amelia, handing a tissue to Chloe. "You'll be OK" I told her.

I caught up to Connor pretty quickly and he just glared at me. "What?" he asked.

"I noticed you pushed Chloe over back there" I said to him. "That really wasn't nice." Connor looked at me and kind of shrugged, in a 'what are you going to do about it' way.

"Did it ever occur to you to wonder" I continued, "why I'm the only guy here today?" He thought about for about two seconds and then shrugged again. I guess thinking about stuff other than who he could push over next was kind of outside his comfort zone. "Or why I sound different to everyone else around here?" Connor stopped walking at that one. "Why?" he said in the end.

"I'm actually a secret agent" I told him. He looked me up and down, thought for a minute and then said "Nah, you're not."

"Yeah, I am. For Santa." Well, it was worth a fucking shot, I thought. He was only 5 after all. And fuck it, Amelia knew how babies were made, but I was pretty sure she was still prepared to believe in Santa as long as he kept the presents coming.

"But…Santa's in the North Pole!" Connor spat out, obviously thinking I was slightly retarded.

"Well, why do you think I sound like this?" I retorted. That stumped him. "Secret agent?" he asked. "What, like a spy?"

"Kind of. I look after the, uh, naughty list. I'm looking for people to add to it."

"But it's not Christmas!" Connor said, sounding kind of worried.

"No, but it's never too early to start adding kid's names to it." I bent down so I looking him right in the eye. "I would really love to add your name to it, so just watch you step OK? I don't want to see you push anyone, tease anyone and you'd better do everything Sebastian's mom tells you to do."

"Or what?" Connor decided to go for a last-ditch attempt at bravado.

"Or else you'll be very, very sorry come Christmas morning. Understand?" He nodded. "Great, now go back to where you're supposed to be and behave." Connor took one last look at me, then turned around and started jogging back the way he'd come.

"Hey, Connor" I called out and he turned around. "I'm watching you, remember that." He looked a little pale at that, and then he really started running away from me. Hopefully that was mission accomplished.

I started to walk back too, but met Amelia, Maisie and Chloe coming towards me. "I thought you guys were staying put?" I asked them.

"We got bored" Amelia replied. "We have to do the giraffes then its lunch." We all walked over to the platform we'd started at and stared at the giraffes again. After a small disagreement between the three of them over whether I was as tall as the giraffes, and some discussion on whether the zebras were just coloured ponies, we were finally able to go back to the seating area and join the rest of the class for lunch.

Once again, we were about the last there and had to sit on the ground under a tree. Amelia unpacked her lunch and started swapping sandwiches with Maisie. Chloe dug out her bruised apple and chewed it kind of forlornly. And I, well I fucking needed coffee.

"Stay here" I said to them. "I'll be back in a minute." Except that I wasn't, because the guy making the coffee at the kiosk had no fucking clue what he was doing. I suspected some of the orangutans would probably have done a better job had they been left in charge of the espresso machine.

So of course, when I got back to the spot under the tree there were no kids where I'd left them. Only Chloe's abandoned backpack, which I picked up. Fuck, most of the class had finished eating and was scattered everywhere and I had no idea where they'd gone. "Amelia!" I called. "Amelia!" But she couldn't hear me. Or didn't answer. Or had possibly been eaten by lions.

I turned around to look at the lion enclosure. Yeah, they hadn't moved.

I started walking through the throngs of kids and mothers with pushchairs who were also congregating. Fuck, it seemed like years since I'd come with Sookie and the kids to the zoo on my first real day at her house. It was the first time I'd ever spent any time with kids and now, well now I'd been left in charge of three of them.

And I'd lost them. Maybe I wasn't doing as well as I thought I was.

I walked over to the elephant enclosure where the one remaining elephant stood eating some hay. No Amelia. Or Maisie, or Chloe. I walked past the flamingos, who somehow weren't even pink, the cheetahs again, who were now completely AWOL, and the pond that supposedly contained hippos. Still no Amelia. Maybe they'd gone the other way.

I was walking back to where I'd started from when I spied some bleachers beside the elephant's field. Sure enough, sitting right up the top were the three girls I was missing.

I was just heading up there to round them up when I just about bumped into Tanya again. "Oh" she said, pointing to my coffee. "That looks good." Fuck, I thought, should I have got her one too? How friendly did I have to be?

"It's not" I assured her. "They fucked it up completely."

"Oh. Right. Well, it should perk you up a bit for the drive back anyway."

"Uh, yeah."

"Are your lot behaving? Mine are driving me a bit mental. I mean, Em's OK of course, I'm used to her, but the other two. My God, their parents must be driven mad." She laughed.

"Mine ran off. I need to go and get them back. So, I'll see you later."

"Yep. See you Eric" she said, and I headed up the steps to collect my charges.

"I thought I said stay put" I said, sitting down in front of Amelia.

"Oh, well I thought you meant stay in sight" Amelia said, airily.

"How is this in sight, Ames? I couldn't see in here from where we were before." Amelia shrugged. Obviously that was my problem. "Here" I said to Chloe. "You left this." I held out her backpack.

"That's not mine" she said, holding up an identical pink backpack.

"Well who's is it then?" I asked. All three of them looked at each other, then looked back at me. "Dunno" Amelia said, and that seemed to be the general consensus. Fucking fantastic, now I was in possession of a backpack for which I didn't have the matching owner. The day was just looking up.

Just then I heard the teacher's voice yelling out that Room 5 needed to come and gather around her now. I hustled the girls out of the bleachers and we joined the group of kids. One of the other parents I didn't know announced that Sunita had lost her backpack, and I could get rid of that problem, but I got a few more when I was instructed to lead the boys to the bathroom.

Sometimes it sucked being the token guy.

Connor wouldn't look me in the eye anymore, but he did seem to be on his best behaviour at least. The same couldn't be said for the rest of them and there was a certain amount of shoving going on, combined with the desire that most of them seemed to have to kick everything in sight. Fuck, I wasn't sure that girls weren't easier. At least I was fucking used to them. This was like being in charge of a small, aggressive horde of fucking barbarians. The amount of farting and burping alone was enough to set your teeth on edge.

Fuck, I really couldn't remember it being this bad when I was one of them.

Eventually I got through that chore, and reclaimed my party of tiny, chattering people, who'd probably talked all the way through their bathroom visit and not kicked one single thing the whole time.

And then we could finally leave. Thank fucking God. I would be happy if I never saw the zoo again.

Except that I'd promised Felicia I'd take her back on Saturday.

The drive back to school was probably noisier than the drive there, the girls having been revved up the morning's activities. There was a nasty moment when Chloe thought she'd left her worksheet behind somewhere, but I got Maisie and Amelia to help her look for it and eventually it was discovered in a very crumpled state in the pocket of her skirt.

Thank fuck for that.

And then all that remained was to get the kids, and the extra booster seats, back to the classroom safe and sound. Maisie fell over on the playground, so perhaps I kind of failed that test, but Nurse Amelia inspected her knee, announced "It's not bleedin'" and everything seemed OK.

I left the seats outside the door and said goodbye to Amelia, who looked pretty keen to ditch me now she was back at school. Maisie followed her into the classroom as did Chloe, but only after she'd briefly hugged my knees and whispered "Bye Meela's daddy" to me.

Well, it was nice to be appreciated.

Unfortunately, as I turned around to walk back to my car I almost bumped straight into Debbie. "Eric" she said. "Everything go OK?"

"Uh, yeah. No problems."

"Great. Thanks for your help today. I just have one question?"

"OK. Shoot."

"Did you say something to Connor? When we were at the zoo?"

Oh. Fuck. Little fucker had ratted me out. Now I was probably going to be blamed for lowering his self-esteem and hurting his feelings. Fuck, fuck, fuck. "Oh. Well I may have suggested he find a better way to behave."

"Mmm. I thought you had" Debbie said. She looked at me for a moment or two and I wondered what was coming next. "He's a little shit, that one" she whispered, before continuing on at a normal volume "He'd been hounding Sebastian all bloody morning. Sebby only wanted to be friends with him too. So, thank you for that. It was a big help."

"Oh." Fuck, that was so not the response I expected. "No problem."

"Excellent. Well, I'll look forward to doing this again with you Eric. I think the next trip will be to the museum. That should be a great morning out."

"Uh, yeah. Sure, Debbie. I'll, uh, see what my schedule is like…"

"You do that. You're a valuable member of our school's parent team, Eric. We'd hate to lose you."

"Yeah. OK. Bye, Debbie."

"Bye Eric!" she said, brightly.

I walked back to my car, picturing the slippery marble staircases at the museum and the dozens of nooks and crannies you could possibly lose children in, not to mention the numerous displays that wouldn't be enhanced by sticky fingerprints, discarded apple cores or orange felt pen.

Fucked. I was utterly, utterly fucked.

**Thanks for reading!**


	52. Chapter 52

**A/N So my laptop got a virus. To get this done I have had to endure several lectures from the resident IT expert (my husband) about safety when surfing the net, and then I had to surrender the laptop so it could be rebuilt with a new version of Windows that I am having to get to grips with. **

**On a positive note though, my baby has a first word. It's cheese. Although it sounds more like 'seese' when she says it. It's kind of disconcerting to open the fridge and have a little voice go "Seese! Seese! Mmm!" in the hope you'll dole out a cheese slice. But still, it's better than another lecture from her father on deleting emails...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

On the days I worked it was a bit of a race to get home, dump my work van, drive to daycare, pluck a rather reluctant Felicia from out of the sandpit, and then get to school to get Amelia. So on the day of the trip to the zoo I was a bit out of breath by the time I made it to her classroom, but I beat the bell.

However that just gave me more time to stand around and look at the other mothers. Yeah, I didn't know how they did it. I was pretty sure some of these women didn't work and yet, there they all were in their really expensive skirts and pants, wearing pretty jumpers and cardis. And then there was me, in the yoga pants which were starting to ride low below the bump, the polo shirt I wore for work which was now getting a bit small, and my hair in a mess. And I had baby sick on my shoulder. It wasn't even from my baby, but from a small girl I'd been helping out during class who'd decided to repay me getting her to swing around a bar by throwing up on me.

I sighed and looked at Felicia. She was wearing a t-shirt that had seen better days, when it was Amelia's, and currently it was decorated with green paint and some unidentified orange stains which were possibly pasta sauce, despite the fact that Felicia had insisted she'd been given "Nothin'" for lunch. Her pants were covered in sand and her Dora sneakers were an interesting shade of grey rather than white. Somewhere during the day she'd lost one of her pigtails, but she seemed to have gathered some rather interesting felt tip marks on her face to make up for it. At least we matched.

Felicia roamed around the other mums looking bored by the whole experience. The other mothers eyed her as she passed them and I could see them judging just how likely she was to randomly place a sticky hand on their immaculate clothing. A few of them had similarly immaculate toddlers with them. How did they manage to stay so clean and tidy?

I was pondering this, while keeping one eye on Felicia's progress, she was edging towards the door in the hope of spying Amelia, when bits of the conversation around me drifted over. "So, did you go to the zoo this morning?" one woman asked another.

"Mmm, I did. It was dreadful. I'm not sure Mrs Garfield isn't too old to be looking after 5 year olds. There was NO control at all."

I just hoped that it wasn't Amelia running round and causing a problem, although quite frankly she'd be more likely to be standing there with Mrs Garfield yelling at everyone to settle down and be quiet.

"Connor was a handful, of course. I don't think even his mother can control him, and poor Debbie was struggling" the second woman continued. Good, while at least it was no one I could lay claim to. I'd seen Connor when I did parent-help and yeah, I'd felt sorry for the woman who'd been stuck at his table. He was one of those kids no one wanted to be responsible for on a school trip.

"Is Connor the one who has all those siblings?" the first woman asked.

"Yeah. I think there's about four or five in that family. Maybe six. The mother just looks stressed and obviously can't cope, and I guess Connor is the result of that."

"Mmm. Poor Debbie having to put up with him for the day."

"Well she said that dad helped her out and put the fear of God into Connor." I'd been watching Felicia again, but my ears kind of pricked up when I heard that.

"Oh, which dad?"

The woman snorted, before answering. "Only one came of course. I don't really know him, but he's American. Very good-looking. Tall. I saw him at the drinks thing."

At this point a third woman butted in. "Oh yeah, I saw him. I think his name's Eric. He's kind of lovely."

"He is, isn't he? Who's dad is he?" asked the woman who'd originally started the conversation.

"Um. Possibly Chloe's, you know the little blonde girl? The cute one?"

"Yeah, I think I do."

Well that was interesting, Eric had made a bit of an impression, but me, and Amelia, well we obviously weren't that memorable. I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. In Amelia's case I guess it meant she hadn't embarrassed Eric or anything, but as for me, well. I kind of knew that I was always going to be in the background as far as Eric was concerned. I'd known that all along. But it still didn't feel very good.

I didn't have much time to think about it though, because the bell rang just then and I had to dive and yank Felicia out of the doorway where she was hovering before she got trampled by 30 or so kids.

Amelia bounced over to us. "Em's my friend" she announced. "We sat next to each other when we did reading this afternoon. Maisie looked sad because she had to sit with Chloe, but that's OK. I'm allowed to have other friends."

"Oh, well. Yeah, as long as you're still nice to Maisie."

"Em says her hair's a funny colour."

"Her hair's a pretty colour, Amelia. It's a very pretty red."

Amelia screwed her face up. "It's orange."

"No it's not. And anyway, how was the zoo?" I guessed that was a long time ago as far as Amelia was concerned and had kind of been eclipsed by this afternoon's jostling for position as most popular girl at the table.

Amelia sighed. "S'OK." She fell into step beside me as we started to walk towards the carpark.

"Did you see the giraffes?" I asked. "Da'raffes?" Felicia echoed.

"Yeah. They were tall. And ate some stuff. But I borrowed Em's pencil, the really nice one with the fuzzy stuff at the end; I used that just before to write my letters…" Amelia stopped talking as Debbie's voice drifted over "Sookie!" she called, obviously trying to remain ladylike and not actually scream my name. "That's you" Amelia prompted.

"Thanks" I said to her, but she kind of missed the sarcasm, and just said "You're welcome." At least Eric's politeness was kind of rubbing off on the kids.

"I'm so glad I caught you" Debbie said, as she came over to me pulling Sebastian in her wake. I idly looked at her clean, dark jeans, white t-shirt and silver cardigan with beading across the shoulders, all topped off with a pair of spiked heel boots, and wondered if she'd made it through the trip to the zoo dressed like that. Probably. I sighed.

"Um, Eric was very good with the kids today" Debbie began, looking a little nervous. "And it was very helpful to have a man there, for, um, toilet trips and for keeping some of the little boys in line. They're a bit, um…well; they're finding themselves at this age aren't they? Although Sebastian is a wonderfully grounded little boy, of course, so I don't have those problems with him. But then he's had such a stable life, so it's to be expected. But some of the others…well, Eric was a big help."

"Well, I'm glad" I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. It was nice that Eric got the thanks from Debbie for his one morning and no one said anything about my on-going commitment to parent-help. But that was OK, I told myself. At least Eric is the dad who turns up.

I kind of hoped Debbie would get to the point soon as Amelia and Felicia were bored and had drifted off. Well, they'd drifted towards Sebastian who looked a bit panicked at Felicia eyeing him up like that. She grinned at him and said "Hi!" but he clung a bit tighter to Debbie's arm.

"So, anyway. I mentioned the next trip to Eric, the one to the museum" Debbie continued, "And he said he'd let me know. But I was hoping, well I was hoping you could make sure he kept that day free? And came with us? We'd all love to see him again." Debbie smiled as brightly as she could. "He got on very well with the other mums" she said, looking slightly starry-eyed. Oh good grief, were they going to start a fan-club?

"I'm sure he did" I replied. "I'll talk to him and see what he's doing, but if he's busy, you might be out of luck."

"Well, just do your best Sookie. And maybe I'll have another chat to him the next time I see him." Yeah, I bet Eric will love that, I thought.

"OK, well, see you Debbie."

"Bye Sookie."

Debbie and Sebastian walked off and I started walking back to the car again. "Sebastian likes Felicia" Amelia announced as we set off.

"Really?" I asked. I thought he'd looked terrified of her.

"Yeah, he let her draw on his hand."

I glanced back at Sebastian, and, sure enough, there were felt-tip marks on his hand. Terrific. "Where'd she get the felt-tip from Amelia?" I asked.

Amelia shrugged. "She went through my bag." Felicia held up her treasure and Amelia held her hand out for it. "Nah!" Felicia shouted and she ran off, with Amelia in pursuit. I had to admit, it was hard enough with two of them, I didn't fancy Eric's task that morning with a whole group.

But at least he'd been appreciated for his efforts.

By the time Eric arrived home Felicia and Amelia had reached an uneasy truce and I was in the kitchen making dinner.

"What are we having?" Eric asked, getting to the bit that was most important to him pretty quickly.

"Meatloaf" I replied. It wasn't the world's most exciting dinner, but it usually got eaten.

"With mashed potatoes?"

"Yeah, they're boiling. I'll give you a shout when I need them mashed."

I was going to say something else, but Amelia stomped in, demanding Eric's attention. "You need to come and tell Felicia that it's not nice to scribble on other people's drawings."

"Do I?" asked Eric.

"Yes" Amelia said, emphatically, before she stomped off again. Eric sighed and walked out of the kitchen. "I'll just put my bag down" he called out to Amelia.

"Hurry up!" she yelled back. "Felicia's still being naughty."

"Daddy!" Felicia squealed, and I could hear her take off running down the hall, and a bit of an 'oof' from Eric when she tackled him, and then Amelia yelled "Are you COMING, Daddy?" and Eric yelled back "I've got Felicia here" so Amelia yelled "Tell her off then!" back to him. So mostly it was a standard night, much running around and yelling when daddy got home, followed by trying to get them all to settle down to eat dinner. I wondered about the wisdom of adding another one into the mix and whether I would in fact go deaf one day from all the shouting, but then I gave up on those thoughts and went back to slicing beans.

When the potatoes were done I yelled for Eric, figuring if you can't beat them join them, and then added some milk and butter. Then I added another blob of butter, because I wasn't getting any thinner anytime soon, so I might as well. Then I added a third, just a small one. The baby would thank me, I was sure of it.

Eric appeared and I handed him the potato masher. "So I heard you made a bit of an impression this morning" I said to him.

"What? Oh fuck. Those fucking rhinos. We might need to talk to Amelia again about not blabbing to all and sundry about sex."

"Oh. OK, that wasn't what I heard" I said, taking the meatloaf out of the oven. "So the rhinos were doing it?"

"Yes. With running commentary."

"Ugh."

"Exactly. I found out all sorts of things I fucking didn't want to know."

"About rhinos?"

"About everything. For instance that Tanya woman seems to be taking a lot of naps with a lot of men. She was horribly embarrassed by the stuff her daughter was saying."

"Oh. So she is a bit slutty then, is she?" I asked. While it wasn't nice to be branded the slut myself I maybe wasn't above finding out some good gossip, and I certainly had my suspicions about Tanya. Eric, however, wasn't buying it and only shrugged. Possibly because he was busy licking mashed potato off the potato masher like it was a giant popsicle or something.

"But anyway" I continued, while putting slices of meatloaf on plates and kind of ignoring the fact that behind me Eric was now eating mashed potato straight out of the saucepan with a spoon. I guess he'd worked up an appetite at the zoo. "Debbie was saying how useful you were at keeping the kids in line and how she really, really, really wants you to come with them to the museum."

"That many reallys?"

"Well, maybe I exaggerated. A bit. But you seem to have a fan."

Eric shrugged and just put his spoon in the sink. "I was a novelty."

"You certainly were" I agreed.

"I'll go and get the kids. I'm fucking hungry tonight" Eric said, conveniently forgetting all the mashed potato he'd just been eating. I peered in the saucepan. Yeah, there was quite a hole in there now. Looks like Eric had been enjoying the extra butter in there too.

EPOV

The trip to the zoo might have only been a few hours, but, fuck, I was exhausted at the end of the day. And really fucking hungry. I may have had a small taste of the potatoes as I was mashing them, just to check the texture really. They were good. I didn't know if Sookie had done something different, but they seemed particularly tasty tonight.

Sookie was fishing for details about the trip and it was obvious that she'd heard something at school, but I wasn't sure what. I really fucking hoped the details of the whole rhino incident weren't getting repeated too widely. And I was slightly concerned that Connor's father might be coming after me now, but mostly it seemed Sookie just wanted to know about Tanya's sex-life. Fuck, I didn't want to know so I wasn't about to relive it now.

So mostly I concentrated on eating my dinner, and maybe hoping that Felicia wasn't going to eat all her potato. There was a nasty moment when, after repeated prompting to talk about the trip from Sookie, Amelia told her that I'd gone to get coffee and they'd 'lost me', at which point she tried to deliver her lecture on not running away.

"I didn't run off" I told her, scooping the mashed potato off Felicia's plate. She'd finished her meatloaf and had been trying to use it to hide beans under. "Finish up your beans" I said to her. She sighed, and dropped some on the floor, hitting Bob on the head. "You guys all disappeared while I was gone."

Amelia thought for a moment. "It was Chloe's idea" she said, and then she went back to her dinner. Somehow I doubted that Chloe was really the architect of that particular scheme, but I wasn't going to get into an argument I couldn't win. Amelia could be a stubborn little thing when she dug her heels on something.

And if Sookie asked, I had no idea where that trait came from either.

I was just hoping that I wasn't going to come up against Sookie's stubborn streak anytime soon. We had a few things we had to do before the baby came, and, well, I just needed her to get on board really. I thought I was almost there with the car. I'd read up, I'd been out and looked, I'd taken a test-drive and now I had pretty much made a decision.

I just had to get Sookie to agree and we could sign on the dotted line. It surely couldn't be that hard, I thought. She'd been in quite a good mood recently. Maybe it was all the sex? That was certainly helping my mood. Even this morning's trip to the zoo hadn't quite ruined my mood completely, although bits of it had come close. Fuck, I really didn't want to go to the museum. I wondered how I could get out of that one.

I was still wondering about it three days' later when we had another appointment with the obstetrician. Sookie kept telling me how many of the mothers at school mentioned me and I'd tried to point out that it was because I was the only guy there. I wasn't sure how all the other fuckers had managed to dodge the bullet, but I was now token guy for the class.

Sookie would just purse her lips and say "Yeah, sure Eric" when I said that. "That's it. You're just a novelty because you're a guy. Not because you're you."

"I'm always me, Sookie. I'm not sure that makes any difference." Sookie always looked a bit sceptical at that point, but fuck, there wasn't much I could do about any of the attention I was supposedly generating. There wasn't much I could do to blend in, so I just hoped it would all blow over.

The visit to the doctor's was over in about 10 minutes which seemed a bit disappointing. I kept waiting for something to happen, but Russell just went over the results of the CVS and then we had another look on his ultrasound at Sam, while Felicia crawled all over me because she was bored.

It was still fucking amazing, though to see Sam in there. "He's bigger" I said to Sookie.

"Yep" she said. "It's all the mashed potatoes. Well, the bit we got to eat anyway."

Russell took some measurements while we watched the screen. The image was pretty fuzzy, but you could still get a pretty good look at him. "He's waving, I think" I said to Sookie.

"Yeah" she agreed, looking intently at the screen herself.

"That's your brother" I tried telling Felicia, pointing to the screen.

"Swings!" she whined. Yeah, she'd seen the little playground behind Russell's rooms while we were waiting. There was no persuading her she didn't want to go and play now.

"Um. That seems big" Sookie commented to Russell.

"It is" Russell replied "But it's still quite early on, so don't worry. Remind me next time and we'll start plotting the growth."

"OK" Sookie agreed.

Once our appointment was through we took Felicia over the playground. I'd have to walk back to the office soon, but it was nice being outside for a bit, even if I did have to push Felicia on the swings while she squealed "Higher, Daddy!" repeatedly and Sookie winced slightly when she saw just how high Felicia was going. "No wonder she hates it when I push her" Sookie commented.

"There's a seatbelt" I replied. "She won't fall out."

"Yeah, I know. But even so, I'm not quite that game."

"Higher!" Felicia interjected.

After her time on the swing, she moved onto the slide which meant less input from me. I decided to try to talk to Sookie about the car. "So I was thinking maybe this weekend we could go out and look at cars?" I said. "Because we need to replace yours."

"But you're going to the zoo tomorrow" Sookie replied. "Felicia! Remember to share nicely." Another little girl had turned up and Felicia was doing her best to sit on the slide rather than slide down it.

"Well, Sunday then."

"Mmm. Browsing car-yards with the kids doesn't sound like a fun way to spend a day."

"We could leave them with someone?"

"Yeah…but I don't know. We've got a while yet. We don't have to rush into anything. Hey, Felicia! Let her have a turn please."

That didn't go like I'd hoped. I knew we had a while, but, well, I wanted to be doing something, anything for Sam. I couldn't take him to the zoo yet, I couldn't carry him around, I couldn't even make sure he was getting mashed potatoes or KFC or whatever it was that Sookie kept insisting he wanted to eat. I was stuck with the few things I could do from the outside and buying a new car was one of them.

But only if I could get Sookie on board with that plan. I'd have to think of something else.

I went back to the office and thought about it for a bit, before I gave up and actually did some fucking work. I was still no closer to a plan that night, or the next morning when I took Felicia to soccer, or 'running around with balloony balls' as it really should have been named. Felicia was slowly getting the hang of it though, and I was pleased to see that she was pretty co-ordinated compared to some of the kids there.

Afterwards we continued on to the zoo. It had been raining in the morning but there was no putting this trip off, so we put on our jackets and braved the drizzle. It soon cleared up. Felicia didn't mind so much that she didn't see a lot of the animals; she mainly wanted to run around. I took her for a fluffy at the café and she amused herself by making lots of roaring noises at me and giggling.

As we were leaving I bumped into Andy with Ruby and Riley. "You only have one?" he asked me, nodding to Felicia who was now roaring happily at Riley.

"Yep. But I was here with Amelia's class on Tuesday. Fuck, that was hard work."

Andy clapped me on the shoulder. "That's where shift-work is a fucking joy" he said. "Sadly, I'm never available for shit like that."

"Yeah, good career-planning. Are you available for baby-sitting tomorrow though?"

Sookie was kind of surprised that I was taking her out for lunch on the Sunday. "Why Newmarket?" she kept asking.

I shrugged. "Why not? Somewhere different might be nice. And, if you're good, I'll let you look in some of the stores."

"Well, I suppose I could go to Egg." I had no idea what that was, but I nodded along anyway. "Exactly" I said. "That's what I thought."

We drove to Newmarket and found parking in one of the parking lots. "It used to be free to park here on a Sunday" Sookie sighed. "I used to work in a shop on Broadway on Sundays when I was at Uni; it's not there anymore of course."

"What it did sell?" I asked.

"Clothes. Old-lady clothes mainly. I used to use my staff discount to get clothes for Gran. She was happy I had that job." We'd started walking along, looking in shop windows. "What part-time jobs did you do?" Sookie asked me.

"Oh, all sorts of shit really. I worked in a restaurant for quite a long time."

"Really? Doing what?"

"All kinds of things. Bus-boy, waiter, behind the bar."

"As long as you weren't in charge of the food then, because, I hate to say it, but licking the potato masher isn't that hygienic Eric."

I laughed. "I only did that when I'd finished!"

"I know, but even so, can you imagine eating somewhere where the staff did that?"

We continued on past some more stores and Sookie dragged me into one that seemed to sell a whole bunch of tiny clothes that would have fitted Amelia and Felicia. "Look!" Sookie said, holding something that was perhaps a skirt, but seemed to be fashioned entirely from pink candyfloss. "Wouldn't Amelia love this?"

"Probably. You should get it for her." I figured if Sookie bought something we could leave.

"Oh, hell no. It's $200. Everything in here is waaay too expensive."

"Yeah. OK." Fuck, I had no idea what we were doing in here then if we weren't actually buying stuff.

"And this is so beautiful too!" Sookie exclaimed, pulling something else off the rack.

"Um. Are you hungry? I'm really hungry." It wasn't exactly a lie, but I hoped it would make Sookie leave the store.

"Yeah, I am actually. Or the baby is anyway."

"Same thing" I said, putting my hand on her lower back to steer her back past the racks of clothes again. Her head swivelled to the side as something caught her eye, but I kept the pressure on and she didn't stop walking.

I took her to a tapas restaurant I'd been to with a client once. Sookie was happy as it meant she could try all sorts of things which I knew she loved doing. It was nice, we hadn't been out by ourselves in a while and it was fun to be grown-ups again, even if we did mostly talk about the kids. When they weren't actually around fighting and yelling and running around and generally creating a disturbance in the restaurant it was easy to remember how much fun they were.

After lunch Sookie took me to the Egg store and I discovered it sold maternity clothing. "It's expensive in here too" she said, kind of sadly. I picked up a label hanging from one of the items "It's not that bad" I commented. "And at least here you're getting more fabric for your money that in the other store."

"Yeah. Thanks, Eric."

It took a bit of persuading but I managed to convince Sookie that she should buy the silk top she kept drifting over to look at. She also tried on a dress, muttering something about a dress she'd had when pregnant with Amelia that had been 'very useful at the end'. We were the only people in the shop so the two assistants both flocked around Sookie, asking her questions and commenting that at least they didn't need to strap the padding on to her so she could see what the clothes looked like with a bump.

They also found a few more items for Sookie to try on, and I reminded myself that they were genuinely trying to be helpful and not earn commission. The other stuff did look good too, and, after much indecision by Sookie over what she needed and what size she should buy, I told her to just get what she liked.

I may have been hoping that the shopping would put her in a good mood for the next part of the plan.

After we left Egg I suggested a walk past the stores to work off lunch. Sookie agreed and we carried on down Broadway towards the car dealerships. I hoped Sookie didn't notice that we were heading away from most of the stores, and, if she did, she didn't say anything.

Eventually we reached our destination. "Turn around and go back?" Sookie asked. "Halleigh and Andy will probably want to get rid of our two about now."

"Yeah…or we could just look at…cars…" Sookie turned around and looked at the rows of cars parked behind us in the dealership and wrinkled her nose. "Really? Now?" she asked.

"Well, we don't have the kids with us. And you said that they'd be a disaster in a dealership, so now's probably as good a time as any." Sookie sighed, and looked at her watch. "OK then" she said in the end. "But just quickly."

I took her hand and we walked in. There was a nasty moment when the salesman I'd seen during the week started heading over to talk to me, and I could hear him shout a greeting, but thankfully he got waylaid by someone else and Sookie was busy looking in the window of a rather dire looking used station wagon anyway. "Do you think we could get three carseats in that one?" she asked me. "I guess we really need to bring them along to try it, although Amelia is kind of big enough to just use a half-booster seat now so that's not quite as big."

"Sookie, I think if you try to fit three carseats to that thing it might just fall apart, it's a shit car."

"Oh. Well I was trying to look for something big enough. And not too expensive" she added, peering at the price listed in the window.

"I think there's something better over here" I said, pulling her hand.

"OK" she said, and she followed me.

"How about this one?" I said, when we reached the car I'd picked. Except that it wasn't really a car. I'd tried to figure it out, I really had, but the problem with three carseats, even if one was only a booster, was that they took up a fuck-load of seat space. And most cars, even SUVS, didn't really have that much space. So really, this was more like one of those people-carrier things with the extra seats. Which would be a bonus, because then the kids could have friends in the car. Maybe we could get a dog. And I'd tried to find one that didn't look too horrific. But which was also safe. In the end maybe safety had won out. Yeah, now that I looked at it again it was pretty ugly. Fuck, Sookie was going to hate it.

"This one?" Sookie said, looking from the ugliest fucking vehicle in the world, to me, and back again.

"Well…yeah. I mean, I did a lot of reading and it's really safe…" because everyone probably keeps their distance from it, in case the ugliness wears off, I thought. Maybe if it was in a better colour and not white, I thought, studying it. No, I was pretty sure it would be ugly whatever colour it was. Fuck.

"Um, you could pick another colour" I told her. "They have a chart of colours. Some of them are nice…" Sookie wasn't saying anything, she was just staring. Then she started to walk around the vehicle, touching it. Finally she opened the driver's door and got in.

"It has a new-car smell" she said, quietly. Well, at least it had something fucking going for it. "Yep" I agreed.

I walked around the car and got into the passenger seat. Sookie was busy studying the dashboard. I just watched as she ran her hand over it. Then she swivelled around and looked in the back. "There are a lot of seats" she commented.

"Could be useful I thought, you know, if Amelia wants to bring Maisie home or something."

"Or Em."

"Whoever."

Sookie went quiet again, which was a real fucking worry. I just knew she was trying to figure out how to tell me my choice fucking sucked. "Are you sure?" she said in the end, turning to face me. "This one?"

"Well, you know. It's my pick, but you could test-drive it. See what you think" I was doing my best to give her an out.

Sookie stared straight ahead out the windscreen. I could see the salesman heading our way. Fuck, now he did work on commission so we'd be in for a hard-sell any minute now. "Look" I said, turning to face Sookie "I thought this might be a good idea, but if you really hate it then it doesn't have to be this one. We can find something else."

"But…it's so expensive?" Sookie said quietly.

"Oh, yeah. Well I'm pretty sure we can get a deal, they're always looking to move the stock. In fact if you want to take this one off the lot, I'm pretty sure I can get quite a bit knocked off. And they said they'd trade your car in…" I was suddenly aware that was a change in the atmosphere of the car. Fuck. The salesman arrived at my door. "Eric!" he said jovially. "Nice to see you. You still interested in this model?"

"Yeah, uh. Just give us a minute would you?" I asked him.

"Sure, just let me know when you're ready" he said, before walking off to find someone else to prey on.

I turned back to Sookie. "Hey" I said, "Don't cry. I just…well, I thought this was a good choice, but if you really hate it then we'll go back to the drawing board." I put my arm around her and pulled her over to me.

"It's not that" she sniffed. "It's just…I've never had a new car before. Not a brand new one, that's never been anyone else's."

"Oh." Fuck, that wasn't what I expected the problem to be. "So, this car's OK then? Well, people-carrier, or whatever the fuck it is."

"Yep, it's great" Sookie said, leaning her head on my shoulder.

"So do you want to test-drive it?" I asked her after a few moments.

Sookie sat up and smiled at me, wiping her eyes. "Guess I should" she said, brightly. "Just to make sure I really like it."

I called the salesman back over and the three of us set out with Sookie driving. And talking. I was a bit worried that no person who was actually paying attention to the road should be talking that much, but the salesman, who was sitting in the back, didn't seem to worry that she might dent his vehicle.

When that was over, we parked it back on the lot and got out. "It's so shiny and white and…clean-looking" Sookie said, admiringly, running her hand over the paintwork.

"Yeah" I agreed. I thought it looked like a fucking barn on wheels but there was no accounting for taste sometimes. So long as she wasn't crying things were good.

It seemed to take a long time to negotiate the price. I could feel Sookie wanted to butt in a few times, but really, there was a lot of margin in car sales, I was pretty sure they could give me a decent discount for something that had been sitting on the lot for a while. So after we were all signed up, and we'd gone over things like window tinting options, and we'd agreed to collect the car on Tuesday evening, we finally started to walk back to the parking lot where we'd left my car.

Sookie hung onto my arm. "That's the nicest car I've ever had" she said. "It smells so good! And it doesn't have crumbs. Although I guess it will soon. Maybe I could ban eating in my car?"

"Yeah, good luck with that one."

"True, but it will be nice while it lasts. The kids will be excited when they see it."

"Yep, they will."

We reached our car and got in and Sookie started looking through her handbag for the ticket to get out. I knew this could take a while, so I didn't start the engine. "Oh, there it is" Sookie said in the end, pulling it out and handing it to me. I started the engine and reversed out of the spot.

"You know there's just one question I have" Sookie said to me.

"Uh-huh" I replied, hoping that the fucking idiot who was having several attempts at reversing into a space was going to hurry up and move soon.

"How did the car sales guy know your name?"

Fuck.

**Thanks for reading!**


	53. Chapter 53

**A/N I have nothing interesting to report about me. The baby, however, well she can now climb onto the coffee table and insists on wearing a nightie meant for a doll on her head as a hat. I'm starting to wonder if she needs to get out more.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

It was kind of exciting when I picked up my new car, or people-mover as it was really. It was so new and shiny. I briefly considered banning kids from it completely, but, as Eric said, that kind of defeated the purpose of buying it in the first place.

Of course it had been pretty obvious that Eric had been to that car-yard and picked the thing out long before I got there. But by this stage I'd learnt that if Eric was actually talking about it, it was probably a done deal. Mostly that was OK; I just hoped he didn't have any other big surprises up his sleeve or anything.

Clearing out my car in preparation for trading it in was a complete revelation. I hadn't quite realised how much stuff I had in the boot. There was the pushchair, of course, which kind of languished in there now Felicia had gone off sitting in it, but I also had the picnic rug, some buckets and spades, which were still a bit sandy from the last trip to the beach, my reusable shopping bags, including the chiller bag, a spare rain jacket, the big umbrella, Amelia's pink umbrella, a ball, an emergency change kit for Felicia with a pull-up and some wipes, the sun shade and the rain cover for the pushchair, and, kind of bizarrely, one lone lemon that had obviously rolled out of my shopping at some point and was now a bit mouldy on one side.

We pulled it all out and set it in the garage. Eric surveyed the pile. "Yeah, you fucking need a big car" he muttered to himself.

"What?" I asked. I'd seen worse, I was sure I had. Of course we hadn't cleared out the backseat yet, but that was all the kid's junk.

Eric didn't reply he just nodded at the pile. "Well" I said, trying to think of a defence. "Mainly, it's for the kids."

"Uh-huh."

"They need a lot of crap."

"Yep."

"Maybe I won't put sandy spades in my new car though."

"I wouldn't."

"Because it's all nice and shiny."

"Yeah."

"Thank-you" I said, reaching over and taking Eric's hand. He looked over and smiled at me. "You're welcome, Sookie" he said. He seemed pleased that I liked the people-mover, and really, what was not to like? It was all clean and shiny and new and it was going to be really easy to get the kids in and out. Even Bob liked it, when Eric brought it home on the Tuesday evening he promptly went to sleep on the roof, and I could hear Eric out there shooing him off it.

At least Bob hadn't made it inside the thing yet. I'd left my old car open once and found him asleep on the parcel shelf in the sun several hours later. The cat fur was still in place when I traded it in because I'd never got around to vacuuming out the car.

The kids liked it though, although Amelia couldn't figure out why I was driving an ambulance now, and Felicia didn't understand that she couldn't run around inside and still had to sit in a seat like normal.

And Eric, well, Eric looked pretty pleased with himself all round, that is, when he wasn't telling Bob that his claws would scratch the paintwork. I tried to tell him he was wasting his breath. I was pretty sure Bob didn't care.

EPOV

Despite the fact that Sookie had figured out that there may have been some planning on my part prior to the purchase of her new car, she didn't seem that pissed about it. Mostly she still seemed happy to be getting it. And when I saw the amount of shit she had in the trunk of her existing car I could see why. I wasn't quite sure why she needed all that stuff, but apparently it was a necessary part of motherhood or something.

So I'd solved one problem, but I still had the house to figure out. I'd seen some more places with Maudette but they were shit. She really didn't have much of a clue despite the fact I'd tried to make it as clear as possible what it was I was actually interested in. I was starting to wonder if we were ever going to be able to move.

Calvin came over to fix the hole I'd made in the garage wall. He didn't ask much about how it had happened, or why, but I took the opportunity to discuss with him again the idea of adding onto our current house. Yeah, it still didn't make any fucking sense to do that. I mentioned the villa I'd seen on my first trip out with Maudette, the one that had already been renovated.

"Yah, there are a lot of places like that around here" Calvin had said. "But they're fucking expensive once they start tinkering with them and adding in bifold doors and big decks and designer kitchens."

"Yeah, that's what this was like. And it had a really fucking great bathroom."

"I bet that wasn't original. Half the villas didn't even have bathrooms, although you get a few with claw baths that are worth a fortune now. Or copper door-handles. They strip all the door-handles out and sell them off."

"Uh-huh."

"Maybe" Calvin continued, stepping back to look at his handiwork, "what you need is something that hasn't been renovated? A real project?"

That sounded less than appealing. "I don't want to live in a pile of shit, Calvin. And neither does Sookie." Well, I figured she wouldn't, but who knew? Bits of this house looked pretty awful before we got Calvin back to finish them off, and there were still a lot of loose floorboards and a door that stuck. Sookie insisted that you got stuff like that with any old house, but I felt sure we could improve it.

"Just don't move until it's finished" Calvin said, shrugging, as he started to pack away his tools.

I thought about that for a moment. "That'd mean bridging finance, if we haven't sold this place yet." I wasn't sure I wanted to be that far into debt.

"Well, you're the one who works with all those bankers. Surely they can help you out?" Calvin asked.

"I guess." I wasn't really convinced though, it would be a huge commitment in time and money and I couldn't really see Sookie on-board for it.

"OK, well I'm done here anyway" Calvin continued. "So just let that putty dry out overnight then give it a bit of a sand-down before you paint it, OK?"

"Yeah, OK." Fuck, I really wasn't up for any renovation projects despite Calvin's enthusiasm. I guess he thought he was going to get the work. Maybe that would make it cheaper, although, fuck. I might still end up being his assistant and that wouldn't fucking work at all.

But for the sake of satisfying my curiosity I started to investigate these renovation projects that Calvin was talking about. He was right there were a few of them around, but most of them were fucking horrible.

And the money they would suck would be horrific. It wasn't as though we were exactly struggling, but at the same time, we weren't made of money. While the house we lived in now was fully paid-off, thanks to Bill's early demise and the fact that Sookie had once sold him life insurance when she worked in a bank branch, funding renovations without releasing the capital by selling the current place was going to be a big ask. I didn't think we could quite do it, yet. In fact I didn't know what we could fucking do about the house. I'd felt good about getting Sookie the car, but as the weeks passed I felt, well, I felt despairing about the house.

Sookie seemed OK though. She was more than OK really, she was blooming now, or as she would say when she looked at herself in the mirror "My arse is getting wider by the day." I didn't like to point out that no one was looking at her ass. They were looking at her bump, or, more likely, her boobs.

Every time I thought that she couldn't possibly get any bigger, she did. And so did Sam. We went back to see Russell and he did some more measurements with the ultrasound again, and then he got out a little graph and started drawing points on it. "So this is where you are" he said, showing the chart to Sookie. I put Felicia, who'd been sitting in my lap, on the floor and leaned over to have a better look.

"Well, that's good" I said, "he's way above the 90th percentile." Sookie shot me a look that showed she was really annoyed by that statement but I couldn't figure out why; surely it was good news that he was doing so well.

"We'll just keep an eye on what happens from here" Russell said. "What were your other two?" He turned around and looked at the screen, scrolling through Sookie's notes. "Mmm, just over 8 pounds…well; I think you can do a 9 pound baby, but maybe not a 10 pound one. We'll have to keep an eye on that."

Oh. It dawned on me why Sookie was a bit less than impressed with Sam's size; she had to push him out. Yeah. Ouch. I felt fucking sorry for her. And I was pretty sure it was my fault he was going to be that big.

After the appointment was over Sookie didn't seem to want to talk about it. "Its fine" she said, "And you can't trust Russell's measuring skills on that ultrasound. He announced I had a 9 pound 2 baby in there the day before I had Amelia. He was a pound out. I wouldn't worry."

But she did sound worried. Still, I decided to change the subject. Kind of, anyway. "Why pounds?" I asked. "Everything else is kilos." I didn't mind, I could understand pounds, I was just curious.

"Tradition, I guess" Sookie said, shrugging. "I mean, the official weight is in kilos, but everyone talks about babies in pounds. It means I can compare babies, but I have no idea how the weight compares to the real world."

"Well, I can tell you. If you want."

Sookie looked at me and smiled. "Yeah, I guess you can. I knew I had you around for a reason!" I walked her and Felicia back to their car and waved goodbye. I might have been great at understanding pounds as a measurement, but I really wanted to be fantastic at finding a new house too.

I wasn't sure what to do about that, so I walked back to my office wondering if I needed to try Maudette again, or maybe try some more realtors. There were a couple of other offices in Mt Eden. There had to be something out there for us.

But what I found when I sat back at my desk and switched my laptop back on was something completely different. I had an email. From Indira

SPOV

Eric was worried about something, I could tell. Me, I was worried about how big this baby was going to be but I was trying to put that off for now. There wasn't much I could do about it, save maybe take up smoking, and I wasn't quite that desperate. If the baby was big, well then, I guess that's why I had a specialist. Despite Russell once cheerfully telling Bill during an appointment that you could get any baby out with forceps, I trusted him not to be quite that brutal and if it came down it, well there was always surgery. He'd done Tara's caesareans and she seemed to have recovered OK, so I was sure I would too.

But Eric was hiding something again. We'd bought the car, so I couldn't figure out what it was, but it was big, I could tell that much. There was a lot of staring at stuff on his phone and occasionally getting his laptop out and trying to work at night. I wanted to ask, but I figured he'd tell me in his own time.

In the meantime, life went on. Felicia reached the magic age of nearly 2 ½ and got promoted to the pre-school at daycare. The main difference, apart from the activities, was that I now had to provide her morning tea in a lunchbox, to get her used to having one. So on her first day she trotted off with her new Toy Story lunchbox and happily joined the other kids without a backward glance. She'd been over this side of the building enough with Amelia, I guessed, but it brought home how much she was growing up too.

It was just lucky I had another baby on order, because otherwise I might have had to go home for a good cry after that.

She was still excited when she got home "I's a Kiwi now!" she told Amelia, after we collected Amelia from school.

"So? I go to school. We don't have groups like at pre-school. I'm in a house. Green house."

"I's got a lunchbox!"

"Yes, and I've had one for _ages_. Em has the same lunchbox as me. It's got princesses on it." It was clear that Felicia was never going to win this comparison, but she didn't seem to mind. I guessed that was how it was always going to be, Amelia was going to get there first and Felicia would just have to carve out her own little niche in the world.

Certainly she was enjoying coming to parent-help with me. Once she'd stopped spending the time wandering around investigating what they had to do in Amelia's classroom, she started paying attention to what the kids at the table were doing. Usually, it wasn't much. It took a lot of coaxing to get them to write anything, and it really depended on the topic as to how enthusiastic they all were. The day they had to write something about their dads had been a disaster as Chloe had promptly burst into tears because she had two mummies and no daddy.

Amelia of course immediately tried to tell her that couldn't possibly be right because there had to be a penis if you wanted to make a baby, and I had to step in and shush her before she made it all worse. "Just, um. Just write about one of your mummies then" I tried.

Chloe stopped crying and started chewing her pencil, so that was progress. "How do you spell dick?" Emily asked me.

"Pardon?" I tried, turning away from Chloe.

"Dick. As in 'my dad is a dick.' Mum says he is. All the time." She looked at me expectantly. I wondered about Tanya's parenting strategies. "Maybe you should write something like 'my daddy is fun' instead", I tried.

Emily looked thoughtful. "I guess…" she said slowly. "Great!" I told her enthusiastically.

"I'm going to write that my daddy has red hair" Maisie piped up. "Good for you" I told her.

"I'm going to write that my daddy is dead!" Amelia said, trying to top that. "Um, really?" I asked her. "Why don't you put something about Eric?"

Amelia shrugged, "Alright. How do you spell comes-from-America then?"

Emily looked up. "Mum said that Eric's her friend now. But I don't know if that's a nap-taking friend. She takes naps with a few friends." She thought for a moment. "She says she's going to the museum if Eric goes. Is Eric going?"

"Don't know" I said. Probably not now, I thought.

"Mum said that Uncle Chris might be my daddy. I heard her talking about it with Jocelyn" Chloe said, still chewing her pencil. "Do you want to write about Uncle Chris then?" I asked her.

"Um. Maybe. I could say he has no hair and a picture on his arm?"

"Yeah that'll work" I told her. When the girls had finally settled down I walked around to see how Sebastian was doing. "Do you need any help?" I asked him. Well, any help that wasn't Felicia. She was standing at his elbow watching what he was doing. He was drawing a picture again. This time it was a tiger. At least Felicia wasn't scribbling all over his picture, I thought.

Sebastian looked at me and shrugged. "Want to write something about your dad?" I asked him. He nodded. "What do you want to say?" I asked. He thought about it. "Lawyer" he said in the end after much thought.

"Your dad's a lawyer?" I asked him.

"He specialises in tax law, primarily GST for large companies" Sebastian said. He tripped over a few of the words but I think that was the longest sentence I'd ever heard him speak. Wow, so I guess some things were rubbing off on him then.

It was only after Felicia and I left the classroom at the end of our shift that I noticed what Felicia had in her hand. It was Sebastian's drawing. "Felicia!" I said to her. "Did you take Sebastian's picture?"

"He gived it to me!" she countered, holding it against her chest.

I sighed. I was pretty sure he hadn't. "You shouldn't take things from other people, sweetheart" I tried. "They won't like it and you could get in trouble."

"Mine" Felicia retorted.

I was torn about whether to go back to the classroom and hand it back, or just leave with it. In the end I decided it was just a picture and we'd let it go for now. "Just don't do that again" I said to Felicia. "Or we won't be allowed to come to school with Amelia anymore."

Felicia just glared at me and held the picture close to her. It wasn't until we got home and she put it down to eat lunch that I saw what it was a picture of. It was a tiger and next to it was a tiny girl with blue eyes and curly pigtails. Felicia had been right; Sebastian had obviously drawn it for her. Maybe Amelia had been telling the truth and he did really like her?

EPOV

I was going to have to tell Sookie sometime I figured. Unfortunately I picked a night when she'd been helping at the school and after dinner mostly what she wanted to do was tell me how that had gone. "The kids are still hard work" she said, as we sat watching TV and I absentmindedly ran my hand over her bump, while Sookie leaned against me. I couldn't even fit my hand over it now. It was pretty big. Probably due to the big baby in there. Fuck, poor Sookie. I realised I hadn't really been listening to her. Mainly because I heard her say "You're not listening, are you?"

"Oh, I was, really."

"So what I was saying?"

"The kids are…hard work." That sounded right, anyway.

"I said more than that. The important point is you need to be careful if you do go to the museum, Tanya thinks you're her friend."

"That's because I got Connor under control for her."

"No, that's Debbie. Tanya's Emily's mother."

"Who? I don't know any Emily."

"Em."

"Oh. Well that's OK, isn't it? If she wants to be friends. The kids are."

"Remember she naps with her friends. If you want to call it that."

I pulled back to look at Sookie. "Really Sookie? You think I would."

"I think she would" Sookie snorted. Then she muttered something that sounded like "She should be so lucky."

"I don't think you need to worry. It's not even like you get to be alone on these trips. There's kids fucking everywhere and they all want something. And when I had to supervise all the boys that was a fucking nightmare. Seriously, half the class and only me to deal with them. Not good planning."

"What did you do?"

"I told them that if I saw anymore pushing and shoving we were all going back to fill in another worksheet."

"And that worked?"

"None of them wanted to fill in the one they had, so they really didn't want to start another."

"Yeah, I guess. It'd be like getting them to write stories. Sebastian actually wrote something today. And he drew Felicia a picture."

"Did he?"

"Yep. Of her standing beside a tiger. He's a weird little kid, but I think he means well."

"That's…odd, though. Isn't it?" It seemed odd. I mean, I liked Felicia, but I couldn't see her appeal to a five year old boy.

Sookie gave a half-shrug. "I think he's lonely and she wanted to be friends, so he's trying. He just doesn't know what to do with the boys his age."

"They're fucking animals most of the time."

"Exactly."

We sat in silence for a while and then I figured I'd better broach the subject. "So" I said, "I wanted to say something."

"Uh-huh" Sookie said, with a hint of trepidation in her voice. I guessed she'd figured something was up.

"So, um, I had an email. From Indira."

"Oh" Sookie seemed surprised at that. "How is she?"

"Good. She's left De Castro too, now. I think Victor was getting a bit reckless with trying to expand when they didn't have the resources, plus of course seeing Chow every day was getting her down a bit. He's getting remarried soon." To the stripper he'd met when they took me out, poor fucker.

"That would be hard" Sookie agreed. "I don't know what it would be like to have someone you'd loved that much in front of you all the time…" she trailed off, obviously thinking of Bill. I decided I'd better start talking again before we sailed off onto one of Sookie's tangents.

"So, anyway" I continued. "She says she might have a bit of work for me. She's landed this big contract and at the moment it's just her and Clancy in her firm, although why she took that fucker is beyond me. Upshot is she can offer me a cut if I help them out."

"Oh, well that sounds good. The New Zealand dollar keeps slipping so if you can earn some US dollars that would be a nice bonus."

"Yep, it would."

"So, what? They'll send you the stuff to do."

And this is where it all got fucking difficult. "They want me to meet the client first. I'd have to go to Shreveport."

Sookie sat up and turned around to face me. "But…I'm pregnant!" she said. "I'm nearly six months' pregnant you can't not be here."

I sighed. "I don't really want to go" I said, stroking her face. "But…it's a good opportunity. And you said yourself, the money would be nice."

"We don't need the money though! If we need the money we shouldn't have bought the car!" she was almost crying now. Fuck. I really didn't want to make her cry, and I really didn't want to go, but I'd been emailing back and forth with Indira, and fuck, it was a good opportunity. And maybe, just maybe if I earned something from this I could fucking find a house we could afford to renovate.

"We needed the car though" I told her, as gently as I could. "We needed the car because we're going to have three kids. And kids are expensive, you're always saying that yourself."

"They do keep asking for money at the school. You think it's just uniforms and books, but you have to pay for trips, and donations for this that and the other. It's hopeless" Sookie sniffed.

"Exactly. So wouldn't it be good to have this as kind of…buffer. Just in case?"

"I guess. But I hate that you have to go. You'll miss the pregnancy!"

"It's only for two weeks. After that I can work from here. And I won't miss much. We had that other scan the other week, and Sam was fine." I'd taken Sookie for her anatomy scan at 20 weeks and we'd gone back to the same radiology clinic where they'd picked up the initial risk of Down's. Both of us had been quiet going in, but Sam was fine. He waved again. "I have the pictures on my phone. And you can send me others, so I don't miss how big the bump's getting."

Sookie bit her lip. "I know" she said quietly. "I do, but…I want you here."

"I want to be here too."

"But you're going anyway?"

"Not if you absolutely hate the idea. But I think…well I think it's a good plan." I looked at her, trying to read her face. She looked down, and she took a deep breath. "OK" she said finally. "OK, as long as you go soon, because I don't want to you to miss the birth. Book the tickets."

"I guess this gets me out of the museum trip."

"I guess it does."

I kissed her forehead. "It's just a short trip, Sookie. It'll be fine" I said. I wasn't sure any longer which one of us I was trying to reassure.

"I know. But I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too. And Amelia. And Felicia. And even Sam."

Sookie pulled back. "There's one thing we should do before you go though" she said. "And that's get that list of names sorted."

"Yeah, we can do that" I kissed her again, properly and deeply. I felt so bad about this, that she could have her fucking list of names if that would make her happy. I'd do anything to make her happy.

We broke apart. "So I was thinking that maybe we could name the baby Tristram, see if it doesn't have an 'n' at the end, like Tristan, it doesn't sound so bad with Northman. What do think, shall we put that on the list?"

Except that. Maybe I wasn't doing that.

**A/N GST is Goods and Services Tax, it's added on at point of sale for most things we pay for, so lots of companies are therefore collecting it on behalf of the government.**

**Our primary schools are rated by decile, the decile is determined by the socio-economic environment the school is in. Decile 1 are the poor areas, decile 10 the wealthiest. Decile 1 schools get the most government funding, decile 10 the least. Amelia would be going to a decile 10 school, therefore her school would be constantly fundraising to make up the shortfall it would need to keep itself running. But she does get to go to a nice school. So it's a trade-off.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	54. Chapter 54

**A/N A big thank-you once again for everyone who reads and reviews this and keeps me trucking on! If I didn't have my writing I'd be stuck spending the day peeling the baby off the coffee table. Of course, my house might be cleaner, but if anyone asks me, the baby made the mess, I'm waiting until she's big enough to clean it up herself!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

After Eric told me he was going back to the States for work, I didn't want to cry, I really didn't. And I knew that Eric didn't want me to cry. But I couldn't help it. While I was brushing my teeth the tears started, and although I wiped them away before Eric could see I think he knew what had happened.

But I was trying really hard not to make him feel bad about going. I could see that although it was bad timing, there was a part of Eric that really wanted to head back to the States for this job he had lined up. He liked sorting stuff out for people, and that was what made him good at his job. And he really liked to be needed. So I could see the huge appeal this had for him, being asked to go halfway round the world to ride in and save the day.

But as much as I understood all of that, I still felt desperately sad about it all. Truth was I didn't want to be pregnant and alone, again. I'd done it before and it had no redeeming features. I really hadn't thought I'd ever have to do it again.

Eric booked his tickets for the following week, not wanting to leave it any longer in case the baby came early. I tried to point out that if he came that early we had bigger problems than just Eric's absence in the delivery room, but Eric still wanted to go as soon as he could. "That way, I won't miss the end" he said, as he packed underwear into his suitcase.

"What, the bit where I get so big you have to roll me down the street because I can't walk anymore?"

Eric turned to look at me. "Yeah" he said slowly. "That bit. But probably more just…you know…the baby."

"You won't miss much. It's just more of the same. I get bigger and bigger and so does he…which is kind of a worry, but anyway. You'll still get those emails." I'd signed Eric up for emails I'd had before which told you what was happening with the pregnancy each week.

Eric sighed and stopped moving stuff around in his suitcase. "I know" he said "but it's nicer when we read them together. Plus, I still need to feel a kick."

Eric went back to packing. He was really disappointed about the kicks. The baby was quite active now, but somehow as soon as Eric tried to feel any movement, he stopped. Every time I felt a kick when Eric was around I'd run to get him, but somehow he'd never managed to catch it.

The day he got home from work and Amelia greeted him by shouting "The baby kicked me" wasn't a happy one. Eric was starting to take it personally, but no matter how often I tried to coach the baby with what he was supposed to do, he wasn't listening to me. I was tempted to tell him he could just stay in there if he wasn't going to behave for me, but honestly, I wasn't sure that was a great idea either. This particular relationship had an expiration date of 40 weeks and then, come hell or high water, he was coming out.

That was the plan away.

Eric stood up and sighed, having a good look in his suitcase. "There's a lot of room still in there" I commented.

"I might bring some stuff back. It's easier to buy jeans the right length in the States."

"Yeah, I guess it is."

He closed the suitcase and zipped it up, before moving it off the bed and setting it down in a corner of the bedroom. I eyed it warily. I kind of hated that suitcase right at this point in time. And it wasn't just because I suspected it might be full of dirty washing when it came home again.

Eric climbed onto the bed beside me and stretched out. "I feel kind of full still" he commented, patting his stomach and smiling at me. Yeah, I'd been feeding him up in preparation for his departure. It was winter now anyway, so we were eating a lot of heavier things, but so far this week we'd had a couple of stews, a roast chicken done in the crockpot, a chicken casserole and tonight had been lamb roast and Yorkshire puddings.

"Yeah, I can kind of sympathise" I said.

"Any movement?" Eric asked, turning onto his side and moving his hand to my stomach.

"Mmm, he bounced a bit when I ate dinner, but now he's stopped. I think he's gone to sleep."

"Well that's no fun at all" Eric said. I stayed quiet on the matter, my opinion on whether it was fun having someone doing somersaults inside me probably wasn't needed about now.

I watched Eric's face as he stared hard at my bump, as if he was willing the baby to do something, anything, that he could feel. Whatever he was doing, it wasn't working.

"Chocolate" I said.

"Mmm?" Eric asked, still running his hand down the bump.

"Chocolate might wake him up. And Coke, that works too."

"Is this another excuse for you to eat whatever you want?" Eric asked, looking up at me.

"No! This is a proven method for waking up babies in-utero. I had to do it with Amelia once when she stopped moving when I was about 29 weeks."

"I bet Felicia never stopped moving" Eric commented.

"To be honest, I probably didn't pay as much attention to her. I was kind of occupied. By Amelia, a lot of the time." And a lot of the time by Bill, because I was being sucked into his dramas. I sighed; I was just back feeling sorry for myself that this was all happening again. "I'm going to get chocolate" I said, swinging my legs off the edge of the bed and pushing myself up. Eric helped by giving me a push on the bum too, and then he trailed after me as I waddled to the kitchen.

"It's not warm" I said, as I opened up the fridge looking for chocolate.

"I'm alright" Eric said, shrugging.

"Well, you're heading off to have summer again tomorrow night, so that'll help" I sighed. "It'll have to be a Freddo." I could only find the chocolate treats I kept for the kids.

"One of the frog shaped things?" Eric asked. I nodded, and then I handed one to him. I pulled out a bottle of Diet Coke and opened that up as well. Eric took a bite of his chocolate and frowned. "Should you be drinking something with artificial sweeteners in it?" he asked.

"What are you the pregnancy police?" I said, after taking a sip. "It'll be fine. Anyway, you wanted to feel a kick."

Eric shrugged and finished his chocolate. I did the same. "I wonder if I need a second one?' I said. I thought for a moment, and then I opened the fridge and took out the last two Freddos and handed one to Eric. "I hope Amelia doesn't notice they're all gone" I commented, as I opened the wrapper on mine.

"She will" Eric said.

"Course she will, but I can hope anyway."

I finished my second chocolate, drank a bit more of the Diet Coke and then put the bottle down. "Anything?" Eric asked.

"Not yet" I said. "Time for Plan B." I started jumping up and down.

Eric watched me for a moment. "Is that a good idea?" he asked.

"I don't know. But I haven't heard of a baby ever actually falling out because its mother jumped a bit." I jumped a few more times. "That's not easy" I said, having another sip of Diet Coke. "It would be better if my pelvis wasn't trying to separate about now."

Eric looked really worried and his eyes immediately went to my groin. "Really?" he asked. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, it's meant to happen. I've got to get a baby out, remember. It doesn't work if my joints don't start loosening up to make way."

"Oh. Fuck."

"Yeah."

"I didn't realise you had to be basically remodelled in order to do this."

I shrugged and took another sip of Diet Coke. "Well, I guess it happened before, and I managed to get put back together. Kind of. But you never knew the previous version, so you know…"I trailed off.

"Yeah" Eric said thoughtfully. I jumped a couple of more times. "But are you warmer now?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, there's that." I looked down at the bump. "Oh, come on you" I said. "Do something for me."

"Too many Yorkshire puddings?" Eric asked. "They kind of make me sleepy."

"Too many would be any wouldn't it? I saw you watching how many the rest of us had."

"Well, I won't be getting them next week" Eric said defensively.

"You never know. Indira might feel sorry for you and feed you." He was staying with her in an effort to cut down the amount of money he was outlaying for his stay, but I wasn't sure how that would work. God knows, he could drive me up the wall and I actually promised I'd spend the rest of my life with him. I wasn't sure how Indira was going to feel about having him around. I'd tried to have a chat about being on his best behaviour, but Eric had kind of looked indignant and declared that he couldn't imagine there'd be any problems. Yeah, maybe he didn't have the same imagination I did.

"Mmm. It won't be the same as you feeding me" Eric said, sadly. No, it wouldn't, but he was the one who wanted to go. I nearly said that, but I bit my tongue. I could tell he was torn, I really could. We'd just have to chalk this one up to bad timing. In the end what I did say was "Well, you never know. You'll just have to wait and see."

I jumped a couple of more times, but there was no movement. I sighed. "Of course" I said to Eric. "We won't be doing this after he's actually born. If he's asleep at ten o'clock at night, he's staying asleep and not being poked and prodded and told to wake up just because Daddy wants to play."

"You're no fun" Eric said, with a mock pout. He sounded sad though. Probably partially because he was still missing out on feeling a kick, and maybe also for other reasons.

I sighed. "I think it's bedtime" I trudged out of the kitchen and Eric followed. I used the bathroom while he checked on the kids and the house, and I was lying on the bed reading my book by the time Eric came in. "Are they OK?" I asked him.

"Yeah, Felicia partially woke up and told me she'd seen a tiger and didn't believe it was a dream. Amelia was fast asleep, but she was at a weird angle, so I had to scoot her round." He headed off into the bathroom. And then I felt it. The baby kicked. Bugger.

"Eric!" I called out. Eric shouted something that sounded like "Whuf?" so I figured he was brushing his teeth.

"There's kicking" I called back, as another kick hit me. Although it could have been a hand. It was hard to tell while he still had a bit of room to move. That wasn't going to be for much longer though, the rate he was growing, so I only hoped he got himself comfortable while he could.

Eric burst into the bedroom and was on the bed in an instant. He put his hand on my tummy, and absolutely nothing happened. We sat like that for a moment. "Maybe it's the warmth" I murmured. "Your hand's really warm. Maybe it relaxes him?" I hoped that sounded like a good thing.

"Maybe" Eric said, making it pretty clear he didn't think it was.

Eric put his other hand on my bump as well. "Come on" he said, sounding really impatient. I wanted to tell him that babies don't really work to commands, but I didn't think that was going to help. I needed the baby to come to the party and cheer his dad up at this point. I was just stuck in the middle of the pair of them, really.

I jiggled a bit from side to side, and Eric's hands didn't move, but his eyes slid from my abdomen up to my breasts. At least I was distracting him. And then I felt another kick. "Ooh! Did you feel that one?" I asked Eric.

He sighed. "No." He moved his hands away and I thought he'd go back to the bathroom, but instead he moved down the bed and put his face really close to the bump. "Sam" he said. I sighed. I still wanted that list, because as much as Eric was getting attached to that one name, I wanted a few choices. It might be nice to see what he actually suited when he came out, I thought. "Sam" Eric tried again. "Sam, kick for me. Come on, buddy." He put his hand back and waited. And waited.

I was starting to get a bit worried we were going to be here all night. Eric's flight wasn't until the next evening, so it wasn't like we had to get up early or anything, well, not any earlier than usual anyway. I kind of wanted a decent night's sleep.

Because who knew how well I'd be sleeping the next night, thinking about Eric flying away from me.

I figured the baby had probably gone back to sleep again too, and was trying to work out how I was going to break this to Eric, when I felt another kick. I was almost too scared to ask Eric if he felt that one. I looked at Eric's face. He was frowning. Bugger.

Eric looked at me. "Was that…?" he asked.

"Yeah. That was the baby" I said, smiling at Eric.

"Oh" Eric said. I hoped that was a good 'oh'. Then it happened again. "Wow" Eric said, so I guessed he felt that one.

After that, the baby seemed to be on a roll. He was definitely bouncing all over in there. Probably that's why you shouldn't feed babies chocolate.

Eric laughed. "That's…that's a lot of movement" he said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "He's never quite done this before."

We stayed like that for a while, as the baby kept it up. "What does it feel like? For you?" Eric asked me.

"Kind of fluttery. Well, it has been up until now. This…this is a bit more than that. It's like, I don't know. Bouncing or something. I think he's hyped up on sugar."

"I wonder what he'll be like with ice cream?" Eric asked.

"Probably a menace like the other two are."

"Probably." The baby twisted around again. "Good boy, Sam" Eric said, and then he kissed my tummy through my pyjama top. And then he shuffled up the bed and kissed me. That kind of took my mind off what was going on inside my uterus for a bit. I put my hands behind Eric's head and just held him to me.

Eric pulled back. "It's only two weeks" he said. It was starting to become a bit of a mantra around here.

"Yeah, I know."

Eric kissed me again. The baby kicked some more. The pair of them were kind of distracting.

And then Eric's hand slipped inside my pyjama top and undid the clip on my maternity bra before he wiggled it inside to grasp my breast. Yeah, he was winning in terms of who could be most distracting now. I pushed my chest up against his hand. It was really warm. How was he not cold in this weather? I was cold and I had a small heater attached to my abdomen.

We kissed for a while, and the baby kept up its movements. Eric kept one hand on my tummy so he could continue to feel what was going on.

"I wonder if we'll get him to go back to sleep now?" I whispered to Eric.

"I don't know. He seems pretty wide awake. Don't you Sam?"

"Yeah, I kind of am too. But you know what puts babies to sleep?"

"Whisky?"

"Yeah, very funny. Movement. Rhythmic movement. If I move around a bit that might lull him to sleep."

"OK" Eric said, getting where I was going with this. He pulled the long-sleeved t-shirt he was wearing over his head.

"Jeez, you're keen" I commented, as I moved to get under the covers. I started removing layers only once I was fully covered by the duvet, while Eric just shucked his jeans before getting into bed with me.

"It's not _that_ cold" he said.

I didn't bother answering that. Mainly because Eric had run his hand over my bump again, before placing it between my legs. Yeah, that did warm me up a bit.

I squirmed and panted and felt really, horribly ungainly as my bump seemed to be completely in the way now. I wasn't a shape that was designed for sex, that was for sure. But I was kind of determined to go through with it. This was our last night together, and, to be honest, I wasn't sure how much longer I was going to be able to work around the bump, and the sore hips and the general feelings of looking like a beached whale.

But while the desire lasted, and I had Eric with me, I wanted to make the most of it.

It was only when I was moving to straddle Eric that I had real second thoughts. For one thing I wasn't sure how much of the lumpy bits I wanted to shove in his face and for another, I was worried about how cold I was going to be up there, naked, in winter.

"Are you OK?" Eric asked, sensing my hesitation.

"Um. Just a bit cold."

"I'll keep you warm" Eric said, but of course he couldn't really. The bump got in the way, and when he tried to sit up a bit to hold me, he got kicked, quite hard. Eric burst out laughing at that. "I don't know if he wants to share you" he said.

"Oh, he doesn't know what's going on" I said, starting to move in the hope that would warm me up a bit.

"Yeah. I think Sam has some idea" Eric commented. And then I leant forward to put my hands on Eric's chest and felt a bit warmer.

"That's better" I said. "I don't feel so cold." Eric's hands on my back were helping too. And he'd done his best to pull the duvet up to cover my backside.

"Uh-huh" Eric said. I kept moving and felt my orgasm building. Eric had another go at sitting up a bit and managed to get my nipple into his mouth, rolling it around with his tongue. "That's good" I said to Eric, and then, feeling a bit breathless and a lot warmer than I had when I'd started, I came.

I looked down at Eric's face, as he came just after me, trying to remember every detail. "Oh fuck, Sookie" he moaned, and I felt his body go rigid beneath me.

We stayed like that for a moment, just looking at each other. I brushed some hair off Eric's face and I thought that maybe he was building up to saying something, but I beat him to it. "Bit cold now" I said, climbing off and reclaiming my pyjamas, before going into the bathroom to clean up.

When I got back Eric leaned over and kissed me and then got out of bed and walked to the bathroom door. I watched him go. It was a good view, after all. Then I lay on my side and tried to get comfortable, and wondered how long it took Diet Coke and chocolate Freddos to wear off.

EPOV

When I got back from the bathroom, Sookie was on her side asleep. Of course, I had been in there a while. I'd borrowed her trick, and, while I wasn't crying, I didn't want her to see that I was upset. I'd been so adamant that this was the right thing to do, that I needed to go back to the States for these two weeks and help Indira out, but fuck; I was starting to second guess myself.

Two weeks was a long time in Sam's life, after all.

But I'd finally felt him kick at least. I'd been so fucking annoyed that I always seemed to miss when he did it. Even Amelia had felt some kicks. It was like Sam didn't like me, or something.

But maybe he did. Or he liked chocolate frogs and Diet Coke. I liked to think it was me though. And I liked to think he knew his name when I spoke to him. I'd tried to tell Sookie that it suited him, but she wasn't buying it. I figured if I could maybe get him to keep responding to it, maybe she'd come around.

I looked down at Sookie, who was lying on her side, snoring slightly. She kept denying she did it, but she'd been pretty loud while pregnant. Maybe I wouldn't miss that so much.

I climbed under the covers. Sookie had recently added extra blankets to the bed and it was fucking hot sometimes. I just hoped I could get some sleep. I'd be sleeping in a fucking plane the next night, which meant probably not sleeping at all. Fuck, that was going to be cramped.

I lay on my side facing Sookie and pulled the covers back a bit, thinking I'd get a last look at the bump. At Sam.

And then I noticed he was still moving around in there. I could fucking see it. Sookie was fast asleep, but he wasn't. That was…fucking bizarre. He really was a totally separate person and not just an adjunct of Sookie somehow.

Fuck.

I put my mouth against her stomach, near the place where I saw him moving. "I'm sorry buddy" I said. "But I'll be back. Soon. You look after your Mom. And no more Diet Coke. I don't think it's any good at your age." I stayed like that for a while, and then I switched off the lamp on my nightstand and tried to get to sleep myself.

**A/N So in case it wasn't clear, Freddos are just chocolate shaped frogs, but they're a kid thing and have been around since I was one. Don't forget, if there's anything you ever want to know about NZ or anything I've written, just let me know. I'm always happy to answer questions.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	55. Chapter 55

**A/N Thank-you all again for all the reviews, and for just reading and supporting my little domestic drama!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Eric stayed home with us on the day he was flying to the States, so Felicia at least enjoyed that time with him, as it was a Friday and she was home too. Amelia was slightly miffed to be going to school, but it was a mufti day so that kind of mollified her. It seemed to be a bit ridiculous that the school made me shell out all that money for her uniform, and then wanted to charge me $1 or $2 for her to wear her own clothes for once, but that was kind of the deal when your kid went to a decile 10 school, unfortunately. The Board of Trustees were always on the lookout for another way to round up some cash, and every other week it was something.

So we all dropped Amelia off at school and then went out for brunch in Mt Eden, heading into the Sierra café because it had a very convenient sand-pit in the courtyard. Maybe we wouldn't tell Amelia about this trip. Eric of course ordered the breakfast that came with everything, saying he was only getting plane food later on and that was bound to be shit. I wasn't feeling quite so hungry, so just had a bagel. We had eaten toast at home with the kids earlier anyway, and when I'd made Eric's I'd been distracted and automatically cut each piece into quarters. He hadn't minded though, he was kind of used to it by now. He looked at me and said that he was going to miss getting individual bite-sized portions of toast for breakfast. I'd laughed along with him, but it was a bit of an effort. I'd felt more like crying.

Felicia hadn't really registered what was going on, and was kind of busy burying some toy trucks in sand anyway. We managed to get her to sit down long enough to make a mess with her fluffy and pick at some eggs, and then she was straight back to the sand-pit, leaving Eric and I alone at the table.

"Anything you need to do today?" I asked him, taking a sip of my decaf coffee. It wasn't really the same.

"Nah, I think I'm good."

"Did you pack your razor?"

Eric took a sip of his coffee and looked thoughtful. "I could just buy one there…" he said slowly.

"But you can't arrive looking like a bum. And this is a work trip, not a holiday, remember?"

"I do" Eric said, looking straight at me. Yeah, OK. He hadn't exactly signed up to go to a resort for the two weeks. But all the same, he was hard not to feel a little bit jealous about his chance to go to the States and be somewhere warm. I hated winter. I pulled my jacket a bit closer together at the front, I couldn't really get it done up these days. God knows what I'd be like at the end of the pregnancy. One random, annoying mother at school had already asked me if I was having twins, and when I'd said I wasn't they looked at me like I was stupid.

Not stupid, just fat. Obviously.

"Anyway, you don't want to buy unnecessary stuff if you can help it. The exchange rate is not in your favour until you start bringing the US dollars back" I continued. Eric just nodded and kept eating. "Did you pack any of your toiletries yet?" I asked him, having the last mouthful of my coffee.

"The stuff you bought" Eric said dismissively. "That's in there, although I can't see why I'm taking half of it."

"Because, Eric. Indira doesn't want you scabbing everything off her. You can't just assume you can use all her stuff. Maybe she's got some really nice expensive shampoo or something; she might not want to share."

"It's just shampoo, Sookie. I think you're getting a bit carried away over shampoo." Eric said, before shovelling a forkful of bacon into his mouth.

"It's the principle. You don't just stay with someone and use all their things."

"You never complained."

"That was kind of different, and you know it. Just..." I sighed, and tried to figure out how phrase it. "Just don't act like you own the place…" Yeah, from the look I was getting across the table maybe I didn't do a very good job of putting it in a way that Eric would understand.

"Just exactly what do you think I'm going to do, Sookie?" Eric took a sip of coffee and looked at me intently over the rim of the cup.

I shrugged. I could imagine all sorts of things, but I didn't necessarily want to explain them to Eric right at the moment. All I could really do is make sure he arrived well-stocked with his own stuff and hoped he kept his head down. And then my attention turned to Felicia, anyway, as she yelled "No! Mine!" at some poor boy who'd tried to get in the sandpit with her.

"You're up" I said to Eric, and he stood up to go and explain to Felicia the concept of sharing. She wasn't really buying it. And only time was going to tell if Eric could practice what he preached.

After we'd finished at the café, Eric decided that maybe he needed a haircut. Because there's nothing like leaving stuff like that to the last minute, after all. So we walked over to the barbers in Essex St. They seemed to know Eric in there, of course, and Felicia was mildly entertained by the barber who kept asking if she wanted her hair cut, and waving his scissors at her, at which point she'd giggle and hide behind my legs, and then come peeking out when she wanted him to do it again.

On the way back to the car after that I passed the time waiting for the crossing by looking at the houses in the window of the real estate agent's office. I couldn't believe the prices of some of the places in the Grammar zone, I really couldn't. I wondered how much Debbie had paid for hers and what it was like. And how they afforded it on one income. Eric asked me what I was looking at and I said I was just being nosy. As I turned around to say that to him, I thought that maybe some woman inside the office was waving at us, but the buzzer went to cross the road and Eric just kind of led me across.

"Some of those houses are just ridiculous" I said to Eric as we walked back to the car. "Can you believe how much it adds to the price if it's in the Grammar zone? Or even in zone for EGGS?"

"Mmm" Eric said, as he adjusted Felicia in his arms. She was a bit squirmy, but trying to get her to walk alongside us at a reasonable pace was an effort. Although I had extra trouble keeping up with Eric these days, given I was lugging someone else around.

"I mean" I continued. "We're in the Mt Albert Grammar zone, and that should be fine. Plenty of people went there and…well, most of them are OK." Yeah, Bill had gone to that school. I'm sure whatever broke him had nothing to do with the school. It was far more likely to be his mother, after all. But when we'd originally bought our house, he'd kind of liked the fact it was in-zone for his old school. How he'd managed to go there and avoid going to a Catholic school, like his sisters had, I wasn't sure, but Mt Albert Grammar was fine from what I heard. And it was co-ed these days; unlike Grammar and its sister school EGGS. Co-ed was always better, I thought. I'd gone to a co-ed school and had learnt pretty quickly that boys weren't that interesting, although, it did mean I had to suffer every teacher going 'Are you Jason Stackhouse's sister?' and there was a never a good answer to that question.

I'd been kind of lost in my own thoughts about schools as we got into the car and I realised that Eric hadn't given much of an opinion on the subject, but then I guess he didn't really have an opinion, as he knew nothing about the schools in Auckland.

So we drove the five minutes home and I made Eric go and check he had everything packed and make sure his razor went in there. There was an awful lot of giggling from the bedroom and when I stuck my head in, it appeared that Felicia was getting packed in the suitcase too.

"I fit in dere!" she proclaimed happily. She didn't seem that upset about Eric leaving, but I guess she hadn't really grasped the concept yet. Amelia had been a bit quiet when we'd told her, but then had been caught up in making Emily her best friend and hadn't really mentioned it again. I thought it was going to be a real shock for Felicia though, when she woke up the next morning and Eric really wasn't here. For one thing, she was stuck doing soccer with a mother who was starting to resemble the balls we'd be kicking around.

In the meantime Felicia was enjoying having Daddy home for the day because of the novelty factor. Having Eric all to herself was a big treat that she usually only got when he took her to soccer, so she was making the most of it and there was no way she was letting him out of her sight, not even to go to the bathroom by himself. Still, he was getting two weeks without his entourage, so I didn't feel too badly for him.

Lunch was a few sandwiches, and Felicia refused a nap, instead she opted to sit on the couch with Daddy and cuddle Sockie while watching Sesame Street. They both liked Elmo, whereas he kind of drove me up the wall. I much preferred Oscar the Grouch. I sat on the other side of Eric and may have dozed off for a bit, I'd lost the sickness but I hadn't quite shaken the tiredness all together.

"Hey" Eric said, leaning over me. "It's time to go."

"Oh. OK" I looked at my watch. It was too. I wasn't ready, the whole plan had been we'd have all day and this didn't feel like all day. Surely there should have been more time?

Eric's suitcase was now stationed by the front-door. I went to the bathroom and found some shoes and pulled the jacket that didn't really fit me back on. Felicia was wearing a tracksuit that had been Amelia's, in a nice bright pink, and Eric had stuffed her red puffer vest over the top of it, and she kind of looked like a small cherry tomato. "We's gonna see planes!" she informed me.

"Yep" I agreed.

Eric arrived in the hallway, frowning slightly. "Have you got everything?" I asked him.

"Mmm" he said, still frowning. Really, that could mean anything.

"Passport, ticket, phone…um, book to read on the plane…" I looked at Eric to see if any of this was ringing any bells with him. He looked in the satchel he was taking on the plane and said he was good, so that was it. Time to leave.

First stop was school to collect Amelia. "Emily's my _best_ friend" she declared, as the three of us met her at the classroom door.

"What about Maisie?" Eric asked, completely ignoring the look I was trying to give him.

Amelia sighed. "Well, she's still my friend. Maybe, like, my almost-best-friend. But Emily's my best friend. She said I could go for a sleep-over, can I Mum?" Amelia looked at me expectantly. "Um" I said, stalling. "I really need to talk to her mum…" I wasn't sure how I felt about Amelia staying in their one-bedroom flat with Tanya and God knows how many men she might decide to take a nap with. I'd have to think about it.

"Tomorrow?" Amelia asked. "I want to go tomorrow."

"No. Not tomorrow. I need you to stay home and look after your mother" Eric told her, as we started walking to the car.

Amelia gave Eric a really filthy look. "Yeah, you get to go away" she muttered at him.

"It's for work" I reminded her.

"Yeah…" she said slowly, suggesting she didn't really care what it was for, she just wanted her sleep-over at Emily's house. "But, I just want to GO!" She looked at me expectantly.

"Well, you can't this weekend. Maybe a play-date sometime though. But only after I've spoken to Emily's mum." I hoped that would be the end of it, and just tried to ignore Amelia's rather sullen expression.

I spied Debbie in the distance and hoped she didn't come trotting over to berate me for Eric not being able to go to the museum, she'd already told me once how disappointed she was, as if I could change anything. I just hoped that maybe she wouldn't want to actually risk annoying Eric and have him not go on the next trip.

Felicia had no attention of lying low though. "Bessian!" she screamed, waving at Sebastian. He turned around, and then waved back happily while Debbie acknowledged us all with a curt nod before dragging him by his other hand off to her car. Felicia looked disappointed that Sebastian didn't come over, but decided to make the best of it by walking in front of Amelia. "She's in my way!" Amelia screeched, coming to a complete stop.

"Just go around her" Eric said, sounding kind of exasperated. I didn't blame him, Amelia was in a bit of a mood now over the whole sleep-over thing. We didn't have that long left with him, and it would be nice if we could all get on.

Amelia sighed noisily and stepped around Felicia, glaring at her all the while. Felicia just giggled and then ran off after Eric who'd stopped just ahead of us. And pretty much that was the way the pair of them continued on to the car, one giggling the other glaring.

Luckily we didn't have too much traffic driving out to the airport. The problem these days was that you had to check in so early so we'd figured that we might as well have dinner at the airport as a family. Well, McDonalds, anyway.

I hung around with Felicia and Amelia while Eric checked in. We weren't allowed past the barriers as we weren't passengers. I tried to amuse Amelia by getting her to read the words she could recognise from the various warning signs around the place, but Felicia was a bit harder to control. She could see Daddy doing something interesting the distance and really wanted to be over with him.

After Eric was sorted we headed up to the next level to get our food. Amelia was still being a pain in the bum, and was constantly complaining about everything; Felicia was annoying her, she had cold legs, I wouldn't let her wander off into the shops, no one was listening to her. It was a bit of an ordeal to be honest. I really just wanted us all to have one nice last meal together.

But it wasn't happening. "Felicia!" Amelia shouted, when we were seated with our food outside the McDonald's. "That's my sauce, don't take that!" Amelia snatched the packet of tomato sauce back from her sister. Felicia frowned, and made a grab to get it back, but Eric grabbed her hand instead. "There's enough ketchup to go around" he said. I surveyed the table. He was probably right. My kids did like to drown everything they ate in tomato sauce.

I picked at my dinner. I wasn't really hungry. Eric was eating kind of slowly and with a certain grim determination, as if this was his last meal for a while. But it wasn't anything special. I was pretty sure he could get McDonald's in the States.

When we'd finally eaten and the fighting was down to a minimum, Eric looked across the table at me. "I guess it's time to go through" he said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "God knows how many security checks you'll have to go through."

Eric didn't say anything, he just nodded. We cleared the table and tried to separate the kids as best as we could. Felicia was bouncing around Eric full of excitement, like something good was about to happen. Amelia stuck close to me, looking sullen and unimpressed by it all.

At the entrance to the boarding area Eric stopped and turned around. "So, I'll call" he said to me. "When I get there."

"Yeah, but don't use your cellphone, it'll cost a fortune" I replied, as Eric pulled me into a hug. Well he gave it a good go. I had to kind of stand on an angle in front of him because of the bump. He lent down and kissed me and I tried to enjoy the kiss as much as I could and not think about the fact that no one would be kissing me for a while after tonight. "I love you" he said, when we broke up.

"Yep" I agreed, tryng really hard not to just bawl all over him. "Love you too. Be nice to Indira." I gave his back a quick rub, and then I stepped back and moved behind the kids.

Next Eric said goodbye to Amelia. Well he tried to, she still wasn't looking particularly happy. "Bye Ames" he said, crouching down to hug her. "Be good."

Amelia sighed as he hugged her. "I still want a sleepover" she said.

Eric tried to get a better response out of Felicia. "Bye Leesh, you be good too." She giggled as he hugged her. "Bye Daddy!" she chanted. Finally, he swivelled around and patted my bump. "Be good, buddy" he said. And then we all stood there and watched him walk through to the security area. He turned back just before he disappeared out of sight. Felicia waved enthusiastically; Amelia gave a brief shake of her hand in Eric's direction. I just raised my hand and tried not to burst into tears.

And that was it. He was gone. The three of us walked back downstairs and out into the cold, dark night. I hated winter; I really, really, really hated winter.

I paid for the parking. Eric had emptied his wallet out of New Zealand dollars after he'd paid for dinner and I seemed to have a plethora of $2 coins all of a sudden. Most of the time Eric was the only one of us who carried cash anyway, I tended to use my eftpos card for everything and was always stumped when someone came to the door collecting for charity. And on the times Amelia suddenly needed to take money into school for something like mufti I was stuck raiding Eric's stash of coins in the bedroom.

I got the kids strapped into the car and drove out of the carpark and headed home. Amelia was abnormally quiet, but I figured I was getting the cold shoulder due to my inability to magic up an impromptu pyjama party for her and Emily. Felicia chattered away instead to fill up the silences, but a lot of what she was talking about didn't make any sense. Mostly it seemed to be about the lights she could see out the car windows and possibly some of it was about Elmo. Or Sebastian. It was all a bit muddled. But at least she wasn't asking where Daddy had gone, or when he was coming back.

Once home I hustled the kids into their pyjamas in front of the heater in the living room, trying to stop them being too cold. I'd figured we'd flag baths for the night before everyone got too tired and stroppy. Or stroppier in Amelia's case.

"I want a nightie" Amelia demanded, surveying the flannelette pyjamas I was offering her.

"These are warmer. And they have princesses on them." Amelia looked at the pyjamas as if they were about to jump out and do something terrible to her. Felicia was already in her pyjamas and simply stood there watching the two of us.

"Fine!" Amelia huffed, as if wearing them was the worst thing I could make her do. She got changed, and then we all trooped to the bathroom to finish getting ready for bed. Finally I managed to get them both into Amelia's room, as it was her turn to choose the story. Amelia got into bed and Felicia got in with her, holding Sockie. "She's in my bed!" Amelia exclaimed, as I tried to find a place to sit.

"Well, it's warmer in there. It's just while I read the story" I said. I hoped that would be the end of it, but Felicia had to poke her sister. "She's touching me!" Amelia roared. "She's in MY bed and she's touching ME!"

"Felicia, hands to yourself" I tried.

"Was Sockie" Felicia countered, the smile on her face giving away that she knew exactly what she was doing. I sighed. I didn't know why Felicia felt the need to push Amelia quite like this. I mean, it was blatantly obvious that Amelia had been in a mood since we picked her up and I told her she couldn't have a sleep-over, so really we should be lying low and waiting for morning.

But that wasn't Felicia's style.

I decided that maybe ignoring them was the best policy about now and hopefully they'd get over it. I read the story; it was one of Amelia's favourites about a witch who needed a bigger broom to fit all her animals on. There was a kind of truce during the actual story, but as soon as turned my back to put it back on the shelf, there was a shout from Amelia and when I turned back Felicia was jumping on the bed.

"Felicia! No!" I said, as sternly as I could. Felicia kept jumping. Obviously I wasn't scary at all. Guess we needed Eric for that.

I lifted Felicia off the bed, which was getting harder to do these days, and persuaded Amelia to lie down so I could kiss he goodnight. Then I told Felicia I'd race her to her bedroom, which sent her sprinting out the door and down the hall, and, despite the fact she did a lap of the house before she got to her bedroom door, she still beat me there.

Getting Felicia to lie down was a bit difficult, but I managed it. I kissed her and said goodnight, and as I went to leave the room she frowned slightly. "No Daddy?" she asked. Uh-oh, I thought, here comes the melt-down. "He's on a plane" I said to her.

"Oh, OK. 'Night Mummy" Felicia said, moving further under the covers and putting Sockie up close to her face.

"'Night. Love you lots!" I said as brightly as I could manage.

After that I wandered into the living room, but I couldn't find anything to watch on TV. Even Masterchef wasn't quite the same without Eric spending the first ten minutes moaning about having to watch it, and then the next 40 minutes telling me exactly what he thought was going to happen, and why they were doing it all wrong.

So I switched the TV off and headed to the bathroom to begin the nightly routine of slathering myself in bio-oil to try to keep away stretch marks and fix the itchy skin I had pretty much all the time now. My stomach was all dry and flaky too, like something was sucking all the water out of my system.

Or someone. I guess the baby was kind of thirsty.

I was just doing a last check around the house and kind of hoping that I might fall over Bob so I could drag him off to bed with me, when I heard it. Crying.

I peeked into Amelia's room. "What's wrong?" I asked her. She didn't say anything, just sniffed noisily.

I went over and sat down on the bed. "Oh, sweetheart" I said, stroking the hair off her face. "We'll sort something out with Emily. But maybe a playdate to start with. I'll find her mother's number and give her a call, OK?"

Amelia rolled over to look up at me. "What?" she asked.

"Emily? The playdate you wanted? Or sleep-over, anyway." I said. "Is that what you're upset about?"

Amelia frowned. "He's gone" she said. "He left and you didn't stop him."

"Oh. But he's coming back. It's only two weeks." Amelia didn't say anything; she just blinked a few times. "He came back before, remember?" I said, stroking Amelia's head. She stared at the wall and kind of shrugged. "I guess" she said finally. "But I don't like it when he's not here."

"Me neither" I agreed. "But it's not for long. And then he'll be home." Bob arrived in the room to see what we were doing, and jumped on the bed, staring down at Amelia.

"Hey, Bob" Amelia said, reaching out to pat him. He was a bit less wary of her these days, now she was calmer and possibly tall enough to reach the cat biscuits. He took the patting as a good sign and immediately sat down and curled his tail around himself. Amelia kept patting him and he started up a deep rumble in his chest, which finally broke out into a loud purr. It was a comforting noise and it always made me feel better, and I guess it had the same effect on Amelia as she stopped crying. I handed her a tissue to blow her nose and then kissed her cheek. "It'll be OK" I said to her. "Eric will be home soon."

"I want him to come home now" Amelia murmured.

"Me too, but that's not going to happen. So…we just have to make the best of it."

Amelia sighed, and nodded, and kept patting Bob.

"'Night, Amelia. I love you."

"Yeah. 'Night Mum" Amelia said. Bob adjusted his position and kept up his purring. I'd been hoping he'd come to bed with me, but I guessed I was going to have to give him up to Amelia for the night. It seemed as though her need was greater than mine after all.

So I switched off all the lights in the house, and checked the front door, and checked on Felicia, who was fast asleep with Sockie half over her face, and got into my rather cold bed. And although I didn't have Eric, or even Bob, to cuddle up to, I realised I wasn't alone. I curled on my side and put an arm over my bump. "It's not for long" I said to the baby, "and then he'll be back. And you can kick him some more, but if you could find a way to do that without kicking me in the process, that'd be great." And then I closed my eyes and tried to get some sleep.

**A/N So as I said before the Decile 10 schools are the ones in what are considered the wealthier areas, so they get limited government funding and rely a lot on fundraising and parent's contributions. The theory being that the parents in those areas are in a much better position to contribute anyway. Oh, and even in public schools in New Zealand you pay school fees. There's a bit of a controversy around them. In theory they're a donation that the school asks for and can't be enforced, but what happens is that if they aren't paid, you might find your kid excluded from activities etc that are deemed to have been funded by school fees. Some of the fights over them get a bit nasty, and most parents just cough up. **

**The Grammar that Sookie mentions is Auckland Boys' Grammar, it's THE public school for boys in Auckland. EGGS is Epsom Girls' Grammar School, which has a similar reputation. Mt Albert Grammar is pretty good too, and is co-ed. It also has a working farm, because, you know, it's New Zealand, and I guess at one stage lots of farmers would have sent their sons up to Auckland to board there.**

**Eftpos stands for Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale - so basically using your debit card to buy stuff. New Zealand was a really early adopter of that technology starting from the late 1980's and now we apparently have more Eftpos terminals per head of population than any other country. You walk to the tiny dairy (corner/convenience store) on the end of the road and it will have Eftpos, and you'll use it for the $3 you spend in there. Taxis have mobile units. It's everywhere. So most of us, like Sookie, rarely carry cash. It's just not needed. And because it took off so quickly we have Eftpos cards rather than debit cards, the name stuck.**

**And it case anyone is interested, the book Sookie reads the kids is Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	56. Chapter 56

**A/N So I don't have a lot to say today. Thanks, obviously, and here's the next installment!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

The last day I spent with Sookie before flying out to the States had been really fucking horrible. Well, mostly it had been. There were some good bits. Brunch had been OK, although Sookie seemed determined to lecture me on being a good houseguest, and Felicia decided to demonstrate not sharing. She was a determined little thing sometimes and it didn't matter how many times you told her sharing was a good thing to do, she was pretty intent on hanging on to everything she could get her chubby little fingers on.

And then of course Sookie suddenly decided to take an interest in the property market and Maudette had to pick that moment to try to flag me down. Fuck. I really only want to see Maudette if she's actually found a house, and if she'd actually found a house then she would have called me so…probably it was best that I kept her away from Sookie for the moment. It would have been a fucking shame for our last day to have ended in a fight about moving house.

The best bit of the day was probably watching Sesame Street, not that it was the most riveting viewing, but it kept Felicia entertained. And Sookie fell asleep on me. It was nice sitting there with her leaning on me. I put my hand on the bump and felt Sam moving around inside, he obviously didn't feel the need to sit still right at that point in time. It was cosy, the four of us on the couch, with the heater on because Sookie had complained of being cold.

But eventually we had to go to the airport, and before I knew it we'd collected a really fucked off Amelia from school and were eating rather tasteless McDonald's in the middle of a crowded international terminal. Well, as crowded as anything gets in New Zealand, anyway.

And this really wasn't where I wanted to be at all. I was trying to think of something to say to Sookie, something that was going to tell her how much I'd miss her, that I was sorry for doing this, that I really wished I wasn't now, but that a few weeks ago it had seemed like a really good idea and it might mean a chance to get a new house…but I hadn't mentioned the house, so without that part of the puzzle it all seemed a bit lame really. And I just fucking didn't know what to say anyway.

I really wished I could take them all with me. Well, it sounded like a good idea as I walked through the barrier to the security area, leaving the three of them behind me. Maybe after a few hours on the plane it might have seemed like a fucking stupid idea to take two kids on a plane.

It seemed a bit like a fucking stupid idea to be there myself after a few hours on the plane. It was hot and cramped and uncomfortable and there was no way I could sleep in those fucking awful seats. I ended up getting up and hanging out near the galley with some of the cabin crew who took pity on me and gave me coffee. One of the guys noticed that my wedding ring had a Koru on it, like the Air New Zealand logo, and that led to a discussion about how my wife was from New Zealand and I was only going back to the States for a couple of weeks. I guessed they'd figured I was here on holiday, or business, or whatever really. But it was nice to talk about the family I'd left behind.

I must have finally dozed for a while in my seat, but it didn't seem like it was for long. And then I got dumped at LAX, which is a pretty shitty place to find yourself at any time, and feeling like I did, it really didn't fucking help my mood at all.

The next flight was worse. By this stage I was tired and fucking pissed off about the whole situation, and the cabin crew were less pleasant than they had been on the first flight. One attendant in particular kept asking me if I needed something every five fucking minutes. She really didn't want to discuss the design on my wedding ring, and instead spent the time pointedly ignoring the guy sitting next to me who was trying to get her attention.

By the time I was on the final flight from Houston to Shreveport I realised I fucking hated flying. I was hot, I was cramped and there were people in my personal space who I really wanted to tell to fuck off, but I had no desire to be escorted across the tarmac by the Air Marshals, so I just had to fucking put up with it.

I was getting a whole new appreciation for soccer with Felicia.

Things didn't really improve when I finally got to Shreveport. For one thing, they'd completely fucked up the hire car I'd arranged and I was stuck waiting at the counter for what seemed like hours before they finally found something I could have. And what they came up with was complete shit. I would have preferred the monstrosity that I'd bought Sookie to the tiny fucking car they gave me.

But it was only for a couple of weeks, it was cheap and I just needed something to get me from one place to another.

I followed the directions that Indira had emailed me and found her building. I parked the car on the street, figuring no one would be fucking desperate enough to steal it, and then I dragged my suitcase across the street and got Indira to buzz me in.

"Good flight?" she asked as she opened her front door.

"Um" I wasn't sure what to say. I figured this was one of those times when politeness over-ruled telling the truth. "It was OK. Well, it was three flights really. It's a long way."

"I remember" Indira said, stepping aside so I could walk through the door. Her condo looked pretty much the same as any other, except, it was pretty fucking tiny. I guessed Indira wasn't that big a person, so…fuck. It was going to be crowded in here for the next couple of weeks.

"So, um, where do I put my stuff?" I asked Indira, nodding down at the suitcase.

"Oh, um, well, you're sleeping in the living room, so…um…I guess we'll just have to put your case in there. In the corner."

"Oh, OK" I followed Indira into the living room, yeah it was fucking tiny. And from the looks of it, I was sleeping on the pull-out couch. Well that was just...something I fucking should have checked on before I got here. I just assumed if she was offering me space, she had it to fucking offer in the first place.

Indira looked from me, to the couch, then back again. "I think you'll fit" she said, half to me and half to herself. I looked at the couch. The bed part wasn't pulled out, but even so, I wasn't sure I shared her confidence.

We kind of stood there awkwardly, neither of us saying anything. It wasn't my house, so I wasn't sure what I could do. I really wanted a shower to wash off the dirt from the long trek here, but I didn't know if I could just take over Indira's bathroom without checking first. Or if I'd even fit in Indira's bathroom in the first place.

Fuck, this was such a bad idea.

In the end Indira broke the silence. "So, um. I'm about to go out. With some friends. I guess you'll be OK here?" she looked at me.

"Yeah, fine" I agreed. It was probably for the best that we weren't both sitting around here for the evening, I realised looking around. For one thing, the couch I was sleeping on seemed to be the only place to sit apart from a couple of cane chairs that looked suspiciously like they'd collapse if I sat on them.

"OK, so…there are towels in the bathroom, and, um, help yourself to anything in the kitchen. I'll see you later on, OK?"

"Sure."

Indira grabbed a bag from a table by the front door and with a quick wave she stepped out. I sat down on the couch and looked around again. Fuck, the place wasn't getting any bigger. I pulled out my phone and dialled Sookie.

SPOV

Saturday morning was a mad rush to get all of us out the door to soccer. "Why am I going?" Amelia whinged, as I sent her off to find some colouring in to take with her.

"Because you can't stay here by yourself" I told her trying to bend down to get Felicia's sneakers done up. They only had Velcro fastenings, but even so, it wasn't easy when you had to work around a bump and the feet you were trying to get into the shoes really wanted to run off somewhere else.

Amelia said something like "I _could _stay here by myself" but she was off in her room at that stage and I just pretended I couldn't hear her. Sometimes it was easier than getting into another argument.

It was only when we got to the little Girl Guide hall where soccer was held that Felicia looked around and frowned. "No Daddy?" she asked.

"No, he's on a plane at the moment" I said, as I unbuckled her carseat. "So today I'm going to do it with you."

"Oh, OK" Felicia said, as I helped her get out of the car. Amelia followed her out. "You know what" she said, as she stepped down. "I've never been on a plane."

"Yeah, funnily enough I did know that Amelia" I told her, as I shut the door and locked it.

"What?" she asked.

"Never mind" I replied, leading the pair of them in the door.

Amelia at least behaved for the duration of the class. She sat at the side of the hall, coloured in and started a conversation with some of the mothers who were there watching their husbands and kids running around. One of the mothers I recognised as a TV presenter and she made me feel dowdy. I'd dressed for, well, comfort, and was wearing tracksuit pants and a big cardigan. TV presenter woman was wearing skinny jeans and knee high boots with spiky heels, and was carrying a take-out coffee. She was also Amelia's new best friend from the way Amelia was talking to her animatedly.

It was hard not to be proud of the fact you could take Amelia anywhere and she'd find someone to talk to.

And I was very proud of the way Felicia threw herself into all the games at soccer. Compared to a lot of the other kids, who wandered off and didn't concentrate, she was actually really good. And when it came time to play the game where she had to run and collect small beanbags one at a time to put in her bucket she went all out to win, although I'm not sure that was the point of the game. I think it was meant to be more about following instructions and having the kids practice counting when they added up what they'd collected at the end. I guessed that maybe Eric had been coaching her for this one though, and when, at the end, it was discovered that Felicia had the most beanbags she jumped around a lot and wanted to high-five me several times. Yeah, I could definitely spot Eric's influence all over that one.

When class was over, and Felicia had soccer-ball stamps on both hands, I took the kids to the park next door for a play. "Hey Mum" Amelia said, from the swing. "That lady said she's on TV!"

"Yeah, she is" I agreed. I'd smiled at her as we were leaving and she'd completely blanked me. I'd wanted to stop her and point out that I wasn't smiling because she's a celebrity but just because our kids went to the same soccer class. But of course I didn't, I just looked down and kept walking.

"Can I be on TV?" Amelia asked.

"Maybe one day." I didn't like to point out that I had a feeling the woman in question had started as a beauty queen. All I needed was Amelia to suddenly get it in her head she wanted to start doing pageants.

I let the kids play for a bit and then faced the task of rounding them up. The day was cold and damp, it wasn't raining but the clouds were low and it just wasn't pleasant being outside. Once again, I was really jealous of Eric's trip to the States. I would have loved to be somewhere hot about now. "We're leaving in two minutes" I told them, which set off a round of whinging about not wanting to leave. "If you're good and don't whinge" I told them "We can get lunch from Dulcie May on the way home."

Everyone perked up a bit at that. The Dulcie May Kitchen shop was just up the road from us and sold food and baked goods, the kids like the cupcakes, Eric liked the coffee, and, at the moment, I was rather fond of the fact they did a nice flatbread with pesto, tomato and mushroom that I could eat because it didn't have any meat in it.

So we stopped there on the drive home and piled inside to pick what we wanted. As I thought the cupcakes caught the eye of the kids, and I ordered my flatbread and some club sandwiches for the kids to eat. I also bought some strawberry, rhubarb and vanilla jam just because.

As we came out Felicia turned to look at the shop that was two doors' down. "No t-shirt shop?" she asked me. Yeah, it was a menswear shop that sold an impressive array of t-shirts. They knew Eric by name in there now. Despite the fact he gave me such a hard time for making detours while we were out and about, he was no better if there was something he was interested in.

"Not today" I said to Felicia, trying to balance the food and keep hold of both kids' hands so we could cross Mt Eden Road. "Daddy's not here."

"Oh, yeah" Felicia said. Amelia looked a bit sad at that, but didn't say anything. I just hoped that she didn't pass on her feeling of sadness to Felicia. So far she was coping OK, and I really didn't want that to change.

We all were really. Apart from Amelia's tears the night before, nothing bad had happened to us. I was actually surprised. I thought I'd feel worse. While I hated it when Eric left, it felt different to last time. I wasn't sure if it was because I was more certain that he was coming back, or whether it was because I was kind of occupied by two kids and a baby on the way.

After lunch it was just a matter of trying to keep everyone happy and entertained inside on a rather yucky day. I let Amelia make a castle under the table by draping some blankets over it and she deigned to let Felicia join in. Felicia, I think, realised that if she kept on annoying Amelia she wasn't going to be allowed to play in the fun space set up in the family room, so she was on her best behaviour. I left them to it and went to do some ironing.

About 5 o'clock the phone rang. "I'm here" Eric said, when I answered.

"What? Shreveport?" I asked, trying to keep up with what was going on.

"Yeah. It's a fucking long way."

"You always knew that. So how's Indira."

"Out. I'm sleeping on her couch apparently, so it's probably a good thing."

"On the couch?"

"Well, it folds out. I think. Fuck, I don't know."

"Oh, is that…" I stopped, trying not to make it worse. "Um, well it's only for two weeks, isn't it?"

"Yeah" Eric agreed, slowly. "Only two weeks. But fuck, I don't know about living with Indira in such a…well, it's small. Really fucking small this apartment."

"I'm sure you can cope" I said, feeling quite the opposite. "So was the flight OK?"

"The _flights_ were horrible, they were cramped as well. I'm totally fucking over people, I really am."

Probably it was good that Indira's out for the night, I thought. "Well, you'll feel better after some sleep" I said to him. "Do you want to talk to the kids?" So I passed the phone around so Felicia could squeal "Daddy!" down the phone to Eric, in response to most of what he said and Amelia could tell him that she'd met someone who was on TV and remind him that she still wanted a sleepover sometime.

When I got the phone back Eric sounded tired. "You better get to bed" I said to him.

"Yeah, I need to take a shower first. And find something to eat…" Eric trailed off. "But first you can tell me what happened today. I feel like I've missed a whole lot."

"Oh, well Felicia won the beanbag challenge at soccer."

"She usually does. How did she go with kicking the ball?"

"She's getting there. She only missed a couple of times, but she just giggles when that happens."

"Yeah, she doesn't seem to mind."

"And, um, Amelia's been pretty good today. She behaved at soccer although I think she talked that woman's ear off. You know, the mum that's on TV?"

"Oh, what the blonde one?"

"Yeah. She's kind of snobby though, she totally blanked me when we were leaving."

"She normally talks to me" Eric replied. Well, she would, I thought, but before I could say that Eric spoke again. "What about Sam?" he asked. "How's he?"

"Oh. Well _the baby's_ fine. You know, still in there."

"Still moving?"

"He is a bit. He got a bit excited during soccer. I guess you've only got about, um, two years and three months and you'll have to take him as well."

"Yeah...I…that's kind of a weird thought, really. It doesn't seem long enough for him to get from there, in you, to like Felicia. Does it?"

I thought about it. "It goes quick, I guess, but I suppose I'm kind of used to it. Although I still can't believe that Amelia's at school now. But by the time this baby is two, well, there'll only be what? About four months until Felicia starts school. So we'll probably be focussing on that."

"And…that'll be the end of the baby stage" Eric said slowly.

"Yep. And maybe we can finally take Amelia on a plane. She's remembered she's still never been on one."

"Oh."

"Yeah. It only came up the once, but it's bound to re-surface."

"Maybe next year? When Sam's older?"

"Maybe next year. I won't be pregnant, so that will make it all a bit easier to manage."

"Yeah" Eric said. We were silent for a couple of minutes. I could almost feel how tired Eric was. "OK, well you better go and get some sleep. And I'll talk to you tomorrow. OK?"

"Yeah. OK. I love you."

"I love you too. We all do really. It's just I've learnt that Amelia shows her love by complaining a lot. She wouldn't complain to you if she didn't care." Eric chuckled. "She was upset last night though, about you. That's why she was such a madam at the airport."

"Oh. Shit" Eric said quietly.

"Yeah. She's OK now though. Bob kept her company overnight."

"How's Felicia?"

"Still slightly oblivious, I think, so you're good there."

"And, um…and you?"

"Oh." I wasn't sure what to say. I'd felt worse, a lot worse. But I didn't want it to sound as though I didn't care at all. "I miss you. A lot, but you know…I have Sa…the baby, so I think that helps. I'm never really alone."

"No. No, you're not." Eric sounded sad though.

"I could post one over to you?" I said.

"I don't think you could fit another person in this apartment" Eric said, a bit grumpily. "Not even one that's Felicia-sized."

I laughed. "Well make the most of Indira being out then. Goodnight Eric, go and get some sleep."

"'Night. Take care."

"I will. Love you."

"Love you too." And then he was gone.

For dinner I made us all scrambled eggs. I couldn't do that sort of thing when Eric was around, to him eggs were breakfast or maybe a snack, and in no way did that count as dinner. And then we sat on my bed and watched a movie, all snuggled under the duvet together. Amelia picked The Princess and The Frog, and it was good, but maybe not quite the same without the usual circular conversation between Eric and Amelia which started with him saying that he'd been to New Orleans and her saying that couldn't possibly be true because it was in a princess movie, and everyone knows princess movies aren't real. Although I suspected that deep down she was kind of convinced that there were talking frogs out there, somewhere.

Felicia didn't like the evil voodoo man in this movie and usually hung onto Eric at that point. In Eric's absence she decided I'd do for comfort and snuggled into my side. I wondered if it might prompt some worry on her part about where Daddy might have gone to, but she seemed OK.

So when it was bedtime I tucked them both in. Amelia looked a bit thoughtful. "He is coming back, isn't he?" she said. "Because we talked to him, on the phone. So he's not, like, _gone_. Not like…"

"No, not like your first daddy. Eric's coming back. He's just in the States for a bit."

"And then he'll come back?"

"And then he'll come back."

"OK." Amelia snuggled down, just as Bob arrived on her bed. Looked like he was abandoning me again. I guess I only had myself to blame. He'd started to give me that look, the one which said 'you don't have a lap anymore and I know what that means'. Yeah, he'd seen that before.

Felicia was a little bit more subdued than the night before. "Daddy?" she said as I tucked her in. "Daddy's not here?"

"No, he'll be back in about…well, in a lot of sleeps anyway" I figured the actual number wouldn't make much difference. I realised they needed to make something like an advent calendar for when dad's went away, because surely Eric coming home would be just as exciting as the baby Jesus piece showing up.

"Oh. I go sleep now?" Felicia asked.

"Yes. And then in another couple of weeks, he'll be home."

"OK."

And later on when I snuggled down into my own bed and tried to get my feet to warm up because they were cold even with the fuzzy socks I was wearing, I thought about Eric, alone and sleeping on a fold-out couch. The heat would be nice, but maybe I didn't really want to swap with him. Those beds are lumpy. "We're better off here" I said to the baby. "And tomorrow, we can find the baby name book, because I'm not convinced about Sam. I think there's something better out there for you. And you deserve a nice name, because you're going to be stuck with it forever. Trust me, I know. My mother has a lot to answer for."

EPOV

Talking to Sookie and the kids was great, but also kind of depressing. It always was hearing that life just went on without you and that you were missing out on stuff. At least Felicia had been good at soccer, but there was a part of me that wanted her to only do it with me. It was our thing.

And there was a part of me that was really pissed that that stupid woman Andrea, the one from TV, had been so rude to Sookie. God, she was a bitch.

But there was absolutely nothing I could do about that from Shreveport. So instead I opened my suitcase and dug out some clean clothes and went to investigate Indira's bathroom. It wasn't much bigger than the ensuite at home and this was the only bathroom here. Shit. And it was only when I'd squeezed myself into the shower that I realised I didn't have that bag of shampoo and stuff Sookie had made me bring with me. Fuck it, I thought. It's only once. Indira's not going to care if I use some of hers.

When I'd showered and thrown on a clean t-shirt and boxers, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat. I opened up the refrigerator and found…fuck all. It seemed to be mainly vegetables. I poked around for a bit, but there was nothing resembling any kind of meat whatsoever. Then a thought hit me, did Indira eat meat? Fuck. I was screwed. I didn't really fancy turning vegetarian for two weeks.

I shut the door and thought for a bit. I could order in, or go and get some groceries, but it was late and I was tired and I just wanted to fucking eat something. Anything. I opened the refrigerator again. There were eggs at least. It'd have to be scrambled eggs then.

When I'd finished making them I sat on the couch eating, trying to watch some TV. They were pretty shitty. I was sure Sookie's eggs were better. And although it felt a bit selfish, I kind of wished Sookie was here to feed me. I was used to it now…plus I think she liked it. She spent all that time watching cooking shows for a reason, after all.

After I'd finished my snack, I was hit with a wave of tiredness. It had been a fucking long time since I'd slept properly. It took me a couple of attempts, but I figured out how the mechanism on the couch worked and I pulled the bed out. Yeah, that was small. Indira had left out sheets and pillows and a comforter, so I made it up and, after brushing my teeth, crawled in. I could feel every fucking metal bar holding the thing together. This was so much worse than the spare bed I'd slept in at home. The bed which was now Felicia's because she was a big girl and was about to be replaced by a new baby.

So I lay there for a bit and thought about Sam. He was a good thing to think about. And Sookie was coming around to the name now, she'd almost used it herself earlier on, so it wouldn't matter that I'd hidden the name book. He was Sam now. And I'd be home in time to see him.

I adjusted my position and couldn't get any more comfortable. Fuck, the airbed was better than this. I wished I'd packed the airbed. And then I wondered if Sam would ever want me to take him camping, because that was the kind of stuff fathers and sons did together, wasn't it? Fuck, I hoped not. I wondered if it would count if I made his mother take him. Or maybe his weird-ass uncle.

Fuck, I'd have to go. Otherwise he'd come back playing cricket and rugby and whatever fucking weird sports Jason would teach him. I wondered if I should buy a baseball glove or something while I was in the States. Just…in case. In case he wanted to play someday.

Yeah, that sounded like a good idea. I shifted around again, and moved one of the pillows so it was in front of me. It wasn't Sookie, it wasn't even close to being Sookie and whatever detergent Indira used it smelt nothing like anything I was used to, but it still helped. And eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

**Thanks for reading!**


	57. Chapter 57

**A/N So the story behind why this chapter got delayed - yeah, remember how last time I wrote about Eric going back to the States, Sookie's house got a stomach bug? This time it hit my house. I had a kid with it last weekend, but then it snuck up and got me. Sigh. Stupid germs. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I was completely disoriented when I woke up and it took a moment to work out where I was. I felt hot and groggy and I was pretty sure there were bruises on my back from the bed. I lay still for a few seconds and then I realised I could hear voices, coming from what was probably the kitchen.

"I just don't get why we're fucking working on a Saturday" Clancy complained. Fuck. Clancy. I'd almost forgotten he was part of this. Why Indira had to take him with her when she left De Castro, I did not know. But now here he was, being fucking loud and obnoxious as usual.

"Because, Clancy" I could hear Indira say. "We need to get Eric up to speed before the meeting on Monday."

Clancy snorted. "Well how's that going to fucking work when the sleeping giant is just lying there humping the pillow?"

I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. Fuck, it wasn't easy straightening out after being in that bed…or whatever you wanted to call it. It wasn't a bed really; it was just a sofa attachment or something. Whatever it was, it was shit.

I was still trying to stretch out when I walked into the kitchen.

"Nice of you to join us" Clancy spat out.

"Fuck you too, Clancy" I replied.

"Oh, for God's sake. Do I have to separate you two?" Indira said, looking from me to Clancy and back again.

"Nope. We're good" I told her. Clancy just glared at me. Fucker. "I'm going to take a shower" I said and I walked off to get some clothes out of my suitcase. I forgot to take my shampoo in again, but I wasn't using much, so fuck it. I wasn't walking back out there.

When I finished I found that Clancy and Indira had set up laptops on the table that was in the opposite end of the living room to the couch I was sleeping on. Someone, I assumed Indira, had folded up the bed in my absence, because I guess it didn't really go with the fact this was now our workspace.

Because there's nothing like sleeping and working in the same fucking room, after all.

"Coffee?" Indira asked, getting out of her seat.

"Please" I confirmed, taking a seat at the table next to Clancy, who looked up from his screen to glare at me. "So, what are we doing?" I asked him.

Clancy sighed, and I could see he really didn't want to share any information with me. But if he didn't, then there was no fucking point in my being here. So in the end, he pushed the laptop towards me. "Read that" he said.

We spent the morning going over the client and what they wanted. It didn't seem to be anything too difficult, it was just a small regional bank who wanted something very similar to what Indira and I had gone out to New Zealand to do. To be honest, she and Clancy could have done it without me.

Except that I'd worked with these people before. And that was the clincher; the reason why I'd been dragged half-way across the world to help with this, Indira had kind of told them that if they signed up with her, rather than staying with Victor I'd be working on the project. She'd thought that they would be satisfied if there was just some contact with me via email, but, apparently, they wanted the personal service. And Indira had said that was no problem, of course I'd be around.

And then she'd emailed me. Yeah, that was a consultant for you. None of us were any better than each other.

So we worked through the morning, brainstorming ideas and working on the presentation we could put together to show them what we could do. It was kind of nice in a way; I'd been working by myself for so long I'd forgotten what it was like to bounce ideas off a team. Even Clancy stopped sulking about my presence long enough to put a few ideas forward. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.

SPOV

Sunday morning there was someone sitting on Eric's pillow when I opened my eyes. "No Daddy" Felicia said. "I woked up, but no Daddy." She looked at me expectantly and I tried to figure out what to say. "No, he's in the States still" I tried.

"But…I woked up. I hadda sleep." Oh, realisation dawned. She'd been confused by the sleeps thing the night before.

"More sleeps, Felicia. You need to have more sleeps than that."

"Oh" she said. She looked down at Sockie in her hands, and I thought she was going to say something else but maybe couldn't find the words for it. However, Amelia arrived in the bedroom at that point and took over.

"I'm up!" she announced, as if we wouldn't notice her otherwise. "Is it breakfast time?"

"Yeah" I said, trying to haul myself out of bed. I kind of missed the fact that Eric always felt the need to stick his hand on my bum at this point. Amelia and Felicia just sat and watched me struggle.

"We're getting a baby brother" Amelia said to Felicia, her eyes glued to my stomach. "Brothers are good."

"Dey are?" Felicia asked, wrinkling her nose.

"I think so" Amelia said, confidently. "And I'll get to be the big sister, anyway. So I'm going to be in charge of him."

"Felicia will get to be his big sister too" I told them, struggling to get my feet into my Ugg boots. Seriously, why were my feet so far away and in that really awkward position at the end of my legs? I was sure this used to be a lot easier.

"But she's the _little_ sister" Amelia said, in her best but-Mum-you're-being-an-idiot voice.

"She's _your_ little sister because she's younger than you. But she'll be older than the baby, so she'll be _his_ big sister" I said, trying to clarify it in Amelia's mind. She didn't say anything else, but the look she gave me suggested she still remained pretty sceptical about the whole thing. Like I couldn't figure out what order my children had been born in.

Felicia looked thoughtful as well. "I's a big sister?" she asked.

"Yes. You'll be the new baby's big sister. When he comes out."

"From your tummy?" Felicia asked, pointing at the bump.

"Yep" I agreed, hoping Amelia wouldn't launch into an exhaustive explanation of how the baby actually came out, because Felicia didn't need to know that one just yet. Amelia hadn't been interested in that age at all. I think she'd thought that it was a bit like Santa getting into the house, just some kind of magic occurrence.

Sometimes, though, I kind of envied Tara her nice caesarean scar she could point to and go "See? I have a zipper. You came out of there." Yeah, I wasn't doing show and tell to my kids of exactly where they'd come out of.

The morning progressed and the boredom level in our house grew dramatically. I wondered idly if Eric was having a nice time not having to referee any fights because Felicia tried to kidnap Amelia's annoying Zhu-Zhu hamster toy. I hated that thing, it was noisy and annoying and Amelia kept trying to persuade me to buy her the castle it could live in, but it had been a birthday present and we were stuck with it and Felicia was insanely jealous of it, like it was the coolest thing to ever grace the planet.

So I figured we'd better get out of the house. I idly wondered about going to St Luke's. Farmers were having a manchester sale and it might be a good idea to look for some more flannelette sheets as I now had two single beds to put them on, but as I listened to the argument going on down the hall, all desire to drag the kids around the shops deserted me.

Instead I rang Judith. "Oh, hi Sookie" she said. "How's it going? Eric get away alright?"

"Yeah, he did. But now we're kind of at a loose end. If we bring food, can we come over?"

"Oh sure. I mean, Mum's here for morning tea…"

"Oh, no that's OK then. We won't intrude."

"No, don't be silly. She'd love to see the kids."

Yeah, I thought. I probably should let Lorena see her granddaughters, and Judith's place was fairly neutral ground. "OK" I agreed. "We'll be there in about half an hour."

So I put an extra layer of clothing on each child and bundled them into the car. It was still cold, but the heater in the new people-mover did at least work really well. And then, after a quick detour to the bakery to buy some stuff to take with us, I pulled up at Judith and Calvin's and unloaded everyone again.

Judith met us at the door, with Jessica hot on her heels, eager to see who was arriving now. I handed the bag with the stuff I'd bought to Judith and she ushered us in.

And as much as I told myself I didn't care about Lorena, it was still hard to walk into their living room knowing that she was in there. I knew she knew I was pregnant, but even so, there was kind of no denying the evidence of it at the moment no matter how much polite conversation we made. I felt like she'd think I was a traitor to Bill, and the fact that I still cared what she thought of me and the choices I made, well, that made me feel like a traitor to Eric. So yeah, I wasn't going to win this one in any way, shape or form.

"Hello, Sookie" Lorena said coolly, eyeing my stomach.

"Hi, Lorena. How are you?" I asked, sitting down on a spare chair.

"Oh well, you know" she said. "Winter's hard when you get to my age." She sighed.

"You probably need to eat more, Mum. You're all skin and bones." Judith put a plate of sticky buns on the table and helped herself to one in the process, taking a big bite.

Lorena just sighed painfully. "I can't put any weight on, and you know it." Judith rolled her eyes and sat down. Thomas, who was lying on his stomach on a mat in the corner of the room, let out an excited squeal.

And then Jessica, Amelia and Felicia burst into the room and there were hugs for Nana, who looked a bit overwhelmed. And she looked even more overwhelmed when Amelia tried to give her a blow by blow account of everything that had ever happened at school.

"So, Em's my best friend and Maisie's my friend too, and Chloe, well, she cries a lot but that's OK. We went to the zoo. Daddy took us and we all went in his car and we saw the giraffes and the lions and the zebras, but Daddy lost us for a bit when he wandered off, because you shouldn't just wander off like that…"

"Daddy's not here!" Felicia interjected. "In da Stays!" she looked pitifully at Lorena, as if Lorena could fix the problem of Eric's absence.

"Wanna play with my dollies?" Jessica tried calling from the sidelines. She was obviously slightly annoyed that two perfectly good cousins had turned up to play and at this stage only seemed interested in hanging out with Nana.

"Why don't you guys have something to eat, and then go and play in Jessie's room?" Judith suggested. She handed plastic plates to the kids, who all helped themselves to the finger buns with 100's and 1000's on that I'd bought, and then they sat and ate all the icing off and ignored the bun completely. Amelia continued chatting to Lorena on and off and Felicia and Jessica just jostled each other a bit. I sank back into the chair and decided to enjoy having other adults around to share the kids with me.

Eventually the kids drifted off down to Jessica's room and the noise level dropped in the living room, although Thomas was doing his best to make up for it, he was making a sort of "ah ah ah" sound in the hope of getting anyone's attention. When that didn't work, he threw a few toys and then he rolled onto his back and tried to figure out how teddy bears were put together.

"So how are you?" Judith asked me.

"Oh, well. You know" I said.

"Fed up?"

"Mmm. I'm OK." I felt bad discussing the pregnancy in front of Lorena; I really just wanted to gloss over the whole thing.

"I always had very easy pregnancies" Lorena said, eyeing the bun I was eating. "But then I didn't put on much weight so I think that made it easier, not carrying around anything extra, other than the baby."

"Mmm" Judith said, her mouth full of raspberry scroll, "That's like Sarah, but then she lives on coffee and cigarettes at the best of times. I'm still trying to get rid of the backside I grew when I was pregnant with Thomas."

Lorena looked at the bun Judith was eating, pursed her lips but didn't say anything. "I have the same problem" I said to Judith. "And my bra size…it's just ridiculous now."

"At least you know you'll keep yours" Judith snorted, "I don't want to give up breast feeding because I'm kind of used to having boobs. Calvin will be devastated when they go." She looked down and picked some crumbs out of her cleavage and looked a bit wistful. Lorena just looked somewhere between shocked and disgusted.

"What'll I miss" Calvin said, wandering into the room, carrying a cup of tea for me, and one for Judith.

"Boobs. When I stop feeding gutso over there" Judith said, gesturing to where Thomas was still amusing himself on the floor.

Calvin shrugged, but was diplomatic enough not to say anything either way. He helped himself to one of the buns instead.

"How's it going?" he asked me, when he'd swallowed his mouthful.

"Good. Well, about as good as I expected it to be with Eric away."

"Mmm" Calvin said, his mouth full again. "How's the house-hunting going?"

"What?" I asked him.

"Um" Calvin looked thoughtful. "Never mind. It's just Eric…well he said something about looking for a house…"

"Oh. Yeah. He seems to think a bigger house would be a good idea, but really, how much bigger could we get? I mean we have four bedrooms and two bathrooms already. That's pretty big."

Judith nodded enthusiastically. "I'm still waiting for my ensuite" she said. "And I'd kill for four bedrooms."

"I put the framing up for it" Calvin said, finishing his bun.

"Yeah, so I have framing on the back porch. That's not an ensuite. I married a builder for a _reason_." Judith crossed her arms and put on a mock-pout.

"Well, I think you should be grateful that he's got that far" Lorena interjected, as if it was Judith's fault for expecting too much of Calvin. "And poor Calvin is out building every day, so I wouldn't think he'd want to come home to more of the same."

Calvin smirked at Judith and Judith glared at Lorena. I had to admit this was mildly entertaining, and probably better than sitting at home feeling sorry for myself. All I needed now was Portia to show up and start a really full-on slanging-match and I could be thoroughly entertained for the whole afternoon.

"Well you know what they say, builder's houses are always the last ones finished" I added, figuring it might be fun to throw my own two cents' worth in.

"Definitely if the builder in question is a lazy Saffer beach-bum" Judith grumbled.

Calvin laughed at that. I guess he was used to it. Lorena looked shocked however, as though she couldn't believe that Judith would say anything like that to her husband. Not for the first time I wondered what Lorena's marriage had been like. If I ever asked Bill about his dad he clammed right up, and it was no good really asking Judith, she'd been so little when he left that she wouldn't remember.

"Well, Calvin" Lorena said, mustering as much dignity as she could. "I'd like to go home now, if you please."

"Oh, sure" Calvin said, cramming more food in his mouth and wiping his hands on his jeans. Lorena looked pained, but in the absence of any other suitable sons-in-law, Sarah's partner Matt being a complete moron and possible drug-dealer, after all, Calvin was really the only guy she had left to rely on.

And then it hit me just why I felt so guilty around her. I'd done a reasonably good job of replacing Bill after all. I had a new partner, the kids had a new father, and we were all doing pretty well. But there was no way Lorena was ever going to be able to replace Bill. She was stuck relying on a son in law who was never going to measure up to her expectations. I'm sure under different circumstances she would have been siding with Judith over Calvin's inability to finish any projects at home, but now she had no one else left to elevate to demi-God like status.

I just hoped that Calvin coped with it all better than Bill had.

So I said goodbye to Lorena, and got my two kids to come out of Jessica's room to say goodbye to Nana. From the look of what was going on in there, Amelia had appropriated Jessica's blackboard and had a game of schools going on in which she was the teacher, and possibly Felicia was in the thinking corner, but, as the thinking corner also contained a pile of Lego, Felicia didn't look particularly unhappy.

After Calvin left with Lorena, Judith and I retreated to the living room again. Thomas looked kind of annoyed at us for leaving him in the first place.

"Well, you should have followed us" Judith said to him.

"Ah!" Thomas yelled at his mother.

We sat back down and I contemplated having another bun, but wondered if I'd regret it later on. Thomas was making a lot of noise now "Ah, ah, ah, ah" he went.

"Oh, he's winding himself up" Judith commented. I thought she was talking about him crying but instead he made this kind of weird, wiggling motion and pushed himself forward.

"See? There you go" Judith said to him. "Told you that you could."

"Ah!" Thomas said in agreement, before wiggling forward on his stomach again.

"He's crawling?" I asked her.

"Well, he's sort of moving…" Judith said, contemplating Thomas' style, which, in all honesty, seemed to take a lot of effort for not much co-ordination.

"That seems early" I said. And it did. I mean I had babies at Jumping Beans who arrived at all sorts of different stages of development, but somehow I was stuck with the mind-set that Thomas was just a tiny baby, way too small to be crawling across the floor, however terribly un-coordinated he looked doing it.

"I guess he figured he's not the youngest in the family for much longer" Judith said, pointing to my bump. "So he'd better sort himself out. Plus, we've been doing crawling drills. I have sod all else to do most days."

I didn't like to bring up the fact that technically, this baby I was having wasn't going to be related to Thomas. Instead I focussed on the second part of what Judith said. "So have you thought about going back to work?"

"Yeah, I have" Judith said. "And I'd like to, but they're a bit vague about it when I ask. Funding cuts and everything. I think they really want to cut down the numbers of qualified teachers they have. Now that the law's changed so they don't have to have so many of us with actual bits of paper." Yeah, that was a bit of a sore point with Judith. She was actually qualified, and now that was seen as a bit of a bad thing because it was cheaper for the daycare centres to pay for a random grandmother to come in for the afternoons. "I mean" she continued "If I wanted to go back full-time I think they'd have me, because they always need qualified people to run the places, but I just want to do a few hours a week…so yeah, I don't know. In the meantime we're relying on Calvin's income and hoping that there isn't a huge slump in building or anything."

And then I had an idea. "Well how would you feel about coming to work for me?" I asked her.

"You?"

"Yeah, running some classes and stuff. It would be right up your alley. And I'm going to need someone when I have the baby."

Judith thought for a moment. "So…what would I be doing?"

"Same thing I do. Set up equipment, dance the Wiggly Woo, help kids over climbing frames, blow bubbles and at the end hope it doesn't turn into toddler fight-club under the fun chute."

Judith didn't answer immediately, because Thomas decided that enough was enough and he burst into tears on the floor and she had to go and pick him up. "It's getting near your lunchtime, isn't it?" Thomas stopped crying and looked at her, as if he was agreeing wholeheartedly. Judith sat back down on the couch and pulled up her top and undid her bra so he could latch on. "So" she said, addressing me again. "It'd be pretty much like working in a daycare, really?"

"Yeah, but better. I think, anyway. I mean you have less responsibility because the mums are there, or sometimes dads. Or nannies. And the hours are shorter. And no one expects you to actually clean bums or deal with tantrums. You just do the fun stuff. "

"Sounds good. OK, then. Yeah. Why not?"

So we chatted for a bit more and came up with a plan for Judith to start leaving Thomas with Lorena and come to the odd classes to shadow me. Jessica was still in daycare a couple of days a week, so it seemed to be a good plan all round.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself when left Judith and Calvin's. Calvin had come back from dropping Lorena home and Felicia had looked a bit disappointed that he hadn't brought Eric with him, but I think both she and Amelia benefitted from being out of the house. I knew that I did. I had all sorts of plans for the afternoon and number one on the list was finding the baby name book.

EPOV

We worked all through Saturday, sending Clancy out for sandwiches at lunchtime, which he moaned about but really, he was good for fucking all else. Well, he had some reasonable ideas but I just couldn't bring myself to like the fucker, I really couldn't.

So by the evening we had the last loose ends tied up and I was feeling kind of positive about it all. I figured we had a pretty good shot at nailing this presentation and getting the work and then at least I wouldn't have come all this way for fucking nothing, because not to get at it this stage, well, that would have been depressing to say the least.

"So I think" I said, as Clancy and Indira started to pack up. "We should go out and celebrate. You know, for dinner or something."

"Yeah, I've gotta be somewhere" Clancy said, looking at me like I'd grown a second head. "So, I'll see you Monday." He turned to Indira. "Meet here at 8.30am?"

"Yep. Maybe a bit earlier, just in case of traffic."

"Fuck, there won't be any traffic. But alright, whatever you say." Clancy tucked his bag under his arm and waved over his shoulder. "Later, Eric" he said, and then he left.

"So what about you?" I asked Indira. "You want to go out?" I kind of hoped she would because going from my survey of her refrigerator the previous night, there was fuck all to eat here. Maybe she ate out a lot?

"Oh, sorry Eric" she said, zipping her laptop away in its case. "Um, I have a date."

"A date?"

"Yes, I'm sure you remember them Eric. You know, people go out and have a good time."

"Oh. Yeah. So, um, anyone I know?" I have no fucking idea why I asked that question, but it seemed polite. Or possibly nosy. I wasn't quite sure where the line was, but I felt like I should take an interest. This was the shit Sookie was so much better at. I wished she was here.

"I doubt it" Indira said laughing. "I met him on-line. His name's Roshan and he's a lawyer. He sounds OK, but I can tell you more tomorrow."

I wasn't sure that meeting men on the internet sounded safe at all. "So, um, do you want me to go with you or anything? You know, just in case he's a psycho or something…" I trailed off because the look Indira was giving me could best be described as incredulous and at worse, well, pretty fucking bad anyway.

"Eric, you're not my father! Shit, I'll be fine. I've made it to 33 without being raped and murdered; I think I can last another night."

I shrugged. "I was just offering." Fuck, I didn't know what the protocol was, I guessed she wasn't Amelia or Felicia or even Sookie but I kind of felt responsible for her. More to the point, I didn't want to wake up in the morning and wonder where she was. I'd never hear the end of it from Sookie if she disappeared while I was staying here.

Indira's expression softened. "I know. It's a nice thought, but the agency vets these guys pretty thoroughly, and we'll be in public, and I've arranged to check in with a friend, so it's fine. Hopefully it will be better than fine. I have high hopes for this date." She picked up her bag and gave me a smile, before starting to walk off.

I had another thought though, so I followed her. "So, um, do you need me to go somewhere else?" I asked.

"What?" Indira responded, turning around in the door to her bedroom. Yeah, I didn't want to follow her in there.

"You know, in case, um…" how did I say this without mentioning when she'd been crawling all over Chow. "In case you want to bring him back here…" I gestured to the living room. I really hoped she didn't want to bring him back here. I had to sleep on that couch for a start.

Indira didn't say anything for a few seconds. "It's a _first_ date, Eric" was all she said in the end. "A first date, nothing more. I'm going to get ready." And then she stepped into her room and shut the door. Well I guessed I could have the couch in peace for the night then.

Indira seemed to take about an hour to get ready. I sat and flipped through the channels on the TV. There was nothing good on. I sighed. It wasn't even like I could unpack, given that, well. Fuck, I didn't even have a space to really call my own.

As she was leaving Indira showed me the take-out menus she kept filed away in the kitchen. When we were in there I noticed her eyes kept flicking to the pan I'd used to make my eggs the night before. I'd left it soaking and still had to clean it. Maybe I'd do that while Indira's out I thought.

When she'd finally gone, with a last shout of "I'll be back before curfew, Dad!" I was alone for the first time that day. I wandered back into the kitchen and looked at the pan, then at the menus. Maybe a walk would be nice, I thought. I could go down the street and get some food.

I walked to a Chinese place I'd seen when I'd arrived the other night, but I fucking regretted it as soon as I stepped outside the door of Indira's building. It was really fucking hot, even though it was evening now. Sookie would like the temperature, but to me, well, it was oppressive.

I got my food and trudged back to the apartment, sitting back on my couch to eat. There was still nothing on TV. And the food was only OK. I wondered what Sookie was making for dinner. I checked the time. She'd possibly be already making it. I could give her a call, I thought.

"Hello" she said when she picked up at her end.

"It's me" I said, hoping she hadn't already forgotten who 'me' was.

"Eric Northman you are evil!" she exclaimed.

"What?" I asked. Fuck, I wondered what she'd found out. Maybe Maudette had called her? But she only had the number of my cell, so…fuck. I had no idea.

Sookie giggled. I guessed it wasn't too bad then. "I found the baby name book" she said. "You know, where you hid it."

"I hid it?" Well I had, but I wasn't going to admit it. Not even when I was on this side of the world.

"Yeah, it was behind the shelves in the study."

"Oh. I remember putting it on the top. Bob must have jumped up there and knocked it off. Good job finding it. And anyway, I don't think we can really call it a study if it has a crib in it. Babies are not conducive to getting any work done."

"Good one Eric. Blame the cat and change the subject, why don't you?"

"What? You can't deny it's kind of a catch-all room, Sookie. And I can't really see Sam wanting us to sit in there and work when he's trying to use it."

"Well…maybe he's not Sam for a start. I started a list. He might be Adam. Or Benjamin. Or maybe even Christopher." Even from this distance I could imagine Sookie's slightly defiant look about now. I sighed. _Definitely_ not Christopher. "Let's talk about it when I get back" I tried.

"Fine, well I should have a list by then. And we can add your one choice to it and then we'll decide."

"We get to vote?"

"Well, I guess…"

"So how does it work if we vote for different things?" I asked.

"Ummm" Sookie said slowly, obviously trying to think that one through. Maybe she thought she'd just confuse me with a whole list of names, but I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to choose.

"Who breaks the deadlock then? Amelia?" I asked.

"Ummm" Sookie said again. Yeah, she hadn't really figured that one out. "I guess we just have to compromise" she said in the end. "Find something that no one really hates and go with that…"

"OK, well Sam then."

"Oh no, hang on" Sookie said, quickly. "But we haven't discussed it."

"Well you said you didn't hate it, so it's a perfect choice."

Sookie sighed, loudly. "Fine, we'll talk about it when you get back."

"So how is Sam anyway?" This was the bit I liked the most, the bit when I found out what was going on back home. Well, I liked it a little, and hated it a lot, because I was missing out on it all. I just hoped Sam hadn't done anything too exciting without me.

"The baby who is _yet_ to be named…" Sookie started to say, but I cut her off. "You make him sound like Prince" I told her. "OK, well the baby who has been named by the parent who doesn't know how to register a birth in New Zealand, hasn't really done anything other than a few somersaults, and some kicks. Basically his usual range of movements. Thankfully he hasn't yet worked out where my bladder is, because once they start using that as a trampoline it's all over."

I made a mental note to research registering births in New Zealand. "And what about everyone else? What did you guys do today?"

So Sookie told me about their trip to see Judith and Calvin, and how Lorena had been there, and that Lorena seemed to take Calvin's side over Judith's in their endless debate over when their house was going to be finished, and how the kids had mostly behaved, and that Thomas could crawl now, but it seemed a bit early to her. And she told me that she'd arranged for Judith to start coming in to her classes to work with her, with a view to taking over when she had Sam. She sounded pretty pleased with herself for coming up with that idea, and I had to admit, it was a good one.

"So the big kids are OK?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. They're fine. I think Amelia is getting the hang of you being away now, she doesn't seem so sad…Felicia though, well she's noticed now. I think she expected you to be here this morning."

"Oh." Fuck, that made me feel a bit bad. A lot bad, actually.

"Yeah, I think she'll be OK though."

"OK" I'd have to take Sookie's word on that one. There wasn't much I could do from here. "So, um, what's for dinner?" I asked.

"Cottage pie, it's in the oven. I thought we'd eat early because it's such a poggy day."

"Cold?"

"Yeah. Bet you're not."

"Fuck, no. Thank God for air-con, otherwise I'd have melted by now. I walked down the street before and it was fucking unpleasant."

"Still, be nice to be warm" Sookie said.

"I'd rather be cold and be getting cottage pie for dinner." It was true, I would.

Sookie laughed. "Well, I think there'll be leftovers in the freezer for you when you get back. Possibly I was a bit keen using a whole kilo of mince when it's just me and two kids, but after I got back from the freezer and realised I'd bought that much in with me, I wasn't going back out in the cold to see if there was a smaller pack. "

"Leftovers sound good." Certainly fucking better than the shitty Chinese I'd eaten or my rather tasteless eggs the night before.

After that Sookie passed me over to both of the kids. Amelia had a rambling story about playing schools, and Felicia just said "Daddy?" a lot, which was kind of horrible. I really fucking wished I could hug her. I really fucking wished I could hug all of them.

And then the phone was passed back to Sookie and we talked briefly until she said it was time for them to go and eat and that was it, they were gone. And I was still sitting on a couch, by myself, fucking half a world away.

**A/N Farmers', or, more properly The Farmers' Trading Company, as they used to be known, are a department store. For those of you who don't use the term manchester, it's linens. Sheets and towels etc.**

**Saffer is a term for South Africans. Slightly more derogatory than, say, Kiwi or Aussie, but lots of them will answer to it these days.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	58. Chapter 58

**A/N Well, since I last posted I've survived the end of the stomach bug, my daughter's birthday party, the baby learning to stand up in the high chair (gives mummy a shock every time) and a live bird being left on the bed at 3.30am by my cat. Yeah, it's all go here!**

**And then, of course, I couldn't post this for ages and it was all very annoying. But peppermintyrose very graciously pointed me in the direction of a work-around, so fingers crossed that it has all worked now, and I can retire to bed!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I put the phone down from talking to Eric and sighed. He sounded kind of miserable. But I wasn't sure what I could do to cheer him up from here. It was awful. At least Felicia I could cuddle. I sighed, and then dragged myself into the kitchen to get the cottage pie out of the oven.

I put it on a mat on the kitchen bench. Yeah, it was huge. It could probably feed the three of us for the rest of the week. I guessed I was used to an operating model that included making enough food for me, two kids and Eric, plus left-overs after that. Oh well, I thought, at least I'm stockpiling.

Felicia was quiet at dinner. "Daddy's pie?" she asked, when I dished up.

"He's still away, hun" I said to her.

"But that's OK, because he's coming back" Amelia added trying to be helpful. "But not for a long time." She thought about it for a moment. "Will the baby come before he gets back?"

"No" I said. No way was that happening. I'd cross my legs and just hold on if I had to. "No, the baby's not coming until October.

"Sooo…that's, um, next week?" Amelia said. The passage of time was never her strong suit.

"I'll show you on the calendar after dinner" I told her.

Both of them were quiet for a while after that, apart from the odd comments about dinner itself. Once they'd finished I carried our plates into the kitchen and came back with the calendar, a pen and a flannel so I could wipe the large amounts of pie from around Felicia's mouth.

I sat down and put the calendar in front of the kids. "So this is the day Daddy left" I said, pointing to the previous Friday on the calendar. "And we've had these two days", I put a cross through Friday and Saturday, "so this is today, and then…this is the day Daddy gets back" I pointed to two weeks' time. "So that's…" I tapped the pen in each of the squares as I counted "Thirteen sleeps, including tonight." I looked across the table.

"Thirteen?" Amelia double-checked. "That's…more than my fingers." She held up her hands to prove her point.

Felicia looked from me to Amelia and back again. "Lotsa sleeps?" she asked.

"It'll go quickly" I said to them.

Amelia looked sceptical. "I thought he'd be back before the baby got here" she said.

I picked up the calendar again. "So we're here, today" I said, pointing to the right square. "And then…" I flipped through the pages slowly "this is when the baby's due." I turned the calendar around, wrote 'due date' in the right square, and turned it back again.

"How many sleeps?" Amelia asked.

"You want me to count?" I checked. She nodded. I turned the calendar around and counted squares while the two girls watched. "One hundred and seven" I said, when I'd finished.

"That's too many" Amelia said. Felicia stayed silent.

"No, it's not. It takes a while to grow a baby."

"But you're so fat!" Amelia exclaimed. Yeah, I hadn't noticed that at all.

"Well, he's a big baby. But I'm going to get, um, bigger."

Amelia wrinkled her nose. "It's kind of gross" she said.

"You get used to it" I told her. There wasn't much else to say, really. There were far grosser parts of having a baby than just the way your stomach looked, but I didn't need to share them with my 5 year old.

Amelia sighed. "It's a long time, until the baby" she said.

"Yeah, so see! In comparison, it's not that long until Daddy gets back."

"I guess…" Amelia said reluctantly, studying the calendar again. I could see her lips moving slightly as she counted the days.

Felicia frowned. "Daddy's bringing da bubby?" she asked me, a little bit confused by the way the conversation had gone.

"No. Daddy will be home in 13 sleeps. The baby's coming after that." Felicia frowned again. "Don't worry; we can mark off the days as they happen, so tomorrow we can mark off that today is over."

Felicia didn't look much the wiser at that, to be honest, and I had to admit that it was only recently that Amelia had really grasped the whole today and tomorrow concept.

"Can I mark them off?" Amelia asked.

"Well, how about we take turns?" I asked.

"I getta turn?" Felicia asked.

"Yep, you can both take turns. Like the advent calendar." I figured that at least no one would be wandering around clutching Eric and unwilling to give him up on the day he came home. Well, possibly me, but I was 35 and I figured I was fairly good at sharing by now. "So we'll put this away until tomorrow when it's time to cross off a day, and now it's time for a bath."

There was a general round of whinging, and a very slow procession to the bathroom, where the bath was mostly incident-free apart from when Amelia's mermaid Barbie got eaten by a whale.

And by the time I had the pair of them in bed after a story and another round of reassurance for Felicia that Daddy was coming home and we were one day closer I was kind of tired. But my day wasn't over yet, as I still had to clean up dinner and wrap up the left-overs for the freezer. I walked into the kitchen and faced the mess. This was when I most missed having that other pair of hands around; just to split the chores with. Sure it was also nice to have someone to talk to, and cuddle with, and my feet hadn't been warm at night since Eric left, but it was splitting the day to day drudgery of running the house and looking after the kids that I really could have done with about now. You only realise how good you have it when it's gone.

But it wasn't forever. I started cutting up the pie to fit it into the plastic containers I was going to use to freeze it in. Overall, I thought, apart from feeling a bit tired and not enjoying being the sole person in charge, it wasn't too bad. I was doing OK.

I guess because there was a finite number of sleeps until Eric came back. When I did this last time there were no givens at all. Sure I'd kicked Bill out, but I never really thought that was it. For a long time I thought that he'd get better, that he'd get help, and then we could go back to the way it was. I was in limbo, just going through the motions, and it was a pretty awful place to be.

Just as I finished loading the dishwasher and started boiling the jug to make a cup of tea, I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone stealing my wheelie bin. Huh.

I opened up the front door and was hit by a blast of chill air. I wrapped my cardigan around myself as best I could and walked down the front steps. By the light of the streetlamp I could see Andy at the top of the driveway pulling our bin along. I waddled up to say thank-you.

"Oh" he said. "I was trying to save you coming out in the cold."

"I'm fine. The fresh air is kind of nice, really. But thanks for this, it's a big help."

"Oh that's OK. It's just as easy to put yours out when I do ours. I'll, um. I'll bring it in for you too, if you like."

"You sure? I'll be OK bringing it down." I didn't want him to put himself out too much.

"No. No, I'll do it. Don't worry yourself about it Sookie." Andy looked a bit shifty, which suggested where he'd got this whole idea from.

"OK, well thanks again. Have a good night."

"You too." And with that Andy turned around and headed back into his house.

While I had no doubt that Eric had asked Andy to put the bin out for me, I was still kind of surprised. I always felt that Andy was a bit wary around me, and certainly he hadn't been helping me out when Bill was gone. I was pretty sure he thought of me as the crazy lady who screamed at her husband and who was most likely to be at the centre of the next domestic incident he was called to.

But then I guess I hadn't really got to know Halleigh all that well until after I'd had Felicia and we were both at home with the kids during the day. And I guess this was more proof of the way things were better this time than they had been the last time I'd been alone, I had people who'd look out for me, even if it was just to help me put the rubbish out.

I wandered back inside and into the kitchen. "Brrr" I said to the baby. "I bet Daddy's nice and warm but it's not warm here. Hands up who wants tea?" I put my hand up. "I'll count yours as a yes" I said. "Because we're sharing anyway."

EPOV

I heard Indira come in. It was kind of hard not to given I was sleeping, what, 10 feet from the door to the apartment. There seemed to be a lot of shushing and giggling going on. And there was another voice as well. A male one.

Oh fuck. I wasn't sure what to do. Did I remind her that this was a first date? Or just pretend to be asleep. I heard Indira whisper, quite loudly "No, I told you I had someone staying with me" and I went for the pretending to be asleep route. I was actually pretty keen on pretending to be asleep about now if I thought it might get me out of having to actually be aware of what was going on.

Or hear any of it. Fuck. How thick were the walls around here?

Not thick enough I found out after too long. Shit, this whole staying with Indira was such a fucking bad idea from start to finish.

When I woke up the next morning my head was still covered with the pillow I'd used at some point during the night when I'd been trying to block out the sounds coming from Indira's bedroom. I rolled onto my back and listened. It was all completely quiet.

I wasn't sure what to do. I thought maybe I'd try for the bathroom before anyone else got up, so I snuck in there and had a very quick shower. I'd been so keen to get in first I'd forgotten to take anything in there with me, even clean clothes, so I had to walk back to the living room wearing a towel and hoping that I didn't bump into Indira. Or whoever the fuck was in her bedroom with her. Shit, this could be awkward.

I'd just made myself some coffee when Indira came wandering into the kitchen, wearing a bathrobe and yawning. "It's alright, Eric" she said. "He's gone. Took off sometime in the night, I guess."

I wasn't sure what to say to that. In the end I went with "Oh."

"Fucker" Indira muttered under her breath, helping herself to coffee and glancing at that pan by the sink.

I nodded. Possibly he was, or possibly he just thought he'd got lucky and decided to go for it. I guessed Indira had ditched the whole first date thing at some point during the evening.

"So much for the whole looking for a long-term relationship bullshit" Indira muttered into her coffee. I really wasn't sure whether she was referring to herself or the guy she'd been on the date with by that statement, so I just let it lie

Indira sighed again, but didn't say anything. I wasn't sure what to say. It was just all fucking awkward. I was starting to think I would have been better off in a hotel. Or even a really crummy cheap, motel. Just…anywhere else would have been good.

In the end Indira looked at me. "You got anything you need to do today?" she asked me. I shrugged. It was Sunday; we weren't working again until the meeting the next day I had a whole day to kill. And absolutely no fucking plans at all.

"Not really" I said to her.

"So, want to go shopping? I need cheering up and I guess you want to take stuff home? You know, for the kids? Like we did last time, because that was fun. I never get to buy for little girls. My bother has two boys, but then he's the good son after all. Me, I'm…well, I'm 33 and still fucking up dates I made with men I met on the internet." Indira stopped talking and looked sad. Fuck, I hoped she wasn't going to cry or anything. I really wanted to distance myself from all of this.

But she didn't cry. Instead she kind of shook herself and said "So, shopping? Yeah? Just give me, um, twenty minutes to get ready."

Indira's idea of twenty minutes and mine were quite different. Her's was more like three times that length, so I ate some cereal, then I watched some TV, and finally I started reading the book I'd bought with me. Fuck, I really appreciated Sookie about then. Sometimes it seemed like she took a long time to get ready but she was so much better than Indira.

Finally we could leave the apartment which was feeling smaller the longer I was cooped up in it. I'd never actually been so happy to get to a mall before, because at least it was a change of scene.

It all seemed to make Indira really happy. She dragged me from shop to shop picking out things I could buy and no amount of trying to explain that there was no point buying matching frilly dresses because Felicia wouldn't buy that, would work. And when all else failed she started piling stuff up for Sam as well. It was a fucking good thing I was saving money by staying with her, because this trip was costing me a fortune.

While she was busy buying up most of the stuff in the Gap store I heard one of the shop assistants talking to Indira. "So how many kids do y'all have?" she said, nodding at where I was trying to pick something out for Sam.

"Well, two girls now. The boy's still on the way" Indira told her, without batting an eyelid.

"Oh, well. Congratulations!" the sales assistant said, before Indira sent her off to see whether she could get the same t-shirt with flowers on it in sizes appropriate for the two girls we appeared to have together. Indira looked up from where she was flicking through a rack and caught my eye, but didn't say anything.

I wanted to say something, to pull her up on it, I really did, but…well, I felt sorry for her really. She'd thought this was what she was getting with Chow, marriage, babies, Sundays spent in GapKids and then, well, it didn't turn out like that. Instead she had crappy dates with guys who didn't even hang around for breakfast. It wasn't that different to the life I'd been leading before I went to New Zealand, and although I hadn't really realised at the time, it was a fucking lonely way to live. I wouldn't want to go back to it.

So I didn't say anything, I just finalised my choices for Sam and went over to see what Indira had collected in her pile.

The shopping trip didn't turn out too badly in the end. We stopped for lunch at an Italian place and Indira seemed to have recovered her good humour, calling the guy from the night before 'that fucking lawyer bastard' and resolving not to go there again.

Only time could tell on that one.

So I wasn't feeling too bad about whole situation when we got back to her apartment in the afternoon, my only worry was how I was going to fit all this stuff in my suitcase. But the good mood Indira was in wasn't going to last.

SPOV

Monday morning started with a bang. Well, a squeal really, followed by a shout of "Mum!" I found Amelia standing in the doorway to her bedroom, looking down at a dead sparrow, a very annoyed looking Bob standing behind her.

"It's dead!" she wailed.

"Dead?" Felicia echoed, coming over to have a closer look.

"Um, Bob was just bringing you a present…" I tried, picking the poor little thing up.

"I don't want a dead bird!" Amelia said.

"I'll get rid of it" I told her. Bob shot me a dirty look then, but really, what was I going to do, put it in a casserole?

So once the bird was dealt with, we could get down to serious business; who was going to have first turn at crossing a day off the calendar? "It's my turn today!" Amelia announced.

"Well…" I stalled, looking at Felicia's little face. "Um, maybe we should let Felicia have the first turn?"

"No" Amelia said, crossing her arms.

"Um…it might help her understand a bit more" I suggested. Amelia just humphed. Felicia eyed the pen in my hand hopefully. "Because she didn't really get the idea last night."

"Yes she did" Amelia insisted. "And it's my turn first."

"She's only little, Amelia. Let her have the first go."

"No!"

I wasn't sure how to break the deadlock. "I think letting your little sister have the first go would be a nice big sister thing to do." Amelia sighed, and looked at the floor. "And you're such a good big sister, Amelia."

"Fine!" Amelia said in the end, and I handed the pen to Felicia. "In that square" I said to her, pointing to the previous day.

"That's not a cross, that's a scribble!" Amelia protested.

"It doesn't really matter, as long as we know we're through that day. Why don't you count the sleeps now?" I gave the calendar to Amelia and she counted through the squares until the day Eric got back. "Twelve" she said in the end. "It's twelve sleeps Leesh."

"'welve?" Felicia asked.

"That's less than yesterday" I told her.

She nodded and the three of us set about getting breakfast and getting ready for the day.

There was about an hour to kill between dropping Amelia at school and coming back to start parent help, or sister help as Felicia liked to think of it. So we went to St Luke's to run some errands. While standing at the check-out at the supermarket the cover of the Women's Weekly caught my eye. On the cover was a photo of the woman who'd snobbed me at Felicia's soccer on Saturday, that Andrea Thompson-White. I sighed and picked the magazine up. 'Andrea's Baby Struggle' read the headline.

Feeling nosy, I flipped open to the story. Apparently she'd felt the need to share with the world, well, the rest of New Zealand, really, that she'd had two miscarriages since having her two year-old son, Rhys, and she was starting to worry that she and her husband Bryce, a pilot, would be unable to have more children since she was now 42.

OK. Well, that kind of put a new spin on Saturday I thought. While I couldn't quite understand why she'd decided to sell her story when I was sure lots of women were in the same boat, and some who hadn't had even one child were possibly going to feel a bit less than gracious towards her, I could kind of understand why I maybe wasn't someone she really wanted to be around right now.

But there wasn't anything I could do about it. And it was my turn to pay anyway, not to mention I had a toddler who was about to stand up and attempt to jump out of the shopping trolley. Andrea's problems were sad, but they were her problems, and she'd have to deal with them.

We got to Amelia's class to find the story-writing in full swing. "Meela's mummy" Maisie said. "Are you really going to have a baby?"

"Yes" I said, keeping one eye on Felicia as she circled the table of kids.

"In hundreds of sleeps" Amelia said, knowledgeably. "Mum" she continued, "How do you spell plié?" Today's topic was to write about what they did in their spare time. Amelia had picked writing about her dance lessons. Maisie was writing about walking her dog.

"We don't have a dog" Amelia said, wistfully.

"Bob wouldn't like a dog" I pointed out. "What about you, Emily?"

"Um. I think I'm going to write about when Mum and I go to the pub" she said.

"The pub?" I asked.

"Yeah, on a Thursday night. We go for dinner. It's a treat. Mum points out the men she thinks look nice and we talk about them." Oh, good grief. Tanya had a lot to answer for. "So" Emily continued, "how do you spell bum?"

"Bum?"

"Yeah, like in 'Mum liked the guy with the nice bum'" She looked at me expectantly. I wondered whether I should be getting paid for this.

After that I tried helping Sebastian. Felicia was back hanging out with him again, watching him draw small pictures in the margin of his paper. "What do you want to write about Sebastian?" I asked. He shrugged. "Um, so what do you do in your spare time?"

He looked at me "Maths, piano, reading practice, art" he listed.

"Well how about the art, then? You like drawing?" He shrugged and looked at Felicia. "Pic'jus" she said, pointing to the paper.

Sebastian looked at Felicia, then down at his paper again. "Alright" he said, and he started to write something. I left him to it and went to deal with Chloe.

"What are you writing about?" I asked her.

She looked at me and blinked. "I don't know" she whispered.

"Well, what do you do when you're not in school?"

"We grow things so we don't use up all the, uh, stuff. On the planet." OK, maybe we could work with this.

"So, let's try writing about that then" I suggested. "Working in the garden with your mum and…"I had no idea how her home life worked and Chloe didn't supply a word for me to use. She was quiet for a bit then she said. "How do you spell hoe?"

Before I could answer, Emily jumped in. "That's what Mum says the woman behind the bar at the pub is, she takes all the best men for herself. So I need to know how to spell it too."

Oh good grief, I thought. Definitely I should be getting paid for this.

I managed to talk Emily out of using that part of her story, and things seemed to be going well. At least I thought they were. Chloe's pencil broke and I had to take her out to her bag to find another one, as I think everyone at the table was a bit sick of lending them to her. It was as we were standing at the cubby holes outside the classroom that I heard Amelia's shout of "Don't you touch my sister!"

I raced back inside to find Amelia staring down Connor and another mother and the teacher Mrs Garfield coming over to separate them. Felicia looked defiant, standing beside Amelia. Sebastian looked scared and Emily and Maisie looked on with a kind of gleeful joy.

Shit. "What happened?" I asked, as I arrived back at the table.

"He was being mean to Felicia!" Amelia said, pointing at Connor, who simply stuck out his chest and tried to look threatenng.

"I sent him to get more paper and I think he had a swipe at Sebastian" the other mother said. "And your daughter intervened." I wasn't entirely sure which daughter until Felicia spoke up. "No touch Bessian!" she yelled in Connor's direction.

OK, well that cleared up that. I assumed that Connor had then turned on Felicia and Amelia had stepped in, and while she wasn't above tormenting Felicia she was pretty clear that it was her job alone, and no one else was allowed the privilege. And that was pretty much how it worked; Jason always felt the same way about me.

Still, I was just lucky that Felicia hadn't got as far as biting Connor.

"Right" Mrs Garfield said. "Connor, say sorry to Sebastian please."

Connor swung his foot, and mumbled out something that might have been sorry, while looking at the floor.

"And now off to the thinking corner please!" Mrs Garfield said, as she pointed to a corner of the room, and Connor sloped off. "It was easier when we had the strap" she muttered. I pretended to be shocked, but failed. God knows how many times Jason had had the strap, and Dad before him, and neither of them turned out exactly the worse for it.

"Um, sorry about Felicia…" I said to Mrs Garfield, as the other mother headed back to her table.

"She's alright" Mrs Garfield said, looking down at her. "How old are you?" Felicia blinked and looked blank. "She's two" Amelia said.

"Well, I will look forward to having you permanently in my classroom in three years' time then" Mrs Garfield said, kind of enigmatically, before she left us all, and I figured out Chloe was still outside waiting for me to retrieve her. I just hoped she wasn't crying.

When I arrived back with Chloe, things seemed to have calmed down. The kids finished their stories and I gathered up Felicia so we could leave. Before she followed me she patted Sebastian's hand. "Bye Bessian!" she said brightly.

"Bye Felicia" he said, looking mostly at the table.

I had one more thing left to do before I could go home and collapse, and that was an appointment with Russell. Eric was really sad he was missing out on this one; he loved seeing the fuzzy blob that was the baby on the monitor when Russell did the ultrasound. It was pretty cool.

The waiting room was packed with women and kids and the odd husband or two, and Russell was running late as, the nurse on reception informed me, his surgery had run over that morning. So I wandered off to the bathroom to provide my urine sample and then it was just a matter of waiting. And waiting.

Eventually it was our turn and I could drag Felicia into the consulting room and sit her down with a pile of books in the hope she'd behave. After the usual questions about my health and a blood pressure check, I hopped up on the table for the ultrasound.

Russell spent a bit of time checking and measuring, and measuring again. "Baby's still ahead of dates" he said. "You were 100 per cent sure about your last period, weren't you?"

"Oh, absolutely" I said. I was really precise about these things. It couldn't have happened earlier, that was just a big baby.

"It's a big baby" Russell said, kind of helpfully.

"Yeah" I agreed.

He finished and I went back to sit next to his desk while he plotted the growth on the chart. "Still right up there" he said holding it up.

"Yeah" I said quietly.

"You'll be fine, Sookie" Russell said kindly. "But when it gets closer to the time we'll just…well, we'll manage it as best we can."

"What does that mean?" I asked, slightly worried.

"I shouldn't think you'd need a caesarean, but, we'll just keep an open mind on that option, I think. We can always try a sweep…I did that before, didn't I?" He turned to the computer screen to check my notes.

"Yeah, you did" I confirmed. "With Amelia." Having a membrane sweep where Russell cleared the mucus plug from the cervix manually hadn't been the most comfortable thing I'd ever had done, but it had done the trick, as she'd arrived the next day.

"Yes, so that's definitely an option still" Russell said, smiling at me.

As we were leaving Russell's consulting room, I could hear a rather loud woman in reception. She had to be loud because Felicia was going "Playground? Playground?" repeatedly in a worried attempt to make sure that I didn't forget I'd promised to take her to the little park across from the obstetrician's.

As I got closer I could hear what she was saying "What do you mean, running late? I had to take time off work to be here, and I can't afford to take time off work. Why did no one phone me? If our bank treated customers like this we'd have none. It's ridiculous."

And it was at this point, just before I saw her standing with her back to me at reception, that I realised just who that annoying Australian twang belonged to.

"Hi Sophie-Anne!" I said, coming to stand behind her. She wheeled around; there was the faintest hint of a bump just peeking out of her jacket. I sighed. I hoped she was less pregnant than me, not more.

"Oh. Sookie" she said, looking down at my stomach, and then back up to my face. "You're seeing Russell as well?"

"Yeah, I've just been in."

Sophie-Anne sighed. "Lucky you. Honestly, I re-scheduled my whole day and now they tell me he's running late" she glared at the receptionist.

"Mmm" I said. "Well, um, congratulations anyway. When are you due?"

"Oh, December. Which is annoying. I really need to get on to booking the caesarean, because of the holiday break, but Russell's stalling." I waited for her to ask about me, but it was a good thing I wasn't holding my breath. In the end she said "Where's Eric?"

"In the States, working with some of his old colleagues."

"Right" Sophie-Anne said, like she maybe didn't believe me. "Well, Bert's here of course. You remember him?" she gestured to the huge man next to her. He still didn't have a neck. That was fascinating. "Hi" he said, nodding to me.

"Hi" I said, sizing him up. Yeah, he was huge. That was going to be a huge baby. A really huge baby. Poor Sophie-Anne. Suddenly, I felt a bit less sorry for myself. "OK, well nice to see you guys, hope it all goes well."

"Mmm" Sophie-Anne said. "If I ever bloody get in there I can give Russell a piece of my mind. This isn't acceptable at all! Well, bye then Sookie."

Felicia and I walked out the door and across to the park.

So when Eric rang that night I was all set up to tell him all my news, but he sounded a bit miserable. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"I'm in hiding" he said.

"What from?"

"More like who from. Indira's gone a bit…psycho. There's no other fucking way to explain it."

"Psycho?" I couldn't really picture it. She always seemed nice, and apart from her one night of ill-judged PDA, which, admittedly, was with the guy who was her husband at the time, she was always quite pleasant.

"Yeah, she just…well, she flipped out on me." That didn't sound good. I wondered what Eric had done.

"What about?" I asked, wondering if I really wanted to know.

"Well…it started with the coffee table, apparently putting your feet on it is not allowed."

"Oh. Well you'll just have to try to remember that one." I felt a bit sorry for him. It wasn't something I cared about, mainly because I hadn't been brought up that way. If Mum had ever tried to enforce it she'd been broken by Jason and my dad long before my legs were long enough to reach the coffee table. Unfortunately Bill had been brought up by Lorena so it was only as an adult I got told off for it. It had actually been one of the nice things when he'd first left, being able to relax some of the rules around the house. But still, that didn't seem to be helping Eric now. "So that was it?" I asked.

Eric sighed. "Yeah, pretty much. Oh, there was something really fucking over the top about a pan…"

"Oh Eric! How long did you leave it soaking for?"

"What? No, it wasn't like that. I was going to clean it, but I just…"

"Hadn't done it yet. Shit, no wonder Indira's pissed with you. That's like the first rule of being a good guest, don't leave dirty dishes in the kitchen."

"It needed soaking, so I soaked it." Yeah, Eric was trying to justify himself now.

"Yes, but we've had this discussion. There's a time limit on how long you can soak these things for before you no longer get any benefit whatsoever from it still just sitting there with dirty water in it."

"It was really dirty Sookie. Anyway, you're not here so don't butt in."

"Well, you rang to tell me!"

"I called to talk to you and the kids, not to be lectured on being a good guest and the proper cleaning procedures for cookware!" Eric was pissed now, and I just hoped he wasn't hiding out anywhere he was expected to be quiet. I had visions of him being kicked out of a library or something.

"So what are you going to do?" I asked him, hoping he'd calm down a bit.

He sighed. "Hang out here for a bit, and then head back I guess."

"And apologise?" I asked, bracing myself for what was going to come next, but Eric didn't bite. "Yeah" he said quietly. "I guess." God, he sounded about as enthusiastic as Connor.

"So where are you?" I asked him.

"Some restaurant out of town. It's pretty awful. The food was shit, and it's full of…" he trailed off.

"Americans?" I supplied.

"Yeah, very funny Sookie. At least I can fucking understand them, well, most of them. Actually some of the people around here are harder to understand than you guys." He laughed, and we were good again, which was a relief because I really didn't want to fall out with Eric over the phone.

After that I told him all about my day in detail, and tried not think about the cost of the phone call. Eric wasn't really surprised about the Connor incident, but very surprised about Sophie-Anne. I pointed out that it seemed like karma catching up with her.

I told him about my appointment, and how the baby was still big and getting bigger. Eric sounded wistful and wondered out loud if Sam was missing him. I assured him, the baby, who still might actually be Daniel, was.

And then the kids got to talk to him. Amelia practically recited the paragraph she'd written about dancing at school, and then gave him a very complicated explanation of the calendar crossing off system. Felicia didn't say much, but seemed a bit happier than the last time she'd talked to him. Eric must have asked her about Connor though, because I heard her say "He's no' nice to Bessian. Bessian's my friend." I didn't hear what Eric said to that though.

When I got the phone back I was conscious of being fairly quick because of the cost. "So, um, I hope it goes OK with Indira" I said.

"Yeah, I'm sure she'll get over it."

"She will, just say sorry." I really hoped that would work anyway, for Eric's sake.

"Mmm" he said. "I'd probably better go back."

"OK, well bye from all of us."

"Bye, Sookie. I love you."

"I love you too. But please, please remember that Indira doesn't."

"Yeah, OK. I will!"

"And that all the magic fairies that do stuff here, like clean soaking pots, are actually me."

"Mmm-hmm."

"And that not everyone wants your hulking great feet on their furniture."

"Yeah, OK. I get it. I fucked up, so I need to go and apologise."

"That's the one. OK, Bye." And then he was gone, and all I could do was sit here and worry about him.

"You know" I said to the baby, when it was bedtime "Most of the time your dad's OK, but maybe that's because I'm used to him. Well, we all are really. I guess you're used to him too. He's always been around. You're lucky with that. And he'll be back soon. Hopefully in one piece. I don't think Indira's that mean."

And then I went to sleep with one arm draped over my bump while the baby kicked it to let me know what his thoughts were on the day.

**Thanks for reading!**


	59. Chapter 59

**A/N So, yeah, for those of you still managing to find the story without any alerts, thanks for reading! I haven't replied to any reviews, I know, but I'm lazy and didn't get the nice emails that make it easy to reply so I'm sorry. I feel bad, and if I get a chance might try replying by PM. The whole system is a bit pooed at the moment (and yes, that _is _a technical IT term). On the other hand, I have a rat, or possibly a large mouse, behind my china cabinet that I really wish I hadn't seen earlier, so that took my mind off FFnet being stuffed. I'm hoping I've blocked it in there successfully until the resident rat-catcher gets home from work. On the plus side, if it does get out, the baby's left a few crumbs in the living room and it would be nice if it would deal to those for me, so yeah. Glass half-full!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. But I am, apparently, the owner of a rodent now. Anyone need a cat?**

EPOV

Sunday evening was shit, it really, really was. After Indira had completely lost her cool with me, I'd said I was going out and just left. Which might have been a better plan if I'd had somewhere to fucking go to.

So instead I drove around for a while. Usually I love driving, but the fucking rental car was a piece of shit and I was kind of worried that it might just fall apart on me. It was surprising how easy it was to adapt to driving on the right side of the road again, but I did kind of miss Sookie sitting on the passenger seat, leaning slightly left and muttering about all the American tourists who get killed in the South Island because they drift over the centre line.

I maybe didn't miss the noise from the backseat though, and the clamouring to listen to the same Katy Perry song for the fifth time and Amelia whining "No, Mum! I just want _her_ to sing" when Sookie tried to sing along, and Sookie's consequent huffiness, and Felicia's need to throw raisins at Amelia to get a reaction, and repeatedly touch the window with her permanently sticky little fingers. And then five minutes after leaving the house someone would need a bathroom stop.

Yeah, I did kind of miss of all of that. The car was really silent and empty without the three of them. Well, four of them if you counted Sam, but he wasn't much of a problem yet. And maybe he'd be really quiet and calm and just sit there and take it all in. And never get a word in edgewise because his sisters won't let him.

I wondered what he'd be like, and if he'd be like me at all. Which was kind of a scary thought, but it was…possible. I could see so much of Sookie in both the girls. Even Felicia, who was generally less like her mother, had her moments of pure Sookie-ness. It was a weird thing to watch. She'd jut out her little chin and I'd know that no matter what I wanted, Felicia was doing it her way.

I was so scared of being like either of my parents that I wasn't sure I wanted to risk passing anything on to Sam, but…well; there was no getting around it now. He was part of me and it was always going to be that way.

And, as I drove out of Shreveport I realised what my life might have been like if I'd stayed here. Maybe I might have been alone and still fucking around with my life, but if I had found someone, I suspected I would have ended up with someone like that fucking Sophie-Anne, someone who was only interested in the appearances of things, and in her career. And certainly not in having kids. And that probably would have been fine with me, I'm not sure I would have minded.

But Sookie had come with kids already in place, there wasn't a choice. And I loved Amelia and Felicia, and because it was so cool being around them, I was willing to risk having another baby, and just hope that he took after Sookie's side of the family and not mine. Although maybe not Jason. One Jason was more than enough.

Of course that was before I spoke to Sookie on the phone, from that crummy restaurant where I'd pulled over when I realised I was hungry. Before I'd heard that Sophie-Anne was apparently having a baby too.

Poor fucking kid.

And I'd had to endure Sookie telling me what a shitty job I'd done of being Indira's houseguest. I kind of knew that, but it still hadn't been particularly fucking great being told how shitty it was living with me. Worst of all when Indira had yelled I'd reverted back to my old methods and just run. Fuck. Now I was stuck going back with my tail between my legs.

As I drove back to Shreveport I just felt…empty. After Sookie had stopped telling me off it had been nice to talk to everyone back home, but that was the problem. They were home and I wasn't.

I was really fucking lonely.

I let myself into Indira's apartment with the key she'd given me. She was sitting on the couch watching some TV, and looked at me as I came in the door.

"Sorry" I said, as I stayed by the door, waiting to see what her reaction would be.

Indira sighed. "It's alright, just…please don't fucking mess up the place again."

"OK."

She stood up. "I'm going to bed" she announced. "It's a big day tomorrow."

"Yeah, it is."

"Hopefully Clancy is here on time, because punctuality is not his strong suit sometimes."

I shrugged. "Should we call him?"

"I'll call him in the morning. 'Night Eric."

"Goodnight." Indira walked off to her bedroom and I walked into the kitchen. The pan I'd used was still sitting there, but it was now placed prominently in the centre of the counter, rather than pushed into a corner as I'd left it. Yeah, guess I'd better deal with that then.

The next morning I was woken up by Indira standing over my bed, or couch, or whatever the fuck it was and saying "Eric! Wake up! We have to get organised."

"Yeah. OK" I muttered. I sat up and looked at the time on the front of Indira's DVD player. It was fucking 6.30am. I didn't think we had to be up quite that early.

But Indira wanted to run over the presentation one more time before Clancy got there, so we did that, sitting at her table and drinking coffee. "OK" she said when we'd finished. "I think we're there." She didn't sound completely confident.

"I think we'll be fine" I said. I was pretty sure we had this nailed.

Clancy finally showed up about 8.40am, by which stage Indira was just about beside herself with annoyance. "I said 8.30am. At the latest!" she yelled at him as he arrived.

"Oh, we'll be fine" he muttered, still trying to fix his tie. Indira pushed his hands out of the way and took over. "Did you even brush your hair this morning?" she asked him.

Clancy just shrugged. "Do you think we should just go?" I asked them, as the pair of them stood there glaring at each other. We walked to Indira's car in the parking garage and Clancy glared at me as I waited for him to get in first. Yeah, it was only a two-door and I wasn't fucking sitting in the back.

Indira was still annoyed with Clancy and I had to say, it was nice for someone else to be getting the brunt of it now. Every time we hit a tiny bit of traffic Indira would loudly exclaim that if we were late it was all down to Clancy.

Clancy just slouched in the back and looked vaguely repentant, or surly, I really couldn't fucking tell. Once again I had no idea why the fuck he was here. Surely Indira would have been better setting out on her own rather than have him drag her down.

Eventually we reached our destination and pulled into the parking lot. Indira was visibly nervous now, I looked over at her and she was just staring straight ahead. Fuck, I really hoped she wasn't going to blow it. I didn't remember her being this tightly-wound when we were in New Zealand, but then it was a bit different when it was Victor's head on the line.

I patted her on the arm "It'll be OK. And if Clancy fucks it up, I'll let you take first swing at him." She turned to me and smiled at that, while Clancy just said "Fuck off" from his spot in the back.

We walked into reception and waited for someone to come and escort us up to the boardroom. Eventually some guy called Barry arrived and showed us up in the elevator. "So you guys need anything?" he asked as he showed us in.

I looked around, scoping out the power outlets and that the projector was in place. "I think we're good thanks" I said to him, and he left. "OK, Clancy set up the laptop and we'll get this show on the road" I said to him. He glared at me, but he did as I asked.

Indira just kind of hovered around the side of the room. "I wonder if we should have covered customer feedback more? You know, like looked into how it could be collated and matched with customer migration between products."

I sighed. "Too hard to manage in a short space of time. Unless you engage an external provider to conduct a bunch of workshops all you're going to end up with are shitty pieces of paper that everyone with a grievance has filled out in order to vent their frustration. And then someone has to sit there and try to fit it all into a database." We'd briefly discussed that idea on Saturday, but I could feel that Indira was worried we'd missed something. "And I seriously doubt Clancy's ability to fucking read and type at the same time."

"Fuck you, Eric" Clancy said from under the table where he was trying to plug the laptop in. Yeah, that would have been so much better if it was Sookie doing it.

But at least Indira stopped worrying about the presentation. "Do you think you two can play nice for at least as long as this takes?" she said, looking at me. I shrugged. I was fine. Clancy was the fucking idiot around here.

Clancy stood up again and glared at me. "If everyone would stop fucking getting on my case every five minutes then I'm sure it would all go a lot fucking better."

"Well" I said, taking a seat. "If you weren't such a waste of space, maybe we wouldn't have to."

"Eric!" Indira exclaimed. "Can you just…" but she didn't get to finish, because just then Barry walked into the room, along with Isabel Beaumont and Hugo Ayres, the Chief Officer Financial Services and Project Manager for the restructure of their pricing strategy. There were introductions and handshakes. I'd met Isabel before, but Hugo seemed to have taken up his role since I was last here.

So far, so standard.

And then, after Barry had reappeared with a tray of coffee, we could get down to the actual presentation. Despite telling Indira we'd be fine, I still had a moment of doubt before I started speaking. We were competing with some pretty big consulting firms, and this, well, this was just the three of us. And I lived in New Zealand.

I was thankful when it was over and nothing major had been fucked up. A couple of the slides were out of order, and I glared at Clancy when that happened, because really, it was his fucking job to sort that shit out, but other than that they seemed to be buying it.

"Well" Isabel said when I'd finished speaking. "That all sounds…very promising, Eric. Don't you think so Hugo?" She turned to Hugo. "Yeah, very promising" he echoed. OK, so maybe he wasn't the one we had to impress.

"So, you think you'll have the, uh, personnel to complete all this?" Isabel asked me.

"Oh, I think so. It's not so difficult really creating the models once we get the data through, and you said your systems should be able to give the raw data fairly easily." I looked to Isabel for confirmation and she turned to Hugo, who said "Yeah should be OK. We've got Barry."

I looked over at Barry. He looked way less enthusiastic than Sookie had done at being stuck with that job. Yeah, he obviously wasn't spending his days at home with two kids then.

"So, obviously we need to go back to Max" Isabel said, and I guessed she meant Maxwell Lee, who was her manager. I'd met the guy before and was kind of surprised that he wasn't at this presentation, but then, he was quite good friends with Victor so maybe it was a good thing. Fuck knows what Victor would have been saying behind our backs at this point. "But I think it looks good" Isabel continued. "I just wonder, um, how soon could we have a mock-up of the models? You know, just to get a feel for what you guys can do?"

I was about to tell them it would take at least a week, maybe more, when Clancy, who'd been silent all this time decided to speak up. "Thursday" he said. "We could do it by Thursday. If, um, if Barry sends us some stuff tomorrow."

Fuck. That was a fucking tight timeframe. Isabel looked to me for confirmation. "Sure" I agreed. "No problem." Now Indira was giving me a look, when really, I wasn't the one making promises we possibly couldn't keep. Fuck the pair of them.

"Great" Isabel said, smiling at me, then at Hugo. Hugo just looked bored. Barry looked pissed off. Actually most of us in the room looked pissed off to some degree at this point.

Isabel and Hugo said goodbye and that they looked forward to seeing what we could produce. Barry came over to talk to Indira and find out about sending her some data, and I was left with Clancy, and he started to pack up the laptop.

"That was a fucking shitty idea of yours" I hissed at him. "By Thursday, fuck. We'll be working all fucking night for two days for that."

"Well, what else have you got to fucking do here, Eric?" he asked, shoving the power cord back in the laptop bag.

"That's not the point and you know it!" Although I had to admit, it was kind of a point.

"I thought the point was getting this fucking work so you didn't come here for nothing. Because, fuck knows, we'll never hear the end of it if you interrupted your fucking perfect life to come here and hang out with us poor schmucks and you didn't get anything out of it" Clancy said, through gritted teeth.

"How is my life fucking perfect Clancy? I'm sleeping on a fucking couch, for Christ's sake. I'm sleeping on a couch, in a tiny apartment, in fucking Shreveport, while my wife is pregnant. And I'm…I'm not fucking there for her."

Clancy put the laptop in the bag and zipped it up. "Yeah, boo fucking hoo, Eric. You have no idea what some of us have riding on this, no idea. So just shut the fuck up and do the job we brought you here for." With that he picked up the bag and walked past me. "Coming?" he asked Indira, who had finished talking to Barry. She glanced back at me, and then followed Clancy out of the boardroom.

The ride back to Indira's apartment was silent, and tense. Indira kept glancing at me and then at the rear-view mirror to look at Clancy, but she didn't say anything. It wasn't until we were back in her living room that anyone spoke. "So" said Indira. "Is it going to be like this for the rest of the time Eric's here, or can we call a truce, do you think?"

Clancy shrugged. I didn't really want to make the first move so I didn't even do that. Indira sighed and sat down on the couch. "I didn't leave De Castro" she said "In order to have to babysit you two. So please, please fucking make up before you both drive me insane."

"If we could all just fucking do our jobs" I said, glancing at Clancy, "without butting in where we're not required, then I'm sure it will be fine." I sat down on the couch next to Indira. I figured it was kind of my couch now so I might as well.

Clancy sighed, looked at the floor, and then looked up again. "Yeah, you guys have no fucking clue, do you?" he said. "And for the record, Indira, it's not just you who left De Castro, I did too. And that was what, three fucking months ago? Four? That's a long time with no fucking income." Indira looked a bit sheepish at that fact, I wondered what she'd told Clancy to get him to come with her when she'd left, and if she'd promised more work than they'd so far managed to find. "I borrowed off my father" Clancy said. "And I fucking have to pay him back sometime."

And then something occurred to me. "What don't we have a clue about, Clancy?" I asked him. He sat down in one of the cane chairs and looked really fucking uncomfortable. "Just…stuff…" he said.

"What stuff?" There was something he wasn't fucking sharing.

Clancy sighed, and looked out the window. "You know Bruno? I saw him at the weekend. It seems Victor's heard about Eric here coming back and he's fucking determined to make sure we don't get this gig. And it's all _his _fault." He nodded in my direction.

"Bruno said this?" I asked him.

"Yeah, he was in a bar I went to. It was late. We were talking, and he asked if it was true, if the great Eric Northman had decided to cut his losses and come crawling back to the States." The story was a little skewed, but I wondered where the fuck he'd found out from.

"Fucking Chow" Indira muttered. OK, well that answered that question. She was quite clearly an idiot for saying anything to her ex-husband who still worked for the company that we were now in competition with, but I didn't feel I needed to tell her that. Her face said she already knew. Plus, I was already on shaky ground staying here; I didn't want to push my luck.

"So the upshot is that Victor thinks he can stop us getting the contract?" I asked Clancy.

"I guess. Bruno seemed to think that Victor had some guy there who was going basically greenlight it for De Castro without them having to do much in the way of proving they can do it. _That's_ why I said we could get the model done by Thursday. I didn't want to leave it too long unless slimy fucking Victor Madden pushed us completely out of the running." Yeah, well at least we agreed on something. Victor was nothing but slimy.

OK, so maybe Maxwell was the key. I'd have to find a way to speak to him. In the meantime, we had to do what we'd promised today. "So I guess we're working non-stop until Thursday" I said to Indira and Clancy, both of whom were looking kind of sick about the whole thing now. "There's not much else we can do, we need to prove we're the best team for the contract and just hope it all comes through. And if it doesn't pan out, well, then I guess I can help you guys start on Plan B." Sure, I'd be out of pocket from coming over here, those flights were fucking expensive, but it was probably a good lesson to learn. For all of us.

Clancy and Indira continued to look a bit sick. "There_ is_ a Plan B, isn't there?" I asked them.

Clancy shrugged, which seemed to be his standard response, probably because he knew it would fuck me off, and Indira stayed silent. "Don't fucking tell me you guys had everything riding on this one job?" I asked them.

"Well, it seemed like an ideal fit, and then you said you'd help…" Indira said slowly.

"So, what? You guys just left De Castro with no real plan?" I couldn't believe they'd take such a fucking risk.

Indira looked at me. "You have no idea how…difficult it was working with Chow every day. Did you know he's getting married? To that woman he met at a strip club? And that she's living in _my_ house now? It's just…it was just too much for me. I had to get out."

I looked over at Clancy. "And what's your excuse for being a moron, Clancy? Surely you knew this wasn't such a fucking great idea?" I hoped he had, if he was indeed, dumb enough not to realise the road he was heading down was a fucking uncertain one, then there was no hope for him.

Clancy looked at the floor. "Indira asked me" he said quietly.

"And what? You thought it was a free ride or something? The yellow brick road leading to the pot of gold?" Yeah, the metaphors were slightly mixed up there, but I think he got my point. I couldn't believe he'd been that idiotic.

"Oh, fuck off Eric! You have no idea what it was like for me there. After you left, I got everything fucking dumped on me. They didn't replace you, you know. Victor decided he could without the head count, in order to make his expenditure look fucking great for the year. And yeah, he got a pat on the back; I meanwhile had no fucking life and no fucking thanks. And then Indira said she was going, and starting out on her own…and, well she asked if I wanted to go too. And no one, _no one_ in that fucking awful place asked me anything. So I said yes. But now, fuck; now I don't know…"

Indira looked over at him. "Sorry" she said. "Maybe this wasn't such a shit-hot idea." She turned to me. "Sorry to you too, Eric, for, uh, dragging you out here to deal with all this shit. Oh, I've fucked it up totally!" Indira doubled over and put her head in her hands. "I just couldn't look at him anymore, not after…not after everything we'd been through." I gave her back a quick pat and then took my hand back. Fuck, I so didn't want to have comfort Indira. I looked at Clancy and he looked at me, neither of us sure what to do.

"She's pregnant now, that Marnie woman" Clancy said. "They've had to delay the wedding because she doesn't want to be all fat for it."

Indira let out a wail and I glared at Clancy. I guess he didn't know about the whole IVF thing Indira had been through, but _fuck_, that was so completely the wrong thing to say. Clancy just shrugged and looked at the floor. Yeah, that fucker had no clue about women.

OK, well I figured I'd handled worse than this. If I could talk Amelia's little blonde friend back from the brink, I could handle Indira. Probably. "Hey" I said, trying to get her attention. "You know what? Fuck Chow. He's stuck with some ex-stripper and you… you can find someone better…"

"But what if I don't?" Indira sobbed.

"Maybe…maybe that's not everything anyway. Let's concentrate on what's happening now. Let's, um, let's just get this contract. Let's get this contract and show Chow and Victor and Bruno and all those other fuckers that we don't need them, that we're better than them, and that we don't have to operate under the umbrella of some big, faceless corporation. That we will get this job, not because of the name of the company we work for, or who we play golf with, but because we're actually fucking good at our jobs." Well, I was and I was pretty confident about Indira's abilities. Clancy was still the wildcard, but I was fucking sure we could use him for something. We'd have to. We were stuck with him now.

Indira looked up and wiped her eyes. "OK" she said quietly. "OK, let's do that then."

"Excellent" I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. "I think the first order of business is some lunch. Clancy, you're on that. Indira and I will get things set up and maybe we can start throwing together a few templates this afternoon."

Clancy looked a bit pissed at that, but he stood up. "You know, I fucking left De Castro so I didn't have to take Victor's shit anymore, Eric, but frankly, you're fucking worse than he is."

I shrugged. It was possible, but I liked to think I wasn't. Still, I wasn't about to sit and debate that with Clancy now. "Just go, Clancy" I said, and he walked out the door.

"OK, let's get to work then" I said, standing up. Indira did the same.

"Thanks Eric" she said. "Thanks for just…well, for being understanding. Because I kind of fucked this whole thing up…I just, well I never thought about Chow going to Victor. I just wanted him to know I was doing well, because really, I'm not. I'm lonely, and I left my job to set up a company that doesn't have any work…and yeah, I fucked up big-time. So sorry. And say sorry to Sookie too."

I shrugged. "You can help me buy her something nice maybe. To take back."

Indira's face brightened. "Yeah, that'd be good. We'll go shopping again, at the weekend."

"Sure, let's do that." I smiled at her, and she smiled back.

"Maybe you're not so bad" she said, moving over to the table, and placing her laptop on it. "Even if you are using up all my shampoo."

I didn't respond to that, just pulled the notes I'd made at the presentation out of my bag and set them on the table.

Clancy arrived back shortly afterwards and Indira let him back in. He put the sandwiches on the table. "Yeah, I couldn't remember what you liked, Eric" he said, "But I knew Indira would want a vegetarian sandwich, so I got you one too." He passed it to me, before unwrapping his own roast beef sandwich and taking a bite with relish.

Fucker.

**Thanks for reading!**


	60. Chapter 60

**A/N Day 2 of mouse-watch here. Sigh. Hubby was not impressed that he couldn't catch it last night, and we were all in trouble; me, the cat, the kids. The mouse is still at large though. We have traps now, and hopefully he will venture out soon to tast the peanut butter that I'm trying to tempt him with, although possibly he gorged on all the food the baby threw on the floor earlier. Hard to tell.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, although they're living a nice mouse-free existence that I'm currently jealous of.**

SPOV

By the time Wednesday rolled around I pretty much had a routine going. It was still hard work without Eric, especially in the evenings. The kids were both tired and tended to get grumpy and fight and generally not behave for me. That was when it was always nice to have the other parent swoop in because it was a lot harder for them to act up for both of us. But Eric wasn't here, and it was just me, and I have to admit that in an effort to get the evening over quickly, Wednesday night's dinner was cheese toasted sandwiches, with cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks on the side. Amelia, who tended towards the vegetarian end of the scale at the best of times, ate her sides with no complaint, and even wanted extra tomatoes. Felicia took a bit more persuading and it was only when I reminded her that Daddy always ate his veges without complaint that she finally agreed to nibble a bit of carrot for me.

I didn't point out that Daddy would have looked at what I was serving for dinner and wondered where all the real food had gone, but it was nice to have a night or two off.

When we'd spoken to Eric on Tuesday evening he'd sounded a bit down and said they had a big week ahead of them work-wise, so I wasn't sure when he'd ring again. I just hoped he was eating properly, I had visions of him living on fast food, but I figured Indira might not be too keen on that idea. In the meantime I had Amelia's news from school to entertain me.

"Em's got a baby brother!" she'd said, when we picked her up.

"What?" I asked, a bit lost.

"Em has a brother" Amelia said very slowly.

"But…from where?" As soon as I said that I realised my mistake and braced for a lecture on how babies were made, but instead Amelia just sighed.

"Her daddy had the baby. With the bad woman who stole him from her mummy. He's naughty!" Amelia looked to me from confirmation, but I wanted to stay as far away from that as I possibly could.

"Oh!" I said, realisation dawning. "So has Emily been to see him yet?"

"She was going this afternoon. Her daddy came and picked her up. Early." Amelia gave me a look which suggested that it was shame I hadn't done the same.

By this stage we'd reached the car and I opened the door so the kids could clamber in. "No Bessian?" Felicia asked, looking around and leaning forward in a way which made it almost impossible to do up her seatbelt.

Amelia sighed. "He's sick. But anyway, so Em went home early. Will I go home early when the baby comes?"

I helped Amelia clip her seatbelt in. "I don't know" I said. "Depends what time of day he arrives."

I missed the next thing Amelia said because I was walking around the car to get into my seat while she was still talking, but as I clambered in, she said "Isn't that right Mummy?"

"What is?"

"That if he comes in the morning I get the whole day off school."

"Well, we'll see" I said, starting the car up.

Amelia sighed. "But Felicia still has to go to daycare?"

"I gonna pre-school now!" Felicia interjected.

"Whatever!" Amelia said, rolling her eyes in perfect imitation of one of Emily's less endearing habits.

Later on, during bathtime the subject came up again. "Do you think Em will be at school tomorrow?" Amelia asked.

"I don't know, love. I would think so though. There's not much she can do for the baby."

"Bessian?" Felicia asked.

"Depends what's wrong with him" I said to her.

"Yucky snot?" Felicia asked.

"Possibly" I agreed. That was the problem with putting your kid in daycare, they saw enough yucky snot to last them a lifetime. And other things of course, I remember the day that Amelia came home with the story of how Fergus had vomited all over the path. Yeah, we could see that bug coming before it hit.

"Of course" Amelia said, carrying on as though she hadn't been interrupted. "Em only got a half-brother. That's not the same, is it Mum?" She looked at me for confirmation and I thought for a minute while I tried to stop Felicia leaping out of the bath in an attempt to prevent me from rinsing her hair. It wasn't easy because the bump really got in the way when you were leaning over the side of the bath. "Well…" I started, thinking about how I didn't want to go down the whole 'you did it with two daddies' road again. "Um, this baby, the one in my tummy, that's your half-brother."

Amelia looked at me like I was an idiot. "No it's not because you're the mummy. And it's going to live with us. So it won't be a half-brother."

I sighed; there was no getting around it. "But this baby has a different daddy to you, remember?" I said as gently as I could.

Amelia's little mouth hung open and she looked, possibly for the first time in her entire life, lost for words. "Oh" she said in the end. "Oh yeah. So…it's my half-brother?" she pointed to my stomach.

"Yep, and Felicia's half-brother too."

"But…" Amelia started to say, and then she stopped. "Oh yeah" she said, and she sounded a bit deflated. "So, the baby isn't my real brother then?" she asked.

"Yes, of course he is" I said quickly. "He's your brother and Daddy's your daddy and you don't need to worry."

But now, of course she was. "But he's not my _real_ daddy, is he?"

"He is. He just isn't the daddy that made you. But that doesn't make any difference to how much he loves you."

Amelia was quiet. Felicia though looked at me and said "Daddy's not real?"

I sighed, really that was all I needed. Eric assigned to the same realm as witches and fairies because he wasn't currently here to be poked, prodded and generally jumped all over. "No he's definitely real" I told Felicia. "He's just away at the moment, and working very hard. I think you'll be able to talk to him tomorrow. And then he'll be back on the day we circled on the calendar!" I finished as brightly as I could because, honestly, everyone else in the bathroom looked a bit miserable about now.

Felicia kind of nodded, and retrieved the whale toy from the corner of the bathtub; Amelia let me rinse the shampoo out of her hair wordlessly. I really wished I could cheer them up a bit.

"Who wants Milo before bed?" I asked.

"Me!" Felicia said happily.

"Yeah, I do too!" Amelia added. So after they were dry and dressed in their pyjamas and dressing gowns and slippers I let them sit in the living room with me for a bit and drink their Milo while we watched a bit of TV in front of the heater. It was cosy in there, and even Bob came in for a bit and lay on his back on the floor cooking himself by the oil heater.

Amelia and Felicia were fairly quiet, but didn't seem upset. It was hard on all of us, this trip, but it wasn't forever.

Eric didn't ring until much later on, by which stage I was tucked up in bed watching TV.

"What time is it there?" I asked him.

"Far, far too fucking early in the morning" Eric replied. "Sorry I didn't call earlier but we're working straight through tonight."

"Shit, really straight through?" That seemed excessive.

"A few more hours and then we'll get some sleep, although, given I sleep about four feet from where we're working, it won't be much of a rest."

"Oh. That sounds…crappy…" It really did, and I felt really bad, but there was nothing I could do from here. If I'd been there I would have offered to help, I was sure there was something I could have done.

"Yeah, I just needed a break, so I'm out on the balcony."

"Brrr" I said automatically.

"Quite the opposite, actually" Eric said to me.

"Oh yeah" I agreed. "I just can't imagine it being really hot."

"It is, it's really fucking hot. When I was out here before it was sweltering and it was early evening then."

"You've been sitting out on the balcony?" I knew in my head that it was too hot, but still, there was something about the image of sitting on a balcony enjoying the evening that just appealed about now. Because for one thing, the sun wouldn't be setting at about 5 o'clock at night.

"Well…I just needed a break then too. Clancy's a fucking moron and it was either him out here or me, and I wasn't convinced that if he came out here I wouldn't be tempted to throw him off." Eric laughed hollowly. Yeah, maybe I wouldn't have been offering to help. Maybe I'd just be leaving them all to get on with it and hope Eric was the one who came back alive.

"So what's been happening there?" Eric asked.

"Oh, well, Emily has a baby brother now…"

"Who's Emily?" Eric interrupted. "Are we talking TV?" Yeah, he was totally lost. I sometimes wondered how much real attention he paid to what I said.

"No, it's Amelia's friend from school. You know, her mother's Tanya, the, uh, solo mother you went to the zoo with?"

"Um, OK yeah. So a baby?"

"It's the dad's kid from what I gather, and Amelia was full of the news, but a bit taken-aback when I told her that that the baby will be her half-brother the same as Emily had…" I trailed off, Eric was silent. Shit, yeah. It didn't sound good. It sounded as though there was some value attached to that designation, like it wasn't a proper sibling. Crap. "But I told her it didn't matter at all, that it will be just the same as when Felicia was born. No difference at all. No one will even be able to tell." I may have been rambling at bit at that point, but I was just trying to convince Eric that I didn't care either way and the girls weren't going to. I mean, who would ever know?

"OK" Eric said in the end. "So she's in the same boat as Emily. What about Felicia?"

"What about her, what?" I asked.

"Did she mind?"

"I don't think she even grasped the concept, really. She was…uh; she was more worried about having her hair washed at the time. Oh, and whether Sebastian had been brought low by yucky snot. He wasn't at school today."

"So long as there's no yucky snot in our house, that's fine."

"Yeah, you know they're going to have a nice set of germs for you to come back to."

"Well, it wouldn't be winter if I didn't get sick a few times."

"No. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't get to bring you soup" I said.

"And crackers."

"Yeah, possibly. Although I think it's really time for you to let that one go and join the rest of us with toast. You know, try a new culture and everything."

"I don't think so Sookie, that's a slippery slope that leads to eating beetroot in my hamburgers and I'm not going there, just yet" Eric retorted.

"You wait. When this baby's older and I'm feeding him hamburgers with beetroot you'll want to join the rest of us."

"I'm pretty sure he'll want something normal. Like pickles. Like a normal person would have in a burger. He's half-American, after all."

"Yeah, he is" I said quietly.

"So, what about you? What have you been up to?"

"Oh, nothing exciting. The classes today were fine; no one had a tantrum, or threw up or got into a brawl…"

"A brawl, Sookie?"

"Some of those 2 year olds in the Runner Beans classes are tough little sods, you have no idea!" I thought for a moment. "Actually, you probably do, we have Felicia. But just imagine her multiplied by about 12 and all trying to scoop up the most feathers at once. It can get quite nasty."

"Uh-huh."

"Although maybe not as nasty as your work…Clancy's really that bad?"

"Clancy's a fucker." OK, I decided not to argue and leave it at that. "So what are you doing now?" Eric asked.

"Watching TV. I discovered, now that I'm allowed to be in charge of the remote control because the baby's unable to fight me on it yet, that there's an entire channel of cooking shows. Did you know that?" Eric made a non-committal noise. "So I'm watching that, and also something about millionaires giving away their money, and I think there's one of those police shows on too."

"You're watching three channels?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, I like to flick around…" I said. I could imagine Eric rolling his eyes. He hated it when I did that. He said it was a sign I really shouldn't be in charge of the remote control because it gave him a headache just watching me flick channels in case there was something better on somewhere.

"Are they making anything good? On your cooking show?" Eric asked.

"It's Nigella. So there's much dropping of butter into things and licking of fingers while exclaiming breathily to the camera about how naughty it all is." Eric was quiet, probably contemplating that image. He'd deny it of course, but I knew he liked Nigella Lawson. And I'd decided a while ago not to worry about whether that meant that Eric had a 'thing' for older women with large busts and who liked to cook, or not.

"So, you're not watching anything I'd like then?" he asked in the end.

"You like Nigella! And her heaving bosom" I countered. Eric didn't say anything. "And anyway, I watched something on the Second World War the other night."

"Oh. Was it on Europe or the Pacific?" Eric asked.

"Um. Actually it was a drama about a housewife in London during the Blitz. Her son was killed and she had an affair with an air-raid warden. It was the Sunday Theatre for this week."

"Oh, OK" Eric said. Yeah, maybe that wouldn't have appealed to him as much as a documentary on the Blitz would have. "Sa…uh, the baby liked it" I told him.

"How do you know?" Eric asked, but he didn't sound sceptical, he sounded kind of curious.

"I don't know. I just do…I think…it's hard to explain" I said. "Oh" Eric said sadly, and I realised he wanted me to explain it to him. I tried again. "I get a kind of movement, like, not really kicking, just swishing, like he's happy but not all worked up about it, he's just bumbling about in there enjoying everything. I don't know. Or maybe he can just tell when I'm relaxed. But anyway, it's nice. He keeps me company."

"I miss keeping you company" Eric said, sadly.

"I miss it too. The baby's nice, but he's not you. For one thing, he won't do backrubs. He's actually the cause of the problem in the first place."

"Because he's so, um, big?" Eric asked.

"Well, just because he's hitching a ride in me really. It isn't that much worse than I had before." It was getting him out that was going to be the trick, I thought, but I'd worry about that later.

"OK." Eric said, and then he sighed. "I'd better go back" he said. "Clancy's starting to give me some really fucking filthy looks."

"Yeah, so it's going OK? You think you'll get it all done?" I asked.

"Fuck, I hope so. I really…well, we're all working hard…it would be a shame if we didn't get it."

"Yeah, but not the end of the world, I guess."

"No, not the end of the world." Eric didn't sound that convinced. I guessed he was kind of caught up in it all at the moment.

"And we're crossing the days off. Literally, here. The kids are marking the calendar every morning. Well, Felicia scribbles on it and gets told off. But I think it's giving them the idea."

"Well that's something. I wish I'd spoken to them tonight."

"Yeah, but I said you were busy. They're OK. Maybe tomorrow you can?"

"Yeah, maybe tomorrow."

"I'll let you go then. Bye, Eric. Take care, I love you."

"I love you too, Sookie. Goodnight."

And then Eric was gone. I sighed and put the phone down, before turning the volume back up on the TV. Nigella was still busy in her kitchen. "I don't know" I said to the baby. "Would you use all that fat to roast potatoes? I'm sure they turn out very crunchy, but it kind of reminds me of your Nana's cooking, all that dripping she likes to use." I stopped and thought for a moment. "Well, she's not _your_ Nana. She's Lorena to you. This family is getting kind of confusing. But we'll figure it out. In the meantime, I kind of want some chocolate because of that dessert Nigella made. Yeah, I know! It's a brilliant idea. It would be better if you could go and get it for me, but I guess we can go together." I swung my legs out of bed and waddled off to the kitchen.

EPOV

It felt like we'd been working for days on this model and weren't getting any closer to getting it. Well, we'd been fucking working for hours and hours. It was two in the morning and I was fucking over it, I really was. Everyone was tired and fucking fed up with each other, crammed in Indira's apartment. I could kind of understand now why she and Clancy hadn't sorted out any kind of an office, they couldn't afford it and they'd had no need to, when they hadn't actually been working, but fuck, it made it difficult working in the same space I was technically living in.

I finished talking to Sookie and walked back in from the balcony, rubbing a hand over my face. It was nice to get back inside where there was aircon, but maybe not so nice to have to face Clancy again.

"New Zealand still there, Eric?" Clancy asked.

"Fuck off."

"I was just asking" he said, putting his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

"Of course you were, just because no one fucking cares if you don't go home tonight don't fucking decide to start any shit with me, Clancy, because I am fucking not in the mood!" I realised I was actually quite loud, and that Indira and Clancy were just sitting there looking at me.

"I think we're all tired" Indira said, looking back at the screen of her laptop.

Clancy held my gaze for a moment and then he looked away as well. I sat back down. "Of course we're all fucking tired" I muttered.

Indira looked across at me. "So I think we just need to remember that and maybe…keep some of our thoughts to ourselves" she said.

"Tell him" I said, gesturing to Clancy.

Clancy looked up. "What?" he asked.

"Indira said you need to shut the fuck up" I told him.

"Fuck up, Eric" Clancy retorted.

"Both of you, shut the fuck up or get out of my living room" Indira said, looking from Clancy to me and back again. "You're both as bad as each other. It's like being stuck in hell with a pair of five year olds."

"If there were five year olds around, there'd be more kicking and pushing going on" I told her, grabbing Clancy's laptop and moving it around so I could see the screen. It was a fucking nuisance to only have two laptops between the three of us, but I couldn't bring one from New Zealand and Indira and Clancy clearly didn't have the budget to go out and buy new equipment.

Clancy glared at me. "You're the fucking expert on _everything_, aren't you Eric?" I shrugged, I just knew five year olds, and fuck, at this point in time I'd almost rather being stuck on that school trip of Amelia's pulling kids away from museum displays than have to spend another minute with Clancy.

Indira sighed. "You know what?" she said, to no one in particular. "I've had enough. Let's call it quits for tonight and start again in the morning."

"Tomorrow's Wednesday, though. That only leaves us the one day" Clancy pointed out.

"And night" I added. Fuck, I hoped it didn't come to that.

"But we'll be better fresh, I think. Certainly a lot less…um, well maybe you two will stop fucking me and each other off if you get some sleep" Indira said, as she started to shut her laptop down.

"Fuck. Alright then. I might…" Clancy looked at his laptop, which I'd now co-opted. "I'll leave that there then" he said, gesturing to it.

"Yeah, that's fine. We'll just meet back here at, what, nine?" Indira asked.

"Eight" I replied. "We probably need an early start. And I'll start trying Maxwell Lee again in the morning." I'd had no luck even speaking to him so far, and it was fucking me off. Every time I called his secretary, or PA, or EA or whatever job title she went under was polite but dismissive and I wasn't even sure he was getting my messages. At this point, we were so fucking screwed it wasn't funny.

Clancy stood up, stuffed his hands in his pockets and mumbled goodbye to Indira and I before he walked out the door. As it shut Indira turned to me, "Are you OK, Eric?" she asked.

"Yeah. Just fucking tired. We all are."

"Yeah, but, you know, you've, uh. Well you gave up a lot to be here. I really appreciate that."

I looked up from the screen. "I know" I said to her. She was a bit fucking weird sometimes, but I think she meant well. She just didn't fucking think things through.

Indira stood up, and walked off in the direction of the bathroom, but I stayed put. The problem was that they just hadn't told us about all the fucking exceptions they were running in their pricing system, the amount of variables in the model was getting a bit fucking ridiculous and every time we thought we had it, something else came up. And this was only some sample data, God knows what the actual data would throw up.

I changed a few things and ran the model again. It still didn't look right. Fuck it, I thought. Time for bed.

But of course I couldn't really fucking sleep. I was thinking about the model, I was trying to work out how to get in front of Maxwell Lee, I was thinking about Sookie and the…well, the whole half-sibling thing. It sounded odd. I didn't think of it that way, I really fucking didn't. I mean, we were all the same family, so...fuck, I guess we'd just have to figure it out as we went along. There wasn't a manual for it.

Maybe there was. Maybe I should Google it. Along with looking up birth registration in New Zealand because Sookie had almost said Sam again I'd noticed. She just couldn't fucking help herself.

Probably because it was his name.

And then I had a fucking terrifying thought. Half-siblings. Did I have any? I'd always thought that if my mom didn't want me she wouldn't have bothered with any other kids, but, fuck, it was possible. Wasn't it?

I lay there in the dark and thought for a while. I figured it was, but if it was, and it was a big if, then did I want to know?

I thought about that for a while. Fuck, I decided in the end. I didn't. My mother might as well be dead for all I cared, really. She'd had her chance and she fucked it up.

I lay there for a bit longer ignoring the voice in my head that was telling me I'd got a second chance and maybe she deserved one too. Eventually, I fell asleep.

But not for long, because before I knew it the sun was streaming through the door to the balcony and I was awake again.

Indira wasn't up, so I headed to the shower. I actually remembered my own fucking shampoo for once, but I was pretty sure at this point it didn't really matter.

We had bigger problems than shampoo.

Clancy arrived just before eight, which spoke fucking volumes about how he felt about the day we had ahead of us. He'd bought coffee and bagels with him, and for once didn't moan about being the person in charge of getting the food.

He came over and sat at the table and handed me a cup. "How's it looking?" he said, nodding at the laptop I had in front of me. I rubbed a hand over my face and took a sip of coffee. "It's still not there" I said quietly. And it wasn't, it was kind of all over the place still, and I didn't know how to fucking fix it.

"But we can get there, can't we?" Indira said, arriving back with some plates. She glared at Clancy who had already started eating and was in danger of spreading crumbs everywhere.

We ate almost in silence. When I'd finished I looked at the clock. It was 8.30am. "I'm going to try Maxwell again" I said, walking over to pick up Indira's phone.

Clancy sighed. "He won't fucking talk to you. Victor's probably told him all sorts of shit about you and we're all stuffed. There was that rumour you were some kind of addict so Victor's probably dragged that back up…"

I waved my arm to get Clancy to shut the fuck up. I was actually being put through, to Maxwell Lee. I'd somehow ended up speaking to the main receptionist and not that fucking annoying PA and the receptionist said she'd put me through to his cell.

A few rings of the phone and Maxwell picked up. "Maxwell? It's Eric. Eric Northman" I said.

"Oh. Eric! I heard you were back in Shreveport. How's Australia working out for you?"

"Um. Alright. What I wanted to talk to you about was the bank's new project. The revenue consolidation one that Isabel's running. I don't know if you heard, but I came back to help pitch for it, with a new team…"

"Yes I heard" Maxwell said, cutting me off. "They're Victor's people too, aren't they?"

"Well, we kind of like to think of ourselves as separate from that now, but the upshot is I was wondering if I could talk to you about the job?" Fuck, please say yes I thought.

There was a brief silence from Maxwell's end of the phone, which didn't help how I felt about the whole thing. Clancy and Indira were both sitting watching me, hoping, I guessed, that I'd found the magic answer to all our fucking problems.

Yeah, I fucking wished I was that lucky.

"Look Eric" Maxwell said, "I'm just walking back into the building after a breakfast meeting and I've got a blank spot in my calendar until ten, so if you can be here in half an hour I can slot you in, otherwise, I'm booked up for the rest of the week."

Fuck, it was at least a twenty minute drive to get there at this time of the morning. Maybe more. "Sure, that's no problem. I'll see you in thirty minutes." I put the phone down and dived for where my suit was draped over the back of the couch, but fuck, the shirt…well it wasn't looking the best.

"Just don't unbutton your jacket" Indira said as I emerged from the bathroom five minutes later.

"Yeah. Fuck. I should have been more prepared." I ran my fingers through my hair and looked around for the keys to the rental car. Clancy must have seen them first because he threw them to me. "OK, I'm gone" I said, as I headed out the door without a backward glance.

The drive was one of the longest I'd ever had. I seemed to hit red lights every fucking way I turned and all the while the time ticked on.

I got there with about a minute to spare. I'd never been so fucking glad to get inside a building before. I took a deep breath and walked to the reception desk. "Hi Eric" the receptionist said brightly, which kind of threw me off balance. I didn't remember her from the other day we'd been here, and I hadn't spoken yet, so she couldn't have picked my voice from the phone call this morning.

"Hi, uh…Ginger" I said, looking at her nametag. That sounded vaguely familiar. Why did it sound so fucking familiar? I didn't really have time to worry about that now though. "I'm, uh, here to see Maxwell Lee" I said to her.

"I know" she said conspiratorially. "Belinda said to me last night that she'd been blocking you because that other guy was going to invite her to the big Christmas party? You know the one? But that's months away and she's just being a bitch, so it was a good thing you got me this morning, wasn't it?" She smiled at me brightly. I was kind of lost but there seemed to be something in there about the De Castro Christmas party and I could only guess that Victor was the other guy. At any rate, it seemed to have worked out in my favour.

Well I hoped it had. I had yet to actually see Maxwell of course.

Ginger picked up the phone. "Hi Belinda, he's here…Eric! You know he's coming in, don't pretend you don't. OK, well I'll send him up." She put the phone down again and sighed. "Honestly! She's been _such_ a bitch since she moved upstairs."

"OK, well thanks Ginger" I said, turning to walk to the elevators. Ginger reached over though and grabbed the hand I had resting on the desk. "Oh" she said. "You did get married." She gave a small, sad smile. I had a sudden memory of a conversation with her the night I'd been out with Victor.

"Yeah" I said. "I did."

"Nice ring" Ginger said. "I like the design. I make jewellery, you know, in my spare time."

"OK, well. That's great, hope it goes well." I walked over the elevator and pressed the button to go up.

The woman who must have been Belinda met me at Maxwell's office. "You can go in" she muttered, looking less than impressed with my presence. Ginger was right, she was a bitch.

Maxwell was typing something on his laptop when I walked in. "Eric" he said, standing up to shake my hand.

"Maxwell" I replied, taking the seat he'd gestured to.

"I just need to send this" he said, and I watched him type for a minute or so, before he sat back on his chair. "So, it's good to see you. I thought you'd left the country permanently."

"I, uh, have. I'm just back, well, I'm back to help out with getting this contract really."

Maxwell frowned. "So, you're _not_ part of the team that's pitching for it?"

"Oh, no. I'm definitely part of the team. Well, leading it really" I figured Indira and Clancy wouldn't mind me saying that if we got the contract and fuck it, someone needed to be in charge and it sure as fuck shouldn't be Clancy. "But after this, well, I'll be working from New Zealand."

"Well, how will that work?" Maxwell said, wrinkling his nose like something smelt bad.

"Email. Anyway, it only becomes a factor if we actually get the contract in the first place and I'm not sure…"

"You pitched to Isabel, right?" Maxwell said, butting in.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"Well, then you're in the running."

"I just…well I was surprised you weren't there, Maxwell. You'd, uh, always taken such a keen interest in the past projects we'd worked on together."

He sighed and sat further back in his chair. "I've learned that I can't oversee everything Eric, and Isabel's perfectly capable of looking after a project of…this size" he said dismissively.

I figured it was time to cut to the chase. "So, you're hands-off because of what, the fact it's going to be De Castro running it no matter who pitches what?"

Maxwell narrowed his eyes. "I'm not sure quite what you're implying, Eric."

"Well, I'm pretty sure that you and Victor still see each other at the country club at the weekends, and I'm sure you and your wife will be on the guest list for the next De Castro function. I'm not stupid, Maxwell, I know how it works. And I also know that I'm not Victor's favourite person. All I'm asking for is a chance to show what we can do. On a level playing field."

"Of course it's a level playing field Eric. You have as much chance as any other firm, and my relationship with Victor doesn't count for anything. I said before, it's _Isabel_ running this. Impress her and you're there."

I sighed. This had been a fucking waste of time. "Fine, Maxwell. OK, we'll present our model, like we agreed with Isabel and that Hugo guy and go from there. Thanks for your time."

"Sure, anytime Eric. Great to see you back, anyway."

We shook hands again and I walked out. The PA passed me as I left and smirked slightly. Definitely a bitch.

I took the elevator back down to reception and walked past the main desk. "How'd it go, Eric?" Ginger said brightly.

"Oh. OK. Could have been worse" I said. Of course it could have been fucking better as well.

"Yeah, he's a bit funny that Maxwell guy. Thinks he's super-important, and it's rubbed off on Belinda." I didn't say anything. "So is he going to do what you wanted?" she asked.

"I don't think he can really help me" I said to her. "Apparently, it's all on Isabel's shoulders. What do you know about her?"

She looked thoughtful. "She's a bitch too" Ginger said after a while. OK, well that really didn't help me either. "And I think she's sleeping with Hugo."

I tried to figure out if that would help us in any way, but probably not. "But she's not happy" Ginger continued. "She hasn't been happy since last year's Christmas party. You know, with your old boss? The guy with the curly hair that's always smiling, like, waaay too much." She gave a little shiver. "He gives me the creeps. But obviously not Isabel. Trudy from Marketing, she's really nice to me and she went to that party, anyway, she said that Isabel and the creepy boss-guy, they hooked up at the party and she was really pissed off afterwards" Ginger's eyes went really wide, and then she sighed. "Guess he never called" she said wistfully, looking up at me.

"Uh, yeah. I guess. Well, um, thanks Ginger. It's been nice seeing you again."

"Yeah, you too, Eric. Stay safe!" she gave me a little wave and I walked out of the building.

I drove back to Indira's apartment feeling like I hadn't really accomplished much. Other than the fact I knew far more about Isabel's sexual habits than I really wanted, we were no closer to getting the contract. Fuck. It was all a fucking pile of shit.

I opened the door of the apartment and was met with Clancy and Indira looking at me expectantly. Fuck. I wasn't sure what they thought I'd accomplished, but I was going to have to let them down.

"We did it!" Indira said brightly.

"Did what?" I asked, taking off my jacket and tie.

"Fixed the model. Well, _I_ did it, actually" Clancy said, glaring at Indira.

"You did?" I said, walking over to the table to look at the laptop.

"Yeah…I just. Well, I looked at what you'd been doing this morning and I figured with that many exceptions they had to be running actual exception coding on the pricing. So Indira phoned Barry. Turned out he'd left one column out of the data he'd sent us. Fucking moron. So with that, well, we could make it work."

I looked at what they'd done. It did work, it actually fucking worked. "Fuck, Clancy…that's…well done." I patted him on the shoulder.

"Please don't fucking kiss me Eric" Clancy said.

"No, but I might" Indira said, walking around the table and kissing Clancy on the cheek. He went a funny shade of pink and looked down at the table. "Fuck off" he muttered.

"OK, well at least we're getting closer to being able to present something" I said.

"How was the meeting?" Indira asked, as I sat down.

"A big waste of time. Maxwell's just handing it all over to that Isabel, and all I could find out about her, was, fuck, apparently she slept with Victor at the Christmas party."

Indira frowned. "I knew she looked familiar!" she said. "I remember her that night. She was wearing a really slutty gold dress."

"I don't think that helps" I said.

"No, but Victor's wife. The new trophy wife he'd married in October, the one who came with all her daddy's money. _She_ was wearing a very similar dress. To the same party. I felt kind of sorry for her."

I looked at Indira. "Guess we need to see Isabel again then."

**A/N Milo is a chocolatey kind of drink. It's just a powder you mix with milk and can have hot or cold.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	61. Chapter 61

**A/N Nope, still no sign of the mouse at my house. Sigh. The cat responsible is currently sitting on the bed, looking completely innocent. I meanwhile just know I'm going to get a shock at some point when it jumps out at me.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

When it got to Friday I was feeling really good about how we were going. Nothing had fallen apart without Eric. Well, no one had, anyway. The de-humidifier was on its last legs after working flat-tack with the all the rain, but honestly, it wasn't like Eric was going to fix it if he was here.

Felicia and I spent the day hanging out at home. Unfortunately it was her turn to discover that the mummy who looks like a Weeble isn't always that much fun to hang around with. She was getting a bit grumpy with me that I wouldn't get on the trampoline with her, but bouncing was kind of out of the question. I was happy to sit on there with her while she jumped around me, but that didn't meet with Felicia's approval apparently.

I tried to get her to make cupcakes with me, but that seemed like a lame idea as far as Felicia was concerned. In the end we did some errands and it was only when I picked up one of Eric's suits from the drycleaners that I felt a really, really horrible pang of complete and utter sadness. I'd been doing so well, but all of a sudden it hit me. He wasn't here. And I wanted him here. I wanted to ring him and see what he wanted for dinner, or take him in some lunch so Felicia could destroy his office one piece of paper at a time, or just…just…have him with me, on this side of the world. Not somewhere else where I didn't know what he was doing and I couldn't look after him.

And the fact that he wasn't here, it made me so mad that I wanted to stamp my foot and yell 'it's not fair' right in the middle of St Luke's. But Felicia was quietly working her way towards Farmers, as the displays in the toy department were obviously calling her name, and I realised I was stuck with being the responsible adult for a bit longer. "Do you want a sausage roll?" I asked her.

"OK" she said, and we walked over to the Hollywood Bakery to get some lunch.

Amelia was quiet when we picked her up from school, which is never a good sign. In fact all three of us were kind unravelling a bit I thought. I was still recovering from my earlier bout of sadness; Felicia had decided to cope by pretending I didn't exist and just doing the opposite of anything I asked her to do, and Amelia, well. Amelia wasn't good.

I assumed that it was because of Eric. We'd hit a week now and maybe it was just a bump we'd all have to get over. After all, any minute now we'd get to the point where there'd be less days before he got back than we'd already had with him away.

So I maybe didn't realise how bad Amelia was until it was bedtime. We read a story in Felicia's room. Well, we attempted to. Felicia refused to get into bed and just bounced around, and then yelled "Farfuckswayke!" at me when I tried to get her to sit down for me. Amelia sighed, and looked annoyed but didn't actually join in by berating her sister for being naughty.

In hindsight, that should have been a huge clue as to her state of mind.

We got through the story; we did the Cat in the Hat which had always been one of my favourites as a little girl. When it was done, I kissed Felicia goodnight, and started to walk Amelia to her bedroom, but no sooner were we three steps away from Felicia's bedroom door than she decided to make a jailbreak and sprinted past me.

"Felicia!" I yelled at her. "Get back to bed! Now!"

"Nuh!" came the voice. I thought it was possibly coming from the family room. "Not gonna bed!"

"I'll be in shortly, Amelia" I said to Amelia, who was hovering in the doorway of her bedroom. "I just have to get Felicia back into her bed first, OK?"

Amelia looked at me sadly. "She's being naughty" she said quietly, and with a lot less conviction than she normally would.

"Yes" I agreed. "So I'd better go and tell her that."

"OK" Amelia said, sighing, as she walked into her bedroom.

I found Felicia in the kitchen where she'd attempted to corner Bob for a cuddle. She'd started trying to pick him up and one day it was going to end in tears for one or both of them. Bob wasn't a small cat by any stretch of the imagination and he wasn't really fond of the idea of being cuddled by a 2 year old who was more than likely covered in a kind of sticky substance that wasn't going to do much for his fur.

"Felicia, get to bed NOW!" I tried.

"Wanna cuddle Bob" she told me, stepping closer to Bob who shot past her and through my legs, nearly knocking me over, before bolting out the catflap. So much for Weebles not falling down, I thought, as I grabbed the edge of the kitchen bench for support.

"NO BOB!" Felicia yelled, stamping her foot in frustration in exactly the way I'd wanted to earlier in the day.

"Never mind about Bob, it's bedtime" I tried.

"NO!" Felicia said, and then she ran. I sighed. Amelia's disobedience tended towards the verbal and I would have preferred that now to Felicia's desire to just bloody run off. I wasn't at my most agile and I really could have done without chasing her.

"Sockie's waiting for you" I told her when I found her in the living room.

"I don' care" Felicia said, her eyes darting from side to side as she tried to work out how to escape.

"Felicia, this is your last chance!"

"NO!"

I managed to grab her and kind of tuck her under one arm, as I couldn't really hold her in front of me. It wasn't easy as she was squirmy and annoyed. But I dragged her off to her bed and put her on it. "Please go to sleep now Felicia" I said, as firmly as I could.

"Don' wanna" she pouted, finding Sockie and holding onto him for dear life.

"But it is bedtime, and you don't have a choice" I told her. Felicia's expression suggested she did think she had a choice. Her eyes flicked from me, to the door, and back again. "You have to stay in bed now" I warned.

"No I don'!"

"Yes you do, because if you don't, then…" I paused. You would think years of having arguments with Amelia would have sharpened me up, but instead I just kind of felt a bit defeated by the whole thing. God, I hoped the next one didn't want to argue with me. "Well, if you don't go to bed then it will be much, much longer until the morning gets here and we can cross off another day." It sounded kind of lame when I said it, and I wasn't sure Felicia was really buying it.

"No bed!" she said, trying to swing herself off, but I held her back.

"Yes, bed!" I said to her. "Or no calendar in the morning!" I hoped that boiled it down to the essential message.

"No calendar?"

"No."

"OK" Felicia huffed, lying down and looking at me like I was some kind of really, really big meany. I sighed. I had already realised that I was doomed to a life of being the less-fun parent, but I did wonder if somewhere in Felicia's brain the myth of Daddy was gaining momentum in his absence and she was starting to believe that if he was only here she'd be allowed to run around all night. But there was no way I could really get into that whole concept with her, and discussing Daddy was a bit of a mine-field at the best of times.

This reminded me that I still needed to deal with Amelia.

"OK, well stay in bed now and goodnight. I love you lots."

"Love you Mummy" Felicia murmured, snuggling further down and putting Sockie against her cheek.

I blew her a kiss before I shut the door, and then headed to Amelia's room. She was sitting up in bed just staring at the wall ahead of her. Well, that didn't look good.

"Are you OK?" I said, sitting down on the bed. Amelia shot me a look as I jostled her legs. Yes, I thought, I know I'm the size of a house but just bear with me.

"It's not my real brother" she said. "The baby." She looked at my bump.

"Yes he is. Definitely." Crap, I thought. I had hoped we'd been through this once already and that was enough.

"No, he's not" Amelia said slowly, because I was obviously the one struggling with this whole thing. "He's not. Em's daddy's baby is the same. Just a half-brother. Not a real one."

"It's totally different, sweetheart. You'll live with this baby, and have the same parents looking after you as he does. It's no different to Felicia being your sister."

"Felicia looks like you" Amelia grumbled.

"Yeah" I agreed. It was just a fluke of genetics really, so there wasn't much we could do about it. She was by no means an exact copy, but there were similarities.

"And like Daddy" Amelia added.

"Um…" I said, trying to work out where we were going. "I guess."

"I don't have yellow hair and blue eyes."

"No, you have very pretty green eyes. Like, um, Aunty Jude…"

"Phfft" Amelia said. I felt that she was far too young to be 'phfft-ing' me, but I let it slide. "He won't like me" Amelia said in the end.

"Who?"

"Daddy."

"Why?"

Amelia sighed. "Em said that her daddy likes the new baby better. She said that he doesn't want to see her anymore. The new baby is more his, or…something. Anyway, he likes it more. And Em said that my daddy wouldn't want me. I don't look like him."

"Oh sweetheart" I said, putting my arms around Amelia. "I don't look like anyone else here!" she wailed. "I won't look like the new baby either. No one will want me!"

I wanted to tell her that having blue eyes and blonde hair didn't make the world any better, even if you threw big boobs into the bargain. I wasn't convinced it had made my life so much better and I think Eric would probably have his own thoughts on the matter, but I didn't know if Amelia was exactly in the right place to understand.

"You don't have to look like anyone else" I said to her. "You just have to look like you."

"But you're _supposed_ to look like your family. Otherwise it's…not right. Em said so. _She_ said that her daddy said he's got a new baby now so he doesn't need her!"

I rubbed Amelia's back. It was kind of an awkward cuddle as we had to sit a bit sideways due to the bump, but I hoped it was helping. Because I was struggling to think of any words that were going to miraculously help her about now.

"I don't think he would have said that Amelia. I think Emily's…well, she's feeling a bit sad at the moment and she wants you to feel sad too."

Amelia pulled back and looked at me incredulously. "But Em _said_. She said that her daddy is being funny now about her staying with him. Because he has a new baby, and doesn't need her anymore."

I sighed. "Are you sure it's not something she's heard from her mum?"

Amelia shrugged. "She said her daddy said."

"Well, even if he did" I conceded, "what Em's daddy says or thinks has nothing to do with what your daddy does."

Amelia looked down at the duvet cover. "Em said it would. She said daddies like boys, and babies who look like them."

"Daddies love all their children honey." Well, most of them did, anyway.

"I don't know. He didn't ring tonight" Amelia grumbled.

"No. But that's because he's working very hard, and it's not easy with the time difference, so he didn't get to phone us. But he might tomorrow."

"He probably doesn't want to talk to me" Amelia said.

"Yes, he does. How else would he find out what's happening at school?"

"Well you could tell him" Amelia said, "It doesn't have to be me." Boy, she was really determined to take the worst view of everything. I wondered if she was old enough for me to start reading her Pollyanna.

"It wouldn't be the same for him, if he heard it from me" I said. Amelia gave a half-shrug, but didn't say anything. And then I had an idea. "He chose you, Amelia. He didn't have to, but he did."

She looked a little bit intrigued at that. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Well, when Eric…daddy, got here, you were already 3. So you were a pretty big girl. And you looked like you do now…so he, um, well he stayed here. With us. He picked us. All of us, really. Which is kind of different to having a baby, because this baby" I pointed to my tummy, "Well, this baby we don't know anything about. It's completely pot-luck. He might look exactly like daddy, but that doesn't mean that they'll get on with each other…"

"It won't?" Amelia interrupted.

"Yeah, well we don't know what he's like yet. He might be…well he might be like Daddy and sometimes it's not good when two people are too alike."

"Really?" she asked.

"Yeah, sometimes that's just the way it works."

"What's his name" Amelia asked.

"Who? The baby?"

"Yeah."

"Oh…well, um. We haven't decided yet."

"Oh."

"But we will. The important thing is that daddy chose you and you only. Not just 'a baby however it comes' but actually Amelia Compton, the person. So…you get that?"

Amelia looked thoughtful. "I think so. Did he choose Felicia too?"

"I guess so, but, um, we didn't really know so much what she was like. Remember how she just used to sit there and not move?"

Amelia thought, then shook her head for no. "I remember she used to play with my shoes."

"Exactly, see? We might have thought she'd turn out to be all girlie, but instead she turned out…well, she turned out like Felicia."

"Yeah…so, it's OK then? That I look like me?"

"It's lovely that you look like you. It would be sad if you didn't" I said emphatically.

"OK." Amelia lay down and got under the covers. "Is Bob coming in?" she asked.

"He might be in in a while. Felicia tried to grab him before and he ran out."

Amelia sighed. "She's so naughty. Do you think the new baby will be naughty?"

"I don't know. We'll just have to find out."

"But I'm good? Aren't I, Mummy? I'm good."

"Yes, you are. Goodnight sweetheart. I love you lots." I leant over and kissed her cheek.

"'Night Mummy. Love you too."

I went off to make a cup of tea in the kitchen. Bob turned up and looked at me sadly. "It's OK" I said to him. "Felicia's asleep. Or, at least she's hiding really well somewhere I don't know about waiting to be discovered. Either way, she's not here so I'm not bothered." Bob padded off down the hall in the direction of Amelia's room.

I took my cup of tea over to the couch. "You know" I said to the baby. "I hope you're not too much like your father, because quite frankly one of him is enough. Maybe you could, I don't know, be nice and quiet and just get on with everyone; do you think you can manage that?" The baby gave a couple of slow kicks, or maybe they were waves.

I switched on the TV so I could watch Masterchef. "Yeah, I know" I continued, "I maybe wouldn't put pork, veal and rabbit in the same ravioli, it would be awfully rich. Daddy would like it though. The dead thing count is quite high in that dish." The baby kept swishing around. It was actually nice to watch Masterchef with someone who seemed to enjoy it, but didn't necessarily feel the need to give me his opinion on who was going to be eliminated and what they'd done wrong.

EPOV

Once we'd realised that Isabel's alleged liaison with Victor, might give us a way to get the contract, then I got Indira and Clancy to find out all they could about her from their contacts. Indira was pretty certain the liaison had taken place, given all the office gossip that had been going around De Castro after the party, but it would be nice to get a confirmation of it.

I didn't want to be seen sniffing around anything that touched on Victor at all. I knew if he could he'd blame me, simply because I was the easiest target.

The biggest problem though, was that there just wasn't really anything to find out. Apart from that one party, Isabel didn't appear to have made any waves. It was acknowledged that she concentrated on her career, and had been shoulder-tapped to be Maxwell Lee's successor in the near future. And that was why she was handling this project. It seemed that Maxwell was looking to take a new role in Dallas, a role which he was very anxious to move into because that was where he was from originally.

"But can't we blackmail her?" Clancy asked me, as we discussed our approach on Wednesday night over beer and some kind of vegetarian curry that Indira had cooked. It wasn't quite as good as Sookie's cooking, but it wasn't bad. It might have been better with some meat in it though.

"Over what?" I asked him.

"Having sex with that Hugo guy."

"We don't know that's true."

"Well, having sex with Victor then" Clancy said. "Surely she doesn't want anyone to know that she slept with a married man?"

"I don't think it's a crime, Clancy"

"If it was" Indira said, frowning at Clancy who was picking vegetables out of his bowl, holding them up to examine them, and then putting them back in again, "then that stupid slut that's got her hooks into Chow could be thrown in jail, pronto. Now that would fun to watch."

"But you guys aren't married anymore?" Clancy said, turning to her.

Indira shrugged. "Yeah, but we were. When he first…fuck, I don't know how they got together." Clancy opened his mouth to say something. "I don't _want_ to know" Indira continued. "It's just wrong."

Clancy nodded, and gingerly put a forkful of the curry in his mouth. "It's really hot!" he said, with his mouth full.

"You'll get used to it" Indira said, without much compassion. I put my empty bowl down on the table.

"We need a plan" I said.

Clancy swallowed his mouthful and looked relieved. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. "Thanks for stating the fucking obvious, Eric."

"So that means, Clancy, stay on fucking topic" I said to him. He shrugged and looked down. "Indira was the one talking about Chow" he said.

"It's like dealing with kids, working with you two" Indira commented, finishing up her own food.

I looked around the table. "No, one of us would be crying if that was the case" I said.

"It might be me if he decides to tell me anything else about Chow" Indira said, pointing to Clancy. Clancy looked remorseful and didn't say anything.

"We're still off-topic" I said to the pair of them. "What we need is a way to get Isabel to do what we want her to do, but think it's her idea."

Indira looked thoughtful. Clancy looked scornful. "How the fuck do we do that, Eric?" he asked.

"That is the fucking question, Clancy."

"Well hooray, I'm so glad I asked the right question. Now what's the fucking answer?" Clancy looked at me expectantly.

I looked at Indira. She had an almost identical expression on her face. Fuck. I'd said I was leading the team, but right now, well right now I'd give it all up and go back home. I was sick of this. We weren't getting anywhere fast and we were fucking hamstrung by the fact we had no idea what Victor was or wasn't doing to get this contract. Or how Isabel felt about something that may or may not have happened with him. I wanted to leave, go home, and be with Sookie. I hadn't even been gone a week yet, but I'd missed so much already. The kids were missing me, and fuck; God knows what Sam was doing. I'd missed the last appointment with Russell which was my chance to see what he was up to in there. I wished Sookie hadn't had to go alone.

I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes. "Eric?" Indira asked.

"Fuck, even he's fucking giving up" Clancy said. "We're fucked."

I rubbed my face with my hands. "I've got an idea" I said, looking up.

Thursday morning was practically a repeat of Monday. Clancy ran slightly late, only about ten minutes but it was enough time to make Indira start pacing and muttering. "I don't know why he just can't be here when he says he will be" she complained.

"The problem with Clancy" I said to her, and we waited beside Indira's car in the parking garage of her building, "Is that he thinks he's too fucking good for us. He thinks he's above doing all the shit jobs when clearly, he's fucking not."

Indira looked at me and then burst out laughing. "Oh fuck!" she said, as she doubled over. "That's hilarious!"

I frowned, watching her. "What is?"

She looked at me. "Oh you were just the same, don't deny it. I remember when you first showed up. God, the looks you used to give Victor every time he asked you to do something. I honestly thought you wouldn't last out the week, that he'd fire you just so none of us had to watch you stomp around when you got sent to buy lunch again. What?"

I'd just been standing there, staring at Indira through all of this. I really didn't think I was that fucking bad. "I don't think I was that fucking bad" I said to her.

"Oh please, you know you were. It's a male thing though, right? Don't you all have to stand around comparing dicks or something? Oh look, he's finally here. What took you so long?" For once I was actually thankful Clancy had fucking arrived and we could finish this topic of conversation. I don't know what Indira thought she saw when I first arrived at De Castro, but she obviously had a fucking weird take on things. It was clear that Victor was the problem, not me. He'd been trying to undermine me from the day I started, and everyone fucking knew what kind of low-life he was. So of course I hadn't wanted to fucking do anything for him. I thought I was quite justified in that, but Indira, well I guess she was just going to file it under macho-posturing and leave it at that.

When it really fucking wasn't like that at all.

Clancy pulled his usual sour expression when I held the door of Indira's car open so he could jump in the back seat. "Long legs shouldn't mean you fucking rule the world, Eric" He complained, as he climbed in.

I was about to say something, when Indira said "Shut up, Clancy" and he actually fucking did for once.

When we arrived at the bank's headquarters Ginger was on the reception desk again. "Hi Eric" she said brightly, as we approached across the foyer.

"Is that that chick?" Clancy asked me quietly.

"What chick?" I asked him.

"You know. From the night we went out with Victor."

"Yeah."

"Fuck, do you think she remembers me?"

I didn't bother answering that, but just walked over to Ginger's desk. "Hi Ginger" I said.

"You guys here to see Isabel and Hugo?" she asked. I nodded. "I'll buzz Barry." I turned to see Clancy staring at her intently as she picked up the phone, but she was ignoring him.

"He's on his way down" Ginger said, still talking to me like I was the only one standing there.

"Hey, Ginger" Clancy tried.

"Hey…" she said slowly, her forehead crinkling in concentration.

"So, uh, I haven't seen you, in like, a while…" he continued.

"Uh-huh" Ginger said, her eyes darting to me and looking kind of panicked. Barry approached from the elevators then to escort us up to the meeting room. "So I'll see you around, then?" Clancy said to Ginger.

"Um…" Ginger said. "Maybe?"

"Cool" Clancy said, before he followed us. Poor fucker, he'd obviously decided to take that conversation as way more positive than it actually was. I turned to Indira, to see if she'd agree with me via a very pointed look, but she was staring straight at Barry's back and biting her lip.

I leant over to talk to her. "We'll be fine. Just follow my lead."

"Uh-huh" she said, nodding, as we walked in to the meeting room and greeted Isabel and Hugo.

The first part of the meeting was fairly standard. We talked them through the model we'd devised, and discussed how it could be expanded to run a range of different scenarios through it, and what the final proposal we came up with might look like. In all honestly, it went pretty well and if it wasn't for the fact we were competing with Victor, I might have been confident we'd get the contract just based on this alone.

When we got to the end, I turned to Hugo. "So, uh, you're project managing this?"

"Yep" he replied.

"And Barry's the day to day contact?"

"He's my resource. He'll be getting data feeds and generally helping out when it comes time to write up the full documentation for the Board" Hugo replied. Barry, who was sitting in the corner, rolled his eyes and looked pissed.

"So, um, do you think that maybe you guys could spend some time now, just, uh, just pulling that other stuff we talked about? The marketing campaign spends for the year? And then we could tweak the model for you now, just to give you a taste of what that would look like." That had been something Isabel was quite keen on including, and I was under the impression they were looking to have major shake-up of the way their Marketing department was run. I think that was Isabel's real test, could she downsize it but still get the same revenue flowing in.

"Um…well I do have another meeting to get to…" Hugo said, stalling. He looked at Isabel. Fuck, I really hoped she didn't have to go as well.

"Well, Barry can do it without you. I'm sure he's capable" Isabel said, sounding annoyed. "I don't have another meeting for…" she checked her Blackberry. "Half an hour, so I can wait. Barry, you take Clancy back with you." Having dismissed her staff, Isabel turned back to her Blackberry and started scrolling through emails. Clancy followed Barry out of the room, both of them looking as miserable as fuck, and Hugo said goodbye to Indira and I, and, with a final nervous glance towards Isabel, he fled the room.

So that left Indira and me sitting there with nothing to do. This was it. All Indira had to do was play along.

"So I don't think it's going to be that different" I said to her. "To what we did before. In New Zealand."

"No" Indira said, thoughtfully, while smirking at me, because her back was to Isabel. I was the one who had to keep a straight face through all of this. "I think it should be fine. That was a good project out there, wasn't it? Well, good for you?"

"Yeah, it was. In the end" I said. "You know I went back? After you guys returned to the States, they asked me back and I did a few tweaks for them."

"No, did Victor send you back?" Indira was doing her best to make me laugh by playing the whole thing with exaggerated interest. I gave her my best knock-it-the-fuck-off expression, and she toned it down.

"He did" I confirmed. "Well, actually it was Sophie-Anne who wanted me back. Remember her?"

"Um, yeah. She was quite a star there, wasn't she?"

"Well…certainly she was being lined up to be next CFO" I said, as casually as I could.

"Mmm, so did she get there?" Indira asked, just as casually.

"Unfortunately, no. She got a reputation instead."

"Well I knew she was sleeping with the current CFO, that was pretty obvious when we went out at the end of the project" Indira said, as judgmentally as she could, given what she'd been up that night.

"Yeah, but it wasn't just him. She was sleeping with one of the guys who reported to her as well." I glanced at Isabel, and noticed she'd stopped scrolling through her emails quite so frantically. Good, I really hoped this would pique her interest.

"Oh" Indira said.

"It was kind of awkward. He had photos…which he showed me."

"Ick" Indira said, with a little shiver. She then pretended to have a thought. "Did you, uh…"

This was it. Fuck, I hoped Sookie would forgive me. Not that she'd ever know. But even so. It felt fucking wrong to even pretend.

But I needed to spin this if I was going to swing Isabel in our direction.

"Yeah" I said to Indira. "I did. Well, fuck. I learnt everything from Victor after all." I felt disgusted with myself just saying it, and I had to push away the mental image of actually having sex with Sophie-Anne, but it had the desired effect. Although Isabel continued to stare at her Blackberry I could tell it wasn't really holding her attention anymore.

Indira laughed. "Why am I not surprised?" she said, as though this was all just some big joke between colleagues.

"Yeah, you know me" I had to work hard not to make that sound flat. I was struggling to keep up the pretence. It made me feel sick, pretending like this. Even though Sookie would never know, never have a reason to know. It felt like a betrayal.

But I still did it.

"And then you ran off with that girl who'd been working there?" Indira said.

"Yeah, I did" I really wanted to elaborate on that part of the story, talk about how wonderful Sookie was and how much I loved my family, but that really wasn't part of the plan. And I had to stick to the plan.

"What happened to Sophie-Anne?" Indira asked. I had to admit, she was actually pretty good at this. All her questions sounded as though they were just casual inquiries, and not at all something we'd been rehearsing the previous night.

"Well, she did OK, but then it came out just how many people in the company she was sleeping with. And I think it was sleeping with me, that kind of…well, it didn't look fucking good she'd brought me back in. Let's face it, consultants are fucking expensive and the exchange rate was not in their favour…so they didn't take too kindly to the fact she'd spent their money on getting someone she'd hooked up with back into the company."

"Oh, shit" Indira said. "What'd they do?"

I shrugged. "Moved her sideways. Out to retail…or something. Sookie saw her the other day, says she's got herself knocked up. Guess her careers down the shitter so what else can she do now but sit around and breed?" I laughed, and Indira did too. I watched Isabel out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, she wasn't laughing.

Fuck, I hoped we'd made our point.

Clancy and Barry arrived back in the meeting room with a flashdrive and we all huddled around the laptop to work through the changes. Isabel didn't say much more while we were doing it, other than to discuss the changes we were making and how we might possibly expand on them more fully.

After another 20 minutes we'd done all we could so we packed up and said goodbye to Isabel and Barry. "Thanks, we'll let you know" she said.

"When?" I asked her. "You can't have much more to review, surely?"

Isabel looked down, and then back up again. "No, we don't…but I. Well I just need to get approval for my final decision. We'll let you know." With that she turned and walked away and all we could do was head down in the elevator and back out to the parking lot.

**Thanks for reading!**


	62. Chapter 62

**A/N Still no mouse, but I really need to vacuum so maybe he'll make his move soon. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Clancy spent the ride back to Indira's apartment asking repeatedly what had happened. "But did it work?" he asked, for probably the fifth time.

"Fuck Clancy! I have a five year old and a two year old and I think you're fucking worse than either of them. For the hundredth fucking time, I don't know. We just have to wait and see." I said to him, wishing I could distract him with the radio or something.

Clancy sighed. "Well, what fucking good is that?" he muttered. "And anyway" he added, slightly louder. "They're not really your kids."

"Yes they are." I decided that Clancy was the most annoying person in the entire world.

Clancy decided to stop annoying me and turned his attention to Indira. "How come you and Chow never had kids?" he asked her.

Fuck, that was not the thing to ask. I watched her as she paled and blinked a few times, while pretending she was concentrating on the traffic. I was tempted to turn around and punch Clancy, but I was worried it would distract Indira too much. Actually, I was kind of worried that she would break into sobs and completely forget to watch the road at all. I really wished I'd driven.

In the end Indira just gave a sad sigh and said "It just didn't happen."

Clancy seemed satisfied with that answer, but not so much with the whole wait and see approach to dealing with Isabel. "Do you think we should try going to Hugo and telling him that we know he's sleeping with Isabel and if he doesn't want us to tell everyone he should make sure we get the contract?" he asked, as Indira parked the car.

"There is so much wrong with that idea, Clancy" I said, as I stepped out of the car. "For one thing, we don't know whether he is sleeping with Isabel. And even if he was, I don't think he's the person making the decision."

"Well, we could just go to her then" Clancy said, as he struggled to haul himself out from the backseat, "and say we know…well, she sleeps with a lot of people…"

"Fuck, Clancy, it's all just hearsay. Let's just hope what we did worked."

Clancy shut up, and the three of us headed up to Indira's apartment. Only problem was, that once we go there we weren't really sure what to do.

"Maybe we could get started on expanding the model?" Indira asked.

"No point" I said to her. "Until we get the terms of reference for the contract we don't know if we're actually doing what they want."

"Yeah, I guess" she said.

I loosened my tie and sat further back on the couch. Indira, who was sitting next to me, shot me annoyed look. "You take up a lot of space" she muttered.

I shrugged. It wasn't my fault there wasn't space for a decent sized couch in this place. Clancy was stuck in one of the bamboo chairs again and looked fucking uncomfortable. I was so looking forward to getting back home to my own fucking bed.

I lifted a leg and almost put a foot on the coffee table, before I remembered the rules and lowered it again. I turned to see Indira glaring at me. "I fucking remembered!" I said to her.

She didn't say anything and we all sat in silence for a bit longer. "Fuck this" Clancy said, after a while. "I'm going home. I've got better shit I could be doing than sitting here and waiting to see if Eric annoys Indira so much she goes fucking psycho."

"I would not go psycho!" Indira said vehemently.

"Yeah, you would. He's just about pushed me over the edge several times. OK, I'm outta here." And with that he walked out the door, slamming it behind him and making the mirror on the wall rattle.

Indira stood up. "Well, if we're not working anymore, then I might do some laundry" she started to walk towards her bedroom.

"Um. Hey…" I started to say, but Indira turned around. "Uh-uh, no way, Eric. You can come downstairs with me if you want, but no way am I washing your underpants. I didn't marry you, so you're not my problem. And if you try and tell me some bullshit story about how you're allergic to laundry detergent I'll see right through you." With that she disappeared from view. I thought about it for a moment, and then I started pulling out the pile of laundry I'd been cramming into the space between my suitcase and the wall.

A couple of hours and one argument over whether I was mentally defective for attempting to wash whites and colours in the same load, Indira got a call on her cell. "It's Isabel" she said frowning at it.

"Do you want me to talk to her?" I asked, holding out my hand. I hoped so. I was currently trying to fold and return my clean clothes to my suitcase and not only was it a truly boring and thankless task, I was also starting to wonder if I was going to have room to fit the clean laundry in. There seemed to be an awful lot of kid's clothes stashed in my bag now.

"No!" Indira said, frowning at me before answering the phone.

"Uh-huh" she said. "Sure, yeah. We can do that. No problem." I wondered what the fuck Isabel wanted us to do now. "See you in an hour." She clicked the phone off. "They want us to go back in" she said. "To, um, well she was a bit vague to be honest, but I get the impression it's down to the final cut and they just want to go over a few things."

"OK" I said, pulling out a shirt. "Get hold of Clancy then."

"Yeah" Indira said, dialling his number. She held the phone to her ear. "He's not answering. Clancy, this is Indira. Call me now; they want us to go in again." She clicked the phone off. "Fuck, I wonder where he is?"

I shrugged. Who the fuck knew what Clancy did in his spare time.

Indira sighed and tapped her foot. "Where could he be?" she said.

"Doesn't matter" I said to her, looking for where I'd thrown my tie earlier. "We'll just go without him."

"Well that doesn't seem fair" Indira said. "He's as much a part of this as any of us. Despite the fact you keep treating him like he's a second class citizen."

"It's not fair, it's just life" I said to her, as I gathered up my clothes to head to the bathroom. "It's his own fucking fault for not answering his phone." I walked past Indira to go and get changed.

When I got back she was leaving Clancy another message. "Still no luck" she said. "I have to go and get changed, so you can try him" she handed me her phone and left the room.

I sat down and put on my shoes and socks before I picked up the phone and hit redial. I was expecting to only hear Clancy's message, but this time he managed to pick up. "What?" he asked.

"Nice greeting. They want us back there for another meeting, in forty minutes."

"Fuck" Clancy muttered under his breath. "OK, I'm on my way."

For the second time in one day we ended up waiting on Clancy and he cut it fucking fine. "Jump in" I said, holding the door open for him, and for once he didn't say a fucking thing about being stuck in the back.

It was possibly a good thing we were running late, because as we pulled into the parking lot of the bank's headquarters, the car holding Victor, Chow and Bruno was pulling out. I don't know what would have happened if we'd run into them in the foyer, but I suspected it wouldn't have been pleasant.

Clancy's head twisted around as he realised which car we were passing. "So they're still in the running then?" he said.

"Maybe" I agreed. "Or maybe they've told to fuck off."

"If that's the case, I wish we'd been invited to see it for ourselves" Indira said, as she pulled into a visitor's parking space.

Ginger wasn't on reception this time, there was some girl I didn't know at all who called Barry to come and take us upstairs. When we reached the meeting room, Isabel was waiting, along with Hugo and Maxell Lee. I guessed he'd been roped in to making the final decision. Or he'd wanted to check on what Isabel was doing. Whatever the case, I hoped I hadn't pissed him off too much when I'd gone to see him earlier in the week.

"Maxwell" I said, shaking his hand. "Good to see you again."

"You too, Eric. I hear you and your team put together quite an impressive proposal." I nodded, but didn't say anything. I hoped that was the case and he wasn't just bullshitting me.

"So, uh, what do you want to go over?" I asked, as Clancy set up the laptop.

"Well" Isabel said, glancing at Maxwell. "We'd just like to go over it once more with Maxwell here. Before I authorise spending any of the bank's money." She smiled at that, but only with her mouth. Her eyes looked a bit pissed about the whole thing.

I guessed that maybe she wasn't as in charge as she thought she was.

So we ran through the thing from start to finish once again. Maxwell asked a few questions, most of which we'd already covered in one way or another and none were too difficult to answer.

We reached the end and I watched Maxwell take off his glasses and stretch out. "Well, that seems very workable, I think" he said, turning to the side to look at Isabel. She nodded but didn't say anything.

Clancy did though. "I was thinking…" he began, I looked at him and he deliberately wouldn't meet my eye. Fuck. I considered tackling him but it might be kind of obvious. "About that whole marketing campaign spend, and how you wanted to tie it into new customers?"

Isabel looked at him. "Yes?" she said coolly.

"Well, is that really the way to look at it?" Clancy asked, looking less sure of himself by the minute. "Um, I mean…" Fuck, I thought. Clancy's losing the plot and he's going to drag us all down with him. "Well, the upshot is that that's only part of the equation, what about customer losses, or transfers?"

"Transfers?" Hugo asked, suddenly interested in the conversation.

"Yeah, between products. Like, can we tie it into a marketing campaign for a specific product? I mean, if you're not creating a new customer, but they change what they're using, there's possibly a change in revenue and should we be tracking that through? Because some of this marketing stuff…well I think they're cannibalising the customer base." Clancy looked at me for confirmation. Fuck, he was right.

"It's worth looking at" I said. "There's always a push to move customers to the latest product, but whether that just loses you revenue in another product line isn't always considered."

Maxwell looked thoughtful, Clancy looked hopeful, Hugo looked bewildered, Indira looked pleased and Isabel, well she still looked a bit pissed about it all.

"Hmm, well you've given us a lot to think about. OK, if you'd just excuse Isabel and me for a moment?" Maxwell said, standing up.

"Sure" I said.

They left the room. Indira looked at me, "That went well" she said. Then she turned to Clancy. "Where'd you get that idea?" she asked him.

Clancy shrugged. "When you guys dumped me with Barry earlier, I was looking at their database and I noticed they tracked transfers by customer and product but all they did was make a pretty graph once a month. Fucking amateurs."

"Yeah. Well done, Clancy" I said.

He shrugged. Indira patted his arm and he stared at her hand. And then the door opened and Maxwell and Isabel walked back in. I tried to read their faces, but it was almost impossible. Fuck, I hoped we didn't have to jump through any more hoops.

"Well, I guess I should put you out of your misery" Maxwell said, walking over to us. "Congratulations, you've got the contract." He held out his hand and I shook it.

"That's great" I said.

"Yes" Isabel said, coming over to shake hands as well. "We'll look forward to working with you." She sounded almost completely flat. Something was going on there, but I just hoped it wasn't anything that was going to impact us.

We arranged to come in at ten the following morning to go over contracts and terms of reference and, after some goodbyes and handshakes, Maxwell and his entourage departed and we were left to pack up our shit.

"I can't believe it!" Indira said happily. "After all this time, we actually have some work. And we beat Victor. And Chow. Fucking Chow. I hope he knows it was us. Oh, I'm so happy!" She hugged me briefly, and then she attempted to hug Clancy, but he was trying to pack up the laptop and he didn't really return it.

"Yep, although I hope like fuck Isabel is actually on-board with this. She was looking pretty fucking sour about the whole thing" I said.

"I'm sure she'll be fine" Indira said. "Are we good to go?"

Back at Indira's apartment the mood was still upbeat. "We should go out and have dinner" Indira said. "You know, to celebrate. I know a place…"

"Is it vegetarian?" Clancy asked.

"Well…mostly…" Indira conceded. "I think there's some chicken dishes."

"Can't we go for steak?" Clancy whined.

Indira looked horrified. "Oh no, I'm not anywhere near a hunk of dead cow." They both looked at me to break the deadlock.

"Um. What about Thai?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. That'd be good. Clancy?" Indira asked.

"I don't want to eat anything too hot" he grumbled.

"You'll be fine" Indira assured him.

It was good to get out of the apartment, we seemed to have spent a lot of time fucking cooped up in there this past week and I was going a bit stir-crazy. And dinner was good, although fucking Clancy went a funny shade of purple when he tried one dish and had to gulp down an entire glass of water. Indira laughed her ass off and I had to admit he did look pretty fucking funny.

When dinner was over we walked further down the block for a drink at some fucking bar Clancy thought was 'a great place to meet chicks'. Indira had rolled her eyes at that statement. "How does that help me, Clancy?" she asked him, as we walked through the fucking steamy night air. "I don't want to meet chicks."

"Well" he said. "Maybe you just need to broaden your horizons a bit."

"Oh, yeah. That sounds wonderful. You know I have NO idea what women do in bed together, don't you? So if you think it's such a great idea, you'll have to give me pointers." I wasn't sure how much wine she'd had, but she was sounding kind of loose at this point.

Clancy went the same funny shade of purple he'd gone at dinner. "Uh…yeah…" he stammered. "Uh, I don't think I know, either…."

"Yeah, you do. It's in all the porn, isn't it Eric? Porn's full of lesbian fantasies." Fuck, I thought, don't drag me into this.

"Let's not discuss porn" I tried, as we reached the bar.

"Yeah, that's what fucking Chow said too" Indira muttered, as we walked in.

A few drinks later and pair of them were giggling over…fuck, I had no clue. I was just drinking Coke and trying to make sure nothing happened to either of them, although if they decided to split up I was staying with Indira. For one thing I had a feeling I hadn't brought the set of keys Indira had lent me when we'd come out tonight.

"You should go and talk to her" Indira said loudly, pointing to a brunette standing by the bar. "She looks lonely."

"How desperate do you fucking think I am?" Clancy asked.

"Mildly" Indira replied, sipping her cocktail.

"I am not!" Clancy protested. "I'm not desperate at all."

"Well then, go and talk to her because maybe she is."

Clancy had a drink and looked thoughtful. "Do _you_ think she is?" he asked Indira.

"Is what?" she asked.

"Desperate."

"Maybe. Eric?"

"What?" I asked, not really wanting to get involved in the conversation at all. I wondered if I could get Indira's key from her and go back to the apartment. Of course then I'd be stuck letting her in, but fuck it, I was going to hear her come in anyway. Although if she didn't come back I'd be worried.

"In your expert opinion is that girl over there desperate enough to hook up with Clancy?"

"What the fuck do you mean by that?" Clancy asked at the same time that I asked "What makes me the expert?"

Both of them turned to look at me. "Oh, fuck. I don't know" I said, refusing to look at the girl again and hoping they didn't ask me any more questions. I was watching Indira instead, and I could tell from her face the moment she saw him.

"Chow's here" she whispered.

"What?" Clancy asked, turning around to look behind him. "Oh yeah. I guess he probably came here with Victor too. That's how I found out about this place" he took a sip of his drink and went back to staring longingly at the brunette.

"And you didn't think to mention this?" I said to him, because clearly Indira was still too dumbfounded at his stupidity to talk.

Clancy shrugged. "What were the chances?" he said. Pretty fucking good I would have thought. God, just when I think he has some redeeming features I remember what a total fucking moron he is.

Indira was still staring at where I assumed Chow was. I didn't want to look. If possible, I just wanted to remain under the radar for the rest of my time here. That would have been fucking nice really. But it wasn't going to happen.

Indira said "He's here with Vi…" just as I heard Victor's voice behind me. "Eric" he said. "Nice to see you again" and I realised he'd slithered over to us.

I turned around in my seat. "Victor" I said. "Chow." Chow eyed me warily and then looked over at Indira who seemed to be refusing to make eye contact.

"Clancy. Indira. Good to see you too."

"Uh-huh" Clancy said, looking at me and not Victor.

"So I hear congratulations are in order" Victor said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to me. "Maxwell called me this afternoon to let me know. Can I buy you all a drink? To show there's no hard feelings." Victor smiled broadly, but his eyes were hard.

"Sure" I said. "That'd be great." Indira gave me a look which suggested she thought it was anything but great, and Clancy just looked at the floor. Chow took a seat next to Indira who mouthed "Fuck off" to him just as Bruno arrived with a tray carrying two bottles of champagne and some glasses.

"I didn't think I'd ever see you again, Eric" Victor said, as he opened a bottle and poured a glass before handing it to me.

I took a sip and wondered what his angle was here. Surely he wasn't going to try to frighten us off at this stage? "Well I came back for the opportunity" I said truthfully.

"Mmm, so how are things in New Zealand, you finding much to occupy yourself with there?"

"Plenty" I answered. I wasn't keen on giving Victor any more details about my life than he really needed.

"Still, it can't be the same as the States, can it? I mean, it's such a small country. It must feel good to be back in the big league?"

I shrugged. "It's only Shreveport."

Victor actually stopped smiling and frowned at that. Fucker. He always thought he was so important, and he really fucking wasn't. He was a reasonably big fish in a not very big pond. This wasn't exactly New York.

But don't fucking tell Victor that.

Clancy lasted about ten minutes and then he threw back his glass of champagne and mumbled something about meeting some friends elsewhere, before he got up from the table and practically ran out of the bar. Indira's eyes followed him helplessly, and then she stood up. Fuck, I thought, everyone's bailing. But instead she said "I need a stronger drink" and headed off to the bar, Chow watching her weave between tables. I glared at him and he shifted his gaze back to the table.

"And your, uh, family are well?" Victor asked me. The way he said family he made it sound as though I had a family of rats living with me. Well, possibly I did thanks to fucking Bob, but that was beside the point.

"They're great" I said to him. "Sookie's pregnant. I hear you got married again. I thought you'd sworn off marriage."

Victor leant back in his seat and tried to look as casual as possible. "I met the right woman" he said with a broad grin.

"Lucky her" I muttered to myself.

Indira arrived back and seemed to be knocking back drinks at an alarming rate. Terrific. That was all I needed on top of Victor, making sure that Indira didn't do anything she'd regret.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage it. Victor had started spouting off about his winter getaway with his wife's family, and I briefly zoned out. Next thing I knew Indira was shouting at Chow "How dare you! HOW DARE YOU! Don't you have…a…a…_pregnant_ fiancée at home waiting for you? In my house? IN MY HOUSE!"

"I just wanted to talk" Chow hissed. "But you never let me explain."

"Explain? What's to explain? You cheated! Fuck the hell off!" Indira said. I had to admit, she could be quite fucking scary when she wanted to be.

Chow held her gaze for a few moments more, then muttered, "Fuck this, I'm going where I'm actually wanted" and with a nod to Victor and myself, left. "I'm calling it a night too" Bruno said, following Chow out.

"Thank Christ he's gone" Indira said, pouring herself another glass of champagne. I really didn't think it was a good idea, but she didn't seem to notice the look I was giving her. Or she was ignoring it, anyway.

"It's always so sad to see a good relationship end that way" Victor said to Indira, with all the smarm he could manage. "But you're young. You'll recover, I'm sure."

Indira looked at Victor and seemed unable to form a response to that statement. I wasn't sure if that was due to the amount she'd been drinking or the fact he really was a slimy fucking bastard spouting completely inane shit at her. She threw back her drink and put her head down. I just watched her and hoped that Victor would give up and go away if I ignored him. After a couple of minutes, she looked up. "I don't feel that great, I'm, uh, just going to the ladies room. I'll be back." With that she stood up and tottered off.

"So, Eric" Victor said, "I just have one question."

"Yeah?" I said, turning back to face him. He was looking a lot less genial now.

"How the fuck did you get to Isabel?" he hissed out.

"I have no idea what you're talking about Victor." Well I had some idea, of course, but sometimes it was better to play dumb than to gloat.

"Isabel" he said slowly as though I was the fucking village idiot. "She went to Maxwell Lee and said she couldn't make the final decision due to a personal conflict. She fucking dragged him in and he's had in for us since we helped restructure their Communications team last year and it all went to shit. She's fucking put herself back too, now she's had to go crawling to Maxwell to step in no way will she be his replacement at the end of the year. Who the fuck knows who'll be appointed now, it's a fucking nightmare."

"Oh" I said. That was all really fucking interesting, and not quite what I'd expected at all. Who knew that Isabel was that by the book that she'd actually step aside on the decision making, I just hoped she'd choose us so she wouldn't be seen to be playing favourites. Now I seemed to have inadvertently ruined Victor's plans to have the next Director in his back pocket.

It had been a fucking good day.

"Really, Eric? Oh? That's all you can fucking say. This has got your fucking stamp all over it. What did you do? Sleep with Isabel?"

"Oh, please Victor. I learnt a lot from you, but I don't quite stoop to your fucking level. Let's just say we made a good pitch and Isabel, and Maxwell, recognised that fact. And you sitting here suggesting that there was any other reason, just shows the depths of your fucking sick mind. Not everyone is as twisted as you."

"Don't pretend you're some kind of saint, Eric. We both know that's not fucking true."

I shrugged. "I never said I was, Victor."

"And yet you feel the need to put on this bullshit innocent act, pretending you didn't get to Isabel."

"Look, we've been over this. I don't know what Isabel said to Maxwell or what her reasons were. I think you fucking know something about what she's been up to, and I think that's why you're so pissed now. But honestly, Victor, I couldn't give a fuck about you. I came here to do a job, and that's what I'm doing. And I'll do a fucking good job too. We all will. And then I'm going to go home to my family and live a nice fucking life which doesn't involve having anything to do with Victor fucking Madden. And I'm going to be very, very fucking grateful for that." I'd seen Indira come out of the restroom looking paler than when she'd gone in, and I stood up to go and meet her. "I'm going Victor, and if I never fucking see you again, it will be too soon." I walked off before Victor could reply.

"I don't feel that great" Indira said, as I reached her.

"Neither does Victor" I said, taking her arm.

"What?" she said.

"Never mind." I steered her through the crowd of people and out the door.

**Thanks for reading!**


	63. Chapter 63

**A/N Still no mouse. He must have moved, or be hiding really, really well. At any rate, I've decided to just stop worrying about him and live with mousetraps permanently under the couches, along with the inevitable toys. But thanks for reading anyway, and for making it past the notes about the mouse to actually get to the story!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

On Saturday morning we were all feeling a bit fragile. Well, I was, and I was pretty sure Amelia was. Felicia didn't seem to do fragile; she tended more towards the boisterous and disobedient end of the scale.

I dragged us all to Felicia's soccer only to spend the time trying to persuade Felicia to join in and not just run out the door in the direction of the park. Organised activities were not high on her list of priorities that morning. What was though was being thrown in the air like one of the little boys in the class was by his dad. "Frow me!" Felicia demanded, holding her arms up.

"I can't, sweetheart" I said, "Let's kick the ball instead."

"You suck!" Felicia yelled, loud enough for several of the other parents to turn around. Terrific. I had THAT child with me today.

Amelia was sitting on the sidelines trying to talk to Andrea the TV presenter again. When Felicia yelled at me I could hear her telling Andrea "My baby sister's naughty!" as if Andrea hadn't kind of figured that one out already. I tried giving Andrea a smile, thinking I could still be friendly, but she dodged my gaze again. I gave up, it was obviously her problem and I couldn't do anything about it. I had enough people with problems I was responsible for already.

But we got through class, and I was thankful it was only 30 minutes. Then on to the park, and finally off to the supermarket to re-stock the essentials; bananas, raisins and cheese slices. If I'd been eating deli meats I might have treated us all to Subway, but instead I bought fresh bread and took that home for sandwiches.

I'd corralled Felicia in the trolley while we were at the supermarket, although having to lift her into there wasn't easy. God, Eric couldn't come back soon enough.

So I was really happy when he rang about mid-afternoon. "Hey, how's it going?" I asked, while half-listening to Felicia running down the hall. I hoped she wasn't doing anything particularly dangerous.

"Good. We've got the contract. Spent the morning ironing out the details with the bank's team, so next week should be busy getting it all started." He sounded really pleased about it all.

"Oh, well that's great!"

"Yeah, it was fucking close though. I think Victor thought he had it all sewn up. It was…well, it was fucking nice to get one over on him."

"Uh-huh." I couldn't hear Felicia anymore and I was slightly worried about what she might be up to.

"What's happening there?" Eric asked.

"Oh, well Felicia's gone a bit feral" I stuck my head into her bedroom to see if she was in there, but I couldn't see her. There wasn't any tell-tale giggling either, which was usually the giveaway to the fact she'd wedged herself under the bed. "And Amelia...well." I sat down on Felicia's bed. "Amelia's having some problems with Emily."

"What problems?"

"I think Emily's been hearing some stuff at home, about how her dad won't want her now he has the new baby. So Amelia was in tears last night because you wouldn't want her anymore after the baby comes."

"I wouldn't?"

"Yeah, because, well, it's a half-brother and it might look like you. I don't know. She's kind of mixed up about the whole thing really. And now she's worried that she's not blonde."

"She is?"

"Yeah, Emily has a lot to answer for, unfortunately. Or her mother. I suspect it's really her mother who's behind it."

I stood up and walked out of Felicia's room, wondering where she'd gone. I found her in Amelia's room. The two of them were sitting on the bed and Amelia was reading out loud. I passed the phone around so they could have some very subdued conversations with Eric. Shit, I thought, he'd sounded quite good when he'd first phoned us. And no doubt we were all just bringing him down.

I got the phone back and Eric asked me if I was sure everything was OK. "Oh yeah" I said. "It's fine. We're all fine. It's just…you know, winter and stuff. It's always blah this time of year."

"Yeah. OK. Well, I'd better go. Clancy's waiting for me so we can head out to dinner."

"You're having dinner? With Clancy?"

"Um, yeah. He, well, Indira was going to come too, but then some guy she saw last weekend rang her up for a date last minute. So now it's just us. Not sure it's a good idea. Although I might get to eat meat. Anyway, I should go."

"Yeah" I said, and then there was silence.

"It's not much longer" Eric said. Yeah, he sounded sad now too. We officially brought him down. Yay us.

"I know. This time next week you'll be on a plane."

"Thanks for reminding me. Fuck they are cramped. Between that and this terrible sofa bed I've been sleeping on, it's going to take me about two weeks to straighten out properly I think."

"Poor you" I said. "You'll have to go and get a massage or something."

"Or you could do it?" Eric suggested hopefully.

"Mmm, but the bump'd get in the way."

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "Guess it would. I kind of keep forgetting it's there, because I can't see it. Is it bigger?"

"I guess a bit. He seems to want to eat a lot of chocolate at night now."

"That might be you, mightn't it Sookie?"

"No, pretty sure that's the baby. It's all going to his bum and that's really pushing my tummy out."

"Uh-huh, sure. I'm really not convinced that's Sam. Well, I better go. Love you."

"Love you too."

And when the phone went silent I just felt…desolate. It was getting harder, not easier, the longer Eric was away.

We had fish and chips for dinner as a treat, but going to collect it was difficult with the kids. I had to bundle them up to take them out in the dark and cold, and then Felicia tried to make a break for it out the door of the fish shop and take off down Mt Eden Road several times. When she wasn't doing that she was trying to poke the wet fish in the display in the window to check they were dead. There was definitely something to be said for having pizza delivered, but I was too scared to try that now because they'd expect a tip from our half-American household.

The fish and chips gave me terrible heartburn and I had to scull a large quantity of Gaviscon before I could face bathtime and the inevitable wrestle to get Felicia to stay in the bath.

I made it to bedtime though, before I started crying. I made it to bedtime and just lay there with my arms around the bump, feeling the baby swishing around against my arm, and I cried myself to sleep.

EPOV

Despite running into Victor the night before, and Indira's resulting hangover, we were all in a good mood on Friday. The meeting went well and we walked away with a formal, signed contract for the work they wanted us to do.

I just fucking wished that Victor had been there to see it. Fuck, it felt good that we'd actually beaten him to this contract, it really did.

We left the bank about 3pm and it was Indira who suggested another dinner as we were driving back to Indira's apartment. "I think we need to say thank-you to Eric" she said. "For coming out here and helping us."

"Well, I guess" Clancy said. "Although only if we can get steak."

"Fine. I suppose I can cope for one night, but if I gag at the table, don't blame me. Although I'm not drinking tonight" Indira said.

"And let's not fucking go to any bars that we know Victor frequents, shall we?" I said to Clancy.

Clancy shrugged. "It was a fluke" he said.

"Mmm" I agreed.

But we hadn't been back at Indira's apartment long before her cell rang and she took off to the bedroom to answer it. When she came back she announced she wasn't coming to dinner because she had a date.

"A date?" Clancy said, looking confused.

"Yeah, you know. Someone's taking me out for dinner because he likes me" Indira said haughtily. "I went out with him last weekend, and now he's called me."

I thought for a moment. "Lawyer-guy?" I asked. Indira nodded. "But…really? Um, is this a good idea?"

Indira frowned. "Of course it is! I'm allowed to have a second date with him. Obviously _he_ thought it went well last Saturday. It was just unfortunate he had to leave early, because, uh, he was meeting his parents for brunch."

Fuck, I wasn't sure how to tell her I thought the guy was just calling her because he thought she was a sure thing and it was probably easier to hook up with her than to bother trying to make a connection with someone new.

I thought it was probably a good idea to just keep quiet on the matter, after all. She wasn't my responsibility.

But on the other hand, it was probably helpful that she realise what a slimeball this guy obviously was. The trick was going to be saying something that wasn't too blunt.

"Um, he's possibly just looking for another hook-up" I said to Indira. Her expression darkened in a way which didn't look particularly pleasant. "Yeah, you can just shut up now, Eric. Not everyone is as much of an asshole as you used to be." she said, turning on her heel and stalking back to her bedroom.

"Fuck" I muttered, sitting back on the couch.

"At least she said 'used to be'" Clancy said.

"Yeah, terrific. Now I have to put up with another night of hearing…well, way too fucking much from Indira's room, followed by tears and recriminations in the morning. Fuck, why can't she see he's just using her?"

"Yeah…" Clancy said thoughtfully. "That sounds kind of shitty. She's…well, she's OK. I mean Chow was pretty fucking awful to her."

"Probably" I agreed.

"So it seems a shame she's going out with that jerk, rather than…well, rather than with us…don't you think?" Clancy looked at me for confirmation.

"Well, she should probably steer clear of the lawyer who sees her as nothing more than a fuck-buddy, that's for fucking sure."

Clancy and I sat in silence for a few minutes. "So, did you still want to have dinner?" Clancy asked, sounding a bit unsure of himself.

"Well, I sure as fuck don't want to sit around here waiting for the inevitable awkward moment when Indira's new friend makes his presence known."

Indira of course chose that moment to walk between her bedroom and the bathroom. "I can fucking hear you, Eric!" she yelled at me. "And you'll be moving in with Clancy if you don't shut up!" She slammed the bathroom door closed.

Clancy yelled at the closed door. "I can't take him; my place is smaller than this one!" He looked a bit worried. Fuck, I was so glad I was such a fucking desirable houseguest.

"Is she really going to bring him back here?" Clancy said, looking away from the bathroom door and back to me.

I shrugged. I thought it was pretty much a given, but as I'd just been threatened with being practically thrown out on the street, I wasn't going to say it out loud. "I might go and call Sookie, and then we can go" I said instead, before I walked out to the balcony and made the call.

Sookie sounded sad, and it didn't seem as though the kids were that much better. Fuck, I really hated being this far away from them. Despite the slight chill in my relationship with Indira, I'd been feeling quite good. Seeing Victor fuming powerlessly the night before had done wonders for my mood, that's for fucking sure. But hearing Sookie sigh and tell me all about Amelia's worries that I wouldn't love her as much as the new baby because she's not blonde, or about how Felicia was enacting some kind of primal response to my not being there by just running away all the time, fuck, I wished I could be there.

But instead I was going out to dinner with Clancy. At least there was steak. But, apparently there was also a request for advice on women.

"So" Clancy said, after he'd swallowed a mouthful of his steak. "That girl, at the bank? Ginger?"

"Yeah?" I asked. "I don't think I've got her number, if that's what you're after."

"No, just…how do you get someone like that to go out with you?"

"Out?" I asked, between bites of steak. Fuck, Clancy really knew how to ruin a meal.

"Yeah, like on a date." He looked at me expectantly.

"Fuck knows, Clancy. Try the internet, it's working for Indira."

"Oh." He shut up after that, thank fuck, and went back to eating his dinner. Well, he did for a few minutes. "But I thought you said Indira was just hooking up with that guy? Like, fuck-buddies? What about…um, fuck. Actually dating someone? Like, you know. A relationship."

I was tempted to tell him to try moving to New Zealand, but fuck knows, it wasn't a big place and he'd fucking find me. I did not want Clancy turning up on my doorstep. For one thing, Sookie had let Bob stay, so, God knows, she'd probably want to keep him if he looked half as pathetically hopeful as he did at this moment.

"I have no fucking clue, Clancy. I think you've got to sort that shit out for yourself."

"Oh. OK" he said, and he went back to eating.

We finished the rest of dinner in almost silence, which I didn't mind in the least. It was far preferable to having to try to deal with Clancy's relationship issues. I thought the matter was closed. But it wasn't. We were eating dessert when Clancy suddenly said "But you're, um…you know, happy? It's OK?"

"What? The pie? It's alright; I think I've had better." I was pretty sure that Sookie's crumble thing with the rhubarb was better than this. I really fucking missed her food.

"No, I mean with…um, your girlfriend…"

"Wife."

"Yeah. Her. What's her name again?"

"Sookie."

"Weird. Anyway…you used to, I don't know…I was just surprised I guess, that you stayed with her. But it's because you're happy, right?"

"Yes. Was there a point?" I really wasn't sure what Clancy was getting at.

"Just, fuck. I don't know. I don't know if it's better or worse you've settled down."

"Clancy, I have no fucking clue what you're rambling about now, but do you think we can order coffee while you organise your thoughts?" I waved the waitress over. She took my order and then I had to call her back because she forgot to take Clancy's. She was very apologetic, I guess because she had her eyes on a decent tip at the end of this. It was fucking nice to be back in a service culture that I actually understood.

After the waitress had left for the second time Clancy just frowned at me across the table. "But you used to have such a good time" he said in the end. "You know…and you never had a problem meeting women, like, um, Ginger and…others. And now, fuck, you're…it's like you're old or something."

"Well, I'm not young…" I started to say, but Clancy shook his head.

"You're only, what, like a year older than me? Two? And now it's all about how we're worse than your five year old. Fuck, I don't know. I just can't see the appeal. But even Victor got married again, and Chow is probably going to do it, and yeah...maybe I've got no choice."

"You…want to get married?" Fuck this was difficult. If I'd known that Clancy wanted relationship counselling I would have stayed in Indira's tiny apartment and ordered takeout.

Clancy nodded, kind of sadly. "I want something" he said. "But maybe, you know, without the pious comments about how great my kids are."

"Oh" I said, before turning to thank the waitress when she delivered our coffees. "Well, you know Victor only likes his kids because he uses them to pick up women don't you? Used to, anyway. Possibly still does."

Clancy rolled his eyes. "I meant you, dumbass."

I shrugged. "My kids _are_ great. But I thought we were talking about you anyway."

"Yeah. Me. Fuck, it's just depressing. Even Indira's probably getting laid tonight…"

"Don't remind me" I told him. I felt sure that lawyer-guy had a perfectly good place of his own, so I wondered whether he just liked the ability to duck out during the night, or whether he was hiding his own wife and kids there.

"Well, exactly. And what do I have? A fucking cat." He took a sip of his coffee.

"You…have a cat?" I would not have picked that one.

"Yeah…he just sort of moved in. I think it's a he. It looks like a he. But it kind of screams fucking desperate don't you think? I mean, not even Indira has a cat."

No, thank fuck, I thought. I would not have wanted to share that fucking pull-out sofa with a cat. "Maybe you'll find someone who likes cats?" I suggested. God, this was like trying to pull Amelia out of one of her moods. But I didn't think I could fix this with a Tinkerbell doll. Or possibly I could, but that was terribly creepy thought.

"Maybe" Clancy conceded gloomily.

"Yeah, see. It's not so bad. You just…well, I think you just have to find the right person."

"What fucking Hallmark card did you steal that from, Eric?" Clancy asked.

"Oh fuck, don't ask for my input then get all shitty when I try to help. Fuck, you're worse than my five year old…"

"See! Again with the fucking kids. I get it, you have kids. Big fucking deal."

"Jesus, Clancy. You asked for my help. I was just trying to offer some."

"Fine, Eric. Whatever."

"Yep, you're exactly like a fucking five year old girl, Clancy. Exactly."

We sat and finished our coffees in silence. The waitress brought the check and we split it, before walking to the door. Out in the parking lot, Clancy turned to me. "Well, I guess I'll take off now. I'm going to meet some friends…" he trailed off.

"Yeah, just…" Fuck, I felt like I should say something after he'd been going on and fucking on all night. I just didn't know what to say. "Just good luck."

"Yeah, uh, thanks Eric. That'll help so fucking much."

"Fuck off, Clancy. You know what I mean. I can't fucking fix your defective personality or magic up the perfect woman for you, but shit. Don't fucking get stressed about it all. That won't help either."

"Yeah…OK, Eric" Clancy said, giving me a really weird look, before walking off. I headed to the rental car. He was a fucking weird guy sometimes.

I spent a couple of hours watching TV in Indira's apartment before trying to get some sleep. As predicted, there was a repeat of the previous fucking weekend with Indira and the lawyer arriving home noisily then proceeding to make even more noise in the bedroom. I was surprised the people in the apartment next door weren't complaining.

And in the morning, once again Indira was miserable and alone. "Don't fucking say anything, Eric" she said, when she appeared in the living room where I was trying to watch CNN. Not surprisingly, there was absolutely no news about New Zealand. It would have been nice to just see something, anything, just to connect me to Sookie. But there was nothing. I couldn't, to be honest, ever remember having seen much stuff on New Zealand before I moved there, but somehow I felt like it should be a bit more important now.

Because it was important to me. Although I guessed that if anything major happened, like Mt Eden suddenly erupting after lying dormant for nearly 2,000 years then that might make CNN.

I looked at Indira. "OK. I'm not saying anything" I said, as she sat on the sofa next to me, and looked pointedly at my feet, which I hastily removed from the coffeetable. I guess she was keeping quiet about certain things too.

However, just because I wasn't allowed to talk about her date didn't mean she wasn't going to. "I just don't understand why I attract such complete and utter losers" she said, sadly. "I mean, is there a sign on my forehead that says 'walk all over me'? Is there?"

I was about to answer that one, but Indira kept talking and it became clear it had been a rhetorical question. "I should have had an arranged marriage. My cousin Sunita did, and she's always saying how happy they are. And they are! When you see them, it's not at all like people say it's going to be like, you know, two people who don't like each other trapped together forever. They actually genuinely care about each other. And it helped that their families knew each other beforehand. My father hated Chow, with a passion. Oh my God, my father was RIGHT! Ugh." Indira buried her face in her hands while I contemplated the idea of choosing husbands for Amelia and Felicia. I wasn't sure I really wanted to go there, sometimes it was hard enough just choosing what flavour ice cream we had after dinner.

But I thought I might like the power of veto over their final choice. That could be fucking useful.

Eventually Indira pulled herself together. Well, she sat up and said "It seems kind of wrong that it's you in the proper grown-up relationship and not me" to which I shrugged, because there wasn't much I could do about that, and I just hoped she didn't ask me for any advice because I had a feeling that I'd failed miserably with Clancy the previous night. Whatever he'd wanted to know, I hadn't been able to tell him because I didn't know myself. I didn't think it was an exact science and the formula that had worked for Sookie and I was going to work for everyone.

"Shopping" she said after a moment's thought.

"Shopping?" I asked.

"Yeah, remember? We were going to buy Sookie something."

"Oh, OK. I need to buy toys too." Indira screwed up her face. "There might be Barbies involved." Indira brightened considerably. "That sounds better" she said.

So after a trip to a Toys R Us, where I was treated a lot less suspiciously this time around because I had Indira accompanying me, we tried to find something for Sookie. Only it was harder than I fucking thought it would be. We ended up wandering around kind of aimlessly for a while trying to brainstorm what to look at.

"What about nice lingerie?" Indira suggested.

"I just bought her a whole lot of uh, maternity stuff…" I said, remembering how great those bras that flipped open were.

"Oh, yeah. Um…so clothes are out too?"

I shrugged. "It would have to be maternity stuff I guess…"

"Yeah, it's not exactly exciting" Indira agreed. "Um…God, I don't know. Jewellery?"

"She's not a big jewellery wearer. Plus I was going to get her a new watch for her birthday…" I'd already picked it out and was going to buy it duty free. Her birthday was only a couple of weeks away now.

"Well, this is harder than I thought it would be" Indira sighed, looking disappointed. Then she perked up again. "What about handbags? Everyone loves handbags."

I tried to think if Sookie loved handbags. Mostly she carried around something kind of big and shapeless. "I don't know" I said. "I think she mainly uses it to carry around the kids' stuff. There seem to be a lot of water bottles and packets of wet-wipes and raisins. I think it's only going to get worse for her."

Indira looked thoughtful. "What about a diaper bag then?"

"Oh…I don't know. That sounds kind of um, boring." I wasn't sure I wanted to get Sookie something quite that practical.

"Oh no, you can get some really lovely ones. Really lovely." I must have looked sceptical, because she started nodding as though that would convince me. "Trust me, really nice. I spent a lot of time looking at stuff like that."

"Oh. OK." I always felt a bit bad when Indira said stuff like that. I mean, I really didn't fucking want to know the details of what they'd tried and what had happened, but it had obviously had left its mark on her.

So Indira took me to some shop that was stocked with baby stuff and dragged me a display of bags. "But…they just look like normal purses" I said. I couldn't really tell the difference.

"No, they have all these compartments for baby stuff, and look; you can pull this mat out and change a baby on it."

"Oh." Fuck, I was clueless. But I was willing to go along with Indira on this one.

I was tempted by one which had a pattern of pink and orange swirls, because fuck knows, Sookie wore enough bright colours, but it was Indira who found the final choice. And then when we got back to Indira's apartment I once again had a shit-load of stuff I had no real space for. "Fuck" I muttered. "I might have to buy a new bag."

Indira laughed. "Yeah. I can't believe you bought that much."

I shrugged. "I have three kids, or will have. Soon."

"Yeah, it's kind of a weird thought. You with kids…I still, well I still can't quite picture it."

"I don't know why. I'm pretty sure I unpacked a pair of jeans that still had a half-eaten lollipop in the pocket to prove it."

"Mmm." Indira said, looking thoughtful. "It's just; I don't know…you were so different. Not so long ago." She laughed. "I think its thrown Clancy into a spin. God, he wanted to be like you."

"Like me?" I asked. I couldn't quite understand that. Why the fuck would he want that? I wasn't exactly leading the most fulfilling life.

"Yeah, of course like you! You had that reputation and all those women on the go, God it was painful to watch sometimes. All the guys in the office wanted to be you, Eric. I thought for a while that was Chow's problem too, but then I decided I didn't know what Chow's problem was and I doubt he does either."

"Oh. But it wasn't that great. Not, well...now's better" I said.

"I'm sure it is" Indira said, a bit wistfully. "But all the same, I think your old lifestyle appealed to the guys."

"I don't know. I think Clancy wanted me to tell him how to find a relationship last night."

"Really?" Indira asked, wrinkling her nose. "I always picked him for being far too interested in going out and meeting girls. Like his idol." She glanced sideways at me.

"I guess appearances are deceiving" I said.

Indira sighed. "Yeah, don't I know it. Fucking Roshan. OK, well I better get ready." She stood up from the couch and started to walk off.

"Another date?" I asked. Fuck, I hoped not.

"No, no. Just going out with girlfriends tonight. We do it once a month. I think…well, I think I might be over meeting guys for a while too." She walked off to her bedroom to get ready.

Indira left and I was stuck alone, again. Fuck I missed Sookie and the girls. It was so quiet without them. I even started to miss being asked to referee the inevitable fights over the territory in the playhouse.

I wouldn't have even minded having Bob turn up and share my Chinese takeout.

I rang Sookie, but didn't get an answer. They must have gone out somewhere. I hoped it was somewhere nice and not the often-threatened trip to the emergency room because Felicia had finally pushed beyond her limits.

Yeah, I really shouldn't fucking think like that.

And so, at a total fucking loss of what to do, I did something really fucking stupid. I rang my dad.

"Yeah?" he said, after a few rings.

"It's me. Eric. Nice greeting by the way."

"Does the trick. So to what do I owe the honour of a call from my long-lost son?" Yeah, he'd been drinking. Most people wouldn't notice the slurring, my dad was nothing if not a high-functioning drunk, but years of picking up on the nuances of Dad's daily drinking made me particularly perceptive to it. Fuck, I knew this was a bad idea.

"I'm in the States" I said to him. "In Shreveport. I'm not visiting. But I thought…" I paused and Dad jumped in.

"You had to come back? Fuck, what happened? You running from that woman you were shacked up with?"

"No. Married to. I told you that. No, I'm back for work."

"Oh. Has she spent all your money already?" Dad laughed his ass off at that comment and completely missed my silence on the other end of the line. Fuck. I really wanted to hang up, but I knew I'd feel guilty for that. Then I'd hate him and me. And mostly I liked me, so…really it was better to hang on for as long as I fucking could.

"No. It was…it was a good opportunity. And I had the chance to knock my old boss on his ass in the process which was fucking fantastic." Dad at least laughed at that. Yeah, he would. Nothing like getting one over on someone else to cheer him up.

"So, you called to tell me that? That you're some big hot-shot now?" he asked. Yep, and then came the bit where he brought me down to size.

"No, I called because I have other news. Sookie's pregnant. We're having a baby. In October." I waited, but Dad didn't say anything. "It's a boy, Dad. I'm going to have a son."

There was another pause and then Dad finally said. "Well…fuck. What do you want me to say to that, Eric?"

I lost it, I really fucking lost it. Just for once why couldn't he be a normal parent? Why did I have to be stuck with this fucking defective loser?

"Congratulations!" I shouted at the phone. "You say congratulations like a fucking normal human being, Dad. A fucking normal person. But no, you're just going to use this to tell me once again how I fucked up your entire life, what a drain I was, how you wished she'd taken me too. Well, fuck you. You weren't my first choice either. But at least I fucking know what a good father isn't!" I stopped and realised I was breathing heavily and gripping the phone so hard my fingers hurt. I worked on just relaxing and waited to see what Dad would say next.

"Yeah, you're so fucking perfect, Eric" he said quietly. "But you'll find out. When he's older. You'll find out it's not so fucking easy when your son thinks he's so much fucking better than you are."

"Well you know what, Dad?" I said to him. "If he is, then I'll be fucking glad for _him_, I really will. I hope he's better than me. And that's the difference between you and me I guess. Goodbye, Dad." And then I disconnected the call before he could say anything else. Fuck him. What he did know anyway?

Sam would be great. Our relationship would be nothing like his and mine, _nothing _like it at all. Fuck.

I picked up the phone from where I'd thrown it onto the sofa and dialled Sookie again.

**Thanks for reading!**


	64. Chapter 64

**A/N So it's now Autumn here, daylight saving has ended and it's been quite chilly and rainy today, so I've needed a cardigan and to use the dryer. It doesn't seem right. But I am grateful to everyone who's still sticking with this story. It was Spring when I started this particular installment and we're still going! So a big thank-you!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

When I woke up on Sunday morning it was kind of crowded in my bed. I remembered that at some point in the early hours of the morning Felicia had poked me in the side of the head and said "Snuggles?" before appropriating Eric's pillow without waiting for my reply, but I hadn't really noticed Amelia piling in too. I guess I'd been really tired.

Felicia and Amelia obviously weren't all that tired anymore though, because there was a small tussle going on over the remote control. "No Felicia!" Amelia hissed. "We can't put TV on!"

"Yeah! Daddy said!" Felicia said, at normal volume. Ah yes, Daddy's plan to get a lie-in on a Sunday morning by letting them sit in bed with us and watch kid's TV. It had never worked yet. But somehow Eric kept persevering with it and Felicia now thought it was a thing because everyone actually wanted to be awake and watching something bright and noisy instead of sleeping any longer.

"What's happening?" I asked, as I rolled over to look at them. It wasn't as easy as it sounds, these days I had to almost sit up in order to get myself around in bed, and the pillows I'd surrounded myself with in an effort to get comfortable the previous night didn't help much either.

"Felicia's trying to put TV on but I said no" Amelia explained, glaring at her sister. "TV!" Felicia yelled, giving the remote another tug.

"Yeah, that's fine" I said, shuffling my bum backwards so I could get into a sitting position. That was hard work. I maybe needed stronger arms to do this I thought.

"It's not fine!" Amelia huffed. "We're supposed to be nice to you because you have a baby in your tummy." As she was distracted by the sight of my tummy as it loomed over the covers Felicia made a last ditch attempt to get the remote, and was successful. Amelia turned to glare at her, but didn't try to grab it back.

"Are you?" I asked.

"Yeah…Daddy said we should be nice to you" Amelia reiterated.

"Daddy?" Felicia asked, looking around and clutching the remote control to her chest.

"He's still in the States" I said to her. "Next Sunday he'll be back."

""morrow?" Felicia asked.

"Seven sleeps" I said, holding up seven fingers.

"Oh" Felicia said, kind of sadly. She put the remote down next to her on the bed, most of the fight having gone out of her.

"Well" I said, trying to pep everyone up. "You guys can put TV on; I'm going to the loo." I swung my legs out of bed and waddled to the bathroom to the sound of Amelia saying. "No, Felicia! Push the red button!" and Felicia yelling "FarFUCKSwayke!"

The day was pretty cold and miserable and everyone in our house was in much the same mood. Even Bob seemed a bit depressed; he kept wandering in and looking at me sadly. If Eric had been there he would have told me that I was clearly imagining things and cats don't have moods, but he wasn't here of course.

After lunch we went for a visit for Aunty Tara's just to have something to do. Amelia of course decided to have a good grumble about not being allowed to go swimming in their pool. "Amelia" I said, as we walked up the steps to the front door. "It's the middle of winter, no way are we going swimming today."

"You're no fun!" she told me.

"Nope, I'm not. I'm your mother." Amelia pouted, but didn't say anything else.

Tara let us in and then made Charlotte come out and take my kids off to play. Amelia was ecstatic that a big girl was going to hang out with her, but, to be honest, Charlotte kind of liked Felicia because she was still small enough to be babied and carried around and told she was cute. Now that Charlotte was nearly 10 she considered herself to be pretty much on par with any adults. Tara was full of stories that truly terrified me and she just laughed when I put my fingers in my ears and pretended I couldn't hear. I did not want to know where I was headed with my daughters.

But Felicia wasn't quite on the same page as Charlotte and didn't want to be cuddled and treated like a pet. We heard her run down the hall, and Charlotte saying in a sickly-sweet voice, "Come back Leeshie, sweetie. I'll brush your hair for you", followed by Amelia saying "She's _always_ naughty" in a way I think she hoped would align her on the side of the big girls.

Tara and I tracked Felicia down to Lachlan's room where she was sitting in front of his train-set. "Daddy likes trains" she said.

"Oh, she's fine there" Tara said. "Lachie's out with JB for a while yet, so we'll just leave her to it. Come on I'll make you a cup of tea." As we turned to leave Felicia, Charlotte appeared to try to tempt her out again. "Just leave her there" Tara said.

"But I want to brush her hair" Charlotte whined.

"You can do mine!" Amelia offered, hopefully, in the background.

"Just let her have some space and play with Amelia" Tara said to Charlotte. "She wants to play with you. Felicia is happy with the train." Charlotte sighed, and looked less than impressed with what was happening, but turned around and said to Amelia "Come on, we can listen to my iPod." Amelia beamed at her and they walked off to Charlotte's room.

"You happy there?" I asked Felicia. She nodded. "OK, I'll just be in the kitchen with Aunty Tara" I said, before heading down the hall.

"So where are the boys?" I asked Tara as she put the jug on. I managed to get myself onto one of her barstools but it felt kind of awkward.

"Birthday party, at that rock-climbing place. Lachie was ecstatic. JB…not so much. But I told him it was his turn to go to one of these things. Sometimes I feel like I spend the whole weekend traipsing around with the kids."

"Mmm" I said sympathetically.

"So how are you getting on without Eric?" Tara asked, as she grabbed some mugs out of a cupboard.

I sighed. "OK" I said.

"Just OK?" Tara asked.

"Yeah. Just OK. We're coping. It's just…well it's hard with just the one pair of hands really."

"It is" Tara said, emphatically, pouring the boiling water into the mugs.

"I miss him" I said, kind of sadly.

"I know" Tara said, coming around the counter to pat me on the shoulder. "But it's not much longer."

"Yeah…it's getting more difficult though, I think…" I was going to tell Tara about Amelia's trials with Emily, but the baby started bouncing around. "Oh, someone's woken up" I said.

'Yeah…" Tara said dreamily, staring at my bump. "I've almost forgotten what that's like. It's been so long."

"Well you could…" I was going to say she could always find out again, but then I remembered that she'd finally managed to get JB to have that vasectomy. "No" I said in the end. "You couldn't. How weird."

Tara shrugged and took a sip of tea. "Maybe with number two husband. You know, the toyboy I'm going to get next time I have to nag JB to spend any time with the kids he does have. Although I think I'm getting too old now. I'm 36 after all."

"Yeah, I'm nearly 36. I think that is too old for all of this." The baby gave me an enthusiastic kick. Yep, I thought. Definitely getting old to have someone using my insides as a trampoline.

"So…last one?" Tara said, looking at me over her cup.

"Um…yeah. I think so. I can't…well, there was a lot of drama wasn't there? With this one. I don't think I'd want to do that again. And three kids is a lot, after all. I've already had to trade up to the world's most enormous car. And look how much time you spend on two kids, I'll have that and more as it is. No, I think three will be fine. Great, really."

"Yeah…seems like a lot to me" Tara said. "Most of the mums at school who have three kids are the really rich ones who don't work but still have a nanny. That's probably the way to do it."

"It probably is. Bugger, I should have tried to get myself a millionaire or something!"

"Well, there's still time" Tara said.

"Nah, I doubt it. The trouble is that as I get older, the guys who'd want me as a trophy wife are getting older too. I don't think many 70 year olds are going to cope with the three kids that I come with now." I took a sip of my tea as Tara laughed.

"Do you want to stay for dinner?" she asked, as she started pulling stuff out of the fridge.

I thought about how miserable home was without Eric. "Yep, we'll stay" I said.

The only problem with staying for dinner though, was that we had to go home to a house that was cold and dark. I raced around switching on lights and putting a heater on so I could get the kids in bed and I was just getting out their pyjamas when the phone rang.

"Hi" I said, a bit breathlessly as I'd run for the phone.

"Oh, you're there now" Eric said. He sounded a bit grumpy.

"We went to Tara's. She gave us dinner." I probably sounded a bit defensive, but I hoped he didn't think we were going to sit at home and pine for him for the next week.

"That sounds nice" Eric said with a bit less accusation in his voice.

"Well, it was OK. Tara made pasta and honestly I don't think I've ever met anyone who cooks with as much cheese and cream as she does. It was…um, really rich. I need to go and find the Gaviscon in a moment. I have terrible heartburn from it. Just terrible."

"That's no good" Eric said.

"No, but explain that to your son. It's his doing, really. Can you tell him to be nice to me? Apparently you said it to the other two, although Felicia is denying all knowledge."

"Tell him?" Eric asked. "How?"

"I don't know, I could put the phone on my stomach or something."

"Oh. Um, OK" Eric said, taking my flippant remarks all quite seriously. I guess I had to go through with it then.

"OK" I said. "I'll move the phone now." It felt quite odd standing there with the phone pressed against my abdomen. I could hear Eric's voice, but it was kind of muffled and I wasn't really sure what he was saying. No more indigestion would be a good start, I thought.

Amelia came looking for me and asked what I was doing. "Daddy's talking to the baby" I told her. "Oh" she said, but then she saw I had pyjamas in my hand and wandered off again, as casually as she could manage, keen to get out of sight before I remembered it was really bedtime.

I listened to the sound of our wheelie bins going up the driveway and then decided I'd take control of the conversation again. "It's me again" I said, lifting the phone back to my ear.

"Oh, OK" Eric said. "I talked to Sam. I think he understands now, but we've both agreed that if you're going to eat all that rich food, then basically, it's kind of your fault too."

"Uh-huh, well thanks for ganging up on me and talking about me as if I'm not really here. Oh, and Andy's looking after the bins for me, in case you were wondering. He did it last week too."

"Yeah…that's good."

"Yes. Thank you for that."

"That's OK" Eric said, and then there was a pause.

"So how are things going there?" I asked. "What did you do today?"

"Um…a bit of shopping. With Indira."

"How'd that go?"

"OK." Eric didn't seem inclined to elaborate, so I carried on. "What have you been up to tonight?"

"Not much. I had takeout and watched TV. Indira went out. It's kind of boring here by myself. So, I…I rang my dad" Eric said. Oh crap, I thought. That's never good. I hoped he hadn't been making plans to go and visit him. That hadn't ended well last time and I wasn't sure it would be any better now.

"How is he?" I asked, trying to make it all just seem normal.

"Um. Same as ever, really. I told him about Sam."

"Well that was nice" I said, deciding to just let the whole Sam thing go rather than pull him up on the fact he was still using it, and the baby might yet turn out to be Jamie, which I was starting to really kind of like.

Eric snorted. "Not really. He kind of…well, he said...never mind. I don't really care what he said. It's not important." Eric sounded kind of cavalier about the whole thing, but I guessed there was more going on under there. I hated it when I couldn't actually see him and touch him. It made reading him so much more difficult.

"So…you're OK?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I'm fine" Eric said. "Really, I am. I just…its better now I've spoken to you. You kind of cancel him out."

I wasn't really sure what to say to that, it didn't seem right, somehow, to bask in the glory of being so wonderful that I made Eric's shitty dad seem not so important. In the end I went with asking Eric if he wanted to talk to the kids, well, the kids that weren't still inside me. So the phone got passed first to Amelia, who gave Eric a rundown on what she and Charlotte had been doing this afternoon, and then Felicia who said "I played with Lachie's trains" a lot.

"They sound OK" Eric said, when I finally got the phone back.

"Yeah, they're coping" I said. "We all are, aren't we?"

"We are" Eric said. "This time next week, I'll be home."

"Yeah, you will." I realised it was time to let him go. "I'd better go and put the monsters to bed" I said.

"OK. Love you. Give them both a hug for me."

"I will. I love you too."

I managed to persuade everyone that pyjamas and bed were really a necessary evil and then it was just me and the baby again. Well, Bob was there briefly looking for dinner, but then he disappeared down to Amelia's room. I didn't feel too bad though, not as bad as the previous night anyway. I figured I was on the downhill slide. "We're alright, aren't we?" I asked, patting my bump, and getting a kind of swoosh in reply.

Next morning Amelia was unusually quiet. I guessed she wasn't looking forward to going to school and facing up to what Emily might be saying now. I dropped her at the door and said "See you in an hour!" as brightly as I could, but she just looked at me sadly, and shuffled in after the other kids.

Felicia and I went to buy some vegetables and for a quick fluffy and hot chocolate, during which she actually managed to sit in her seat in the café for at least 5 minutes straight.

I arrived back at school to find the kids at Amelia's table kind of subdued. "No Bessian!" Felicia complained loudly.

"No, so maybe you could sit in his seat, and just draw something, OK?" I asked her, handing her some paper and some of Amelia's felt-tip pens. Amelia glared at me, but didn't say anything.

Felicia sighed, and started to scribble something. That left me able to concentrate on what the other kids were doing. "So, uh, today we're writing about, um, things in the garden" I said, reading what Mrs Garfield had written on the blackboard. "So, Chloe, you should be OK with this one." Chloe looked up at me, and seemed a bit shocked at what I'd said.

"What?" she whispered.

"Gardens. You grow things at home. You can write about that."

"Oh. OK. It's good to grow your own" she said, nodding.

Emily gave a loud sniff, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Oh terrific, I thought, she's incredibly germy. At least Debbie had the good sense to keep Sebastian away if he was still sick.

Amelia gave Emily a look and shifted her chair a bit closer to Maisie. "I'm going to write about the tree with the swing in it. That's in my garden" Maisie said happily. Amelia turned to look at her. "I don't have a swing" she said, in an accusing tone.

"No, but you have a trampoline and a playhouse" I pointed out to her. Yeah, it was pretty clear from the look she gave me that they weren't swings.

"Emily, what are you going to write about?" I asked her. She shrugged. "Dunno" she said, chewing the end of her pencil, and sniffing again. Her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. "Do you want a tissue?" I asked her. She shrugged again. I handed her one anyway.

"Amelia, what about you?"

"I don't know either" she said.

"Well, there must be something. How about the tomatoes?"

"The ones the reindeer ate?" she asked. I nodded. Amelia looked thoughtful, but then Chloe piped up. "I'm writing about my tomatoes. How do you spell tomato?"

"Not the tomatoes" Amelia said grumpily. "_She's_ doing tomatoes." I helped Chloe spell tomatoes. Emily had a half-hearted attempt at arguing with me that tomatoes clearly needed two 'm's but her heart wasn't really in it. She was quite sick, poor kid.

Amelia sighed loudly. "I have NOTHING to write about!" she announced dramatically.

Felicia who was used to the drama looked at her. "Farfuckswayke" she muttered. "Build, Amelia!" Yeah, she couldn't get the hang of saying build a bridge and get over it, either, but it made the other little girls at the table laugh, much to Amelia's complete annoyance. She did not want them laughing at her. "Shut up, Felicia" she said.

"Nah!" Felicia said, sticking out her chin. I decided I'd better step in because while they'd got off the previous week for both sticking up for Sebastian against Connor, I suspected that Mrs Garfield would take a fairly dim view of them having a fight with each other in the middle of the classroom.

Although from the looks of it Connor was doing a good job of distracting her on the other side of the room, so maybe we might have been safe.

"OK, knock it off you two" I said to them. "Amelia, what about…um, daddy mowing the lawn, or something?" I was struggling to come up with ideas for her.

She looked thoughtful. "But he's not here" she said. "He's not here to mow the lawn."

"No, which is why it's quite long. It's going to be really long by the time he's back next weekend, and he'll moan about doing it, but he'll still do it. I think he quite likes mowing the lawn. It lets him pretend he can't hear us."

"Um…OK" Amelia said which just left with me Emily to sort out. However, she was now sitting there with her arms crossed on the table and her head down on them. I went around the table to talk to her. "Emily?" I asked, touching her on the back. "Emily, are you OK?"

She looked up at me. "I don't feel very well" she said quietly. "And my ears are sore."

"Do you want to go home?" I asked her.

"Yeah…but Mum said I had to come here today because it's a work day."

"Well, you tried" I said. "I'll go and talk to Mrs Garfield." I left the table and walked over to where she was supervising some of the other kids.

Mrs Garfield walked off to the office to phone Tanya, and I went back to help with spelling and make sure there weren't too many backwards 'k's in the stuff the kids were writing. And persuade Amelia that she didn't need to write a full transcription of everything Daddy had ever yelled at the lawnmower. God knows I had Felicia as a verbal repository of most of Eric's bad language; I didn't need a written record as well.

Mrs Garfield came back after about 10 minutes and came over to me, so I stood up and moved away from the table. "That mother" she said to me, and I worried I was going to be dragged into badmouthing Tanya, but she just shook her head. "She can't come because she's got back to back meetings all day, apparently."

"Oh" I said. Crap, I didn't really want to take Emily with home with me, but the poor kid was getting no benefit from being here.

"Luckily" Mrs Garfield continued "We've got the dad's phone number as well. Sometimes you don't when the parents have split, but this time we did and he'll be here shortly."

"Oh, that is good" I agreed, as Mrs Garfield whirled around to catch Connor trying to push some other little boy over in the corner. I went back to my table and just before the hour was up a dark-haired guy in glasses wandered into the classroom and came up behind Emily.

"Hey, Em" he said. Oh, I thought. He's South African. Part of me wanted to ask if he knew Calvin, although the more rational part of my brain realised there was no reason for him to.

Except that everyone knew all the South Africans stuck together.

I'd been sitting there rubbing Emily's back and the guy gave me a smile and said "Thanks" as Emily wheeled around her chair. "Daddy!" she wailed. "I don't feel good!"

"No, I know" he said. "I've come to take you home."

"To your home?" she asked.

"Yeah. Come on." Emily stood up. "Will Leon be there?" she asked, sniffing loudly, and then wiping her nose with a tissue. I guessed that was the baby brother.

"Yep. He's snotty too, so you'll make a good pair."

Emily stood up and he swung her onto his hip. "Thanks again" he said to me, and then he carried her out the door.

I turned to see Amelia watching them go. "Was that Em's daddy?" Amelia asked.

"Yep" I said. "See? It didn't make any difference that she has a brother. He still came and got her when she needed him. Daddy will be just the same."

"Oh, OK. How do you spell clippings? Like, you know, the time the grass clippings got spilled on the driveway and Daddy yelled really loudly?"

"FarFUCKSwayke!" Felicia interjected, at just the right time, as she dropped her felt tip on the ground, and it rolled under the next table.

Chloe looked over at her. "Mrs Meela's Mummy, did Leesha say fuck?" she asked me.

"Yeah, she did" I said, getting down on my hands and knees to help Felicia as she pushed her way through the legs of the kids at the other table, intent on her task.

I could hear Amelia saying "She learnt it from Daddy, but he says it louder."

"My daddy's loud too. But mainly when the rugby's on" Maisie added.

"My mummies don't watch rugby" Chloe said quietly. "There's too much, um…sestossderome."

I hoped no one wanted me to actually spell testosterone for them. Felicia meanwhile had retrieved her pen, but decided life at ground level was more interesting and crawled back over to the table to try to tickle Amelia's ankles. "Tickle tickle" she said, borrowing one of Eric's tricks.

"Stop, Felicia! That's tickly!" Amelia said, but she was giggling all the same. "Tickle me! Tickle me!" Maisie yelled at Felicia, who obliged her.

I hauled myself up to sit on one of the chairs again, a chair I was starting to not fit in. Yeah, we were OK. It wasn't long now.

**Thanks for reading!**


	65. Chapter 65

**A/N Yep, definitely heading into Winter here. Spent the day at home with the baby with a temperature who just wanted cuddles. So some of this was typed while I held her with one arm and she went 'uh-uh-oh' in the hope I would show her the video for Single Ladies on YouTube again. She's a bit obsessed with Beyonce.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. My family are much germier at the moment.**

EPOV

I felt a lot better after I spoke to Sookie. And to Sam, although I'm not sure how much of me telling him to be nice to his mother he actually understood. And then I heard from Amelia about how they'd gone to Aunty Tara's but no one would let her swim in the pool, and Felicia told me something about some trains.

They were so far away from me, but it felt good to talk to them all. It would be better if I could see them, of course. Much, much better. But I'd have to wait a bit longer for that.

Instead Indira came home and told me a whole lot of gossip about some women I'd never met…probably. Probably never met. While I was pretending to listen to Indira I wondered if what I should have been telling Sam was that drinking too much and picking up strange women was never as good as you thought it was going to be and there was a reason I could never take his mother to Shreveport.

Instead I'd told him that I loved him and I definitely wanted him and he'd made my life better, not worse. And hopefully that would be enough to curtail any urges he might have to drink and sleep around.

The next few days were hellishly busy trying to get as much as possible done before I went home again. We worked all day Sunday in Indira's apartment trying to elaborate on the framework for some of our models. Clancy made the mistake of asking Indira how her date on Friday night had gone, despite me trying to signal to him to cut it out, but she managed to shrug it off and just say she wasn't seeing the guy again.

After that we were too busy to talk too much about anything other than the stuff we were actually working on.

Monday wasn't much better. We spent the day at the bank going over the data we'd need and liaising with the slightly annoying Hugo as to how he and the beleaguered Barry were going to work with us.

And then I had three and half days of straight work. I stopped noticing that I spent all my time in the same small room in Indira's apartment and just got on with it. Clancy was actually proving to be really good at some of the modelling. Turned out if he just stopped whining about being asked to fucking do anything, he wasn't a complete waste of space. I was still a bit worried about how the pair of them were going to get on without me around, but Indira kept saying not to worry they'd be fine, safe in the knowledge I was going to be in New Zealand, working far into the night for them.

Friday morning was the moment of truth when I had to try to fit everything back into my suitcase. Clancy, who was sitting at the dining room table watched with interest. "I didn't know you liked Barbies that much, Eric" he said.

"Fuck up" I retorted, but only half-heartedly, because really, I had way too fucking much for the bag I'd brought. How the fuck did that happen? Plus the pile of laundry behind my suitcase had grown again and trying to shove it back in wasn't helping. Indira sighed, and walked off, coming back a few minutes later with a large duffle bag. "Here" she said, "you can have this."

"Um…thanks" I said, starting to pack handfuls of dirty clothing in it. "If you're sure you don't mind?"

"Nah. I just used it when I moved in here. I think it was Chow's anyway."

"Oh, OK." I was sure Chow wouldn't mind that I'd somehow ended up with the luggage Indira had removed from the marital home. Well, he'd never know.

And once I had everything finally packed, it was time to drive to the airport and spend fucking hours and hours trapped on a succession of planes in conditions that were going to make Indira's living room look positively luxurious.

"I guess I'd better get going" I said, looking at the time on the screen of the laptop that Clancy was working on.

"Yeah…OK" Clancy said, turning around. "So…see you, Eric."

"Yeah. Bye." We shook hands and Clancy went back to what he was doing.

"You two are dreadful!" Indira scolded, coming over and hugging me, before reaching up to kiss me on the cheek.

"I am not fucking kissing Eric" Clancy said, without turning around. The sentiment was pretty much mutual.

"No, but you could at least say thanks for coming over here and saving our asses."

"Yeah, alright. That. Thanks" Clancy mumbled, still hitting keys on the laptop and not looking away from the screen.

"Well that was heartfelt. You're an ass sometimes, Clancy" Indira said, turning around and poking him in the back with her finger. He tried to reach over his shoulder and swat her away but didn't quite manage it.

Indira followed me to the door. "It'll seem…quite spacious in here without you lurking around" she said.

"Yeah…I don't think I exactly lurk" I said.

"Yeah, you do. But I'm used to it now. And I guess I'll still have Clancy lurking around here for a bit longer."

"Yep. Good luck with that."

Indira shrugged. "It'll be fine. The important thing is we actually have the work now. Fuck knows what would have happened if we hadn't got the contract…so, yeah. Thanks again for that."

"I enjoyed it. I got to fuck up Victor's plans, which was pretty fucking enjoyable." And almost worth making the trip.

"Yeah, that was good. It's nice to know I didn't completely throw my career away walking out of there" Indira laughed.

"Well, it was a gamble." I could understand why she'd done it; I'd have been tempted to do the same thing. Well, once I would have. Now…I kind of had other priorities. Like a new house. That was next on the agenda when I got home. Find a fucking new house even if I had to drive the streets of Mt Eden and start knocking on doors myself. Surely someone would want to sell.

"And now" I continued "you just have to find out if it was worth the risk of taking Clancy with you when you left, or if he's going to continue to prove he can't even get a simple sandwich order correct."

"I can fucking hear you, Eric" Clancy yelled from the dining room table.

"Yeah, fuck off. I'm out of here anyway." I looked down at Indira. "See you" I said.

"Yep, see you around. Come back again because it's fun going shopping for your family!"

"Yeah, for you maybe." I carried my bags out the door and down to the rental car in the parking garage.

SPOV

By the second week we kind of got into a rhythm, which in a way was pretty sad. I wasn't sure what was worse, not coping because Eric wasn't here, or coping with it. But in my family we were survivors, so coping it was.

It didn't mean we had to like it that he wasn't here, and it definitely didn't mean that the kids were on their best behaviour for me. Far from it, Felicia still had the odd moments of rampaging around and Amelia had started to realise that she could make up all sorts of weird and wonderful rules and insist that Daddy had told her that was the way she should be doing things.

Amelia also had her long-awaited school trip to the museum. She'd ended up being looked after by Debbie, which I think had been eye-opening for Debbie. "She didn't realise you can't make Chloe cry" Amelia had said, kind of astonished.

"Well, I guess she didn't realise that, um, Chloe's a bit…emotional…" I said, continuing to chop up vegetables for dinner.

"Yeah, but, you know. She didn't get Chloe a pencil. Chloe _never_ has a pencil. She told her she should be more organised, like Sebastian. Poor Chloe. She cried _a lot_. Daddy didn't make her cry. I said to Sebastian's mum that Daddy didn't make her cry. Well, not that much. Sebastian's mum's a bit funny though."

"Mmm" I agreed.

"So I made sure she looked after Chloe after that, I said 'Sebastian's mummy, you have to hold Chloe's hand and help her with her worksheet because she isn't very good at doing letters.' Not like me. I'm excellent."

I turned to look at Amelia, "Did you really say that?" I asked. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Amelia where fact stopped and fiction began.

"Yeah!" she said. "She didn't know. She's not a very good Mummy help. We have her on Wednesday's too, and all she ever wants to do is talk to Sebastian. She's not good at spelling and what to write like you are."

"Oh, OK." Well, yay. I had one vote at least. I hoped it still counted if it was from your own child.

Bob appeared for dinner, but then so did Felicia, brandishing her T-Rex and roaring enthusiastically, so Bob beat a pretty hasty retreat out of the small space of the kitchen.

"Oh Felicia!" Amelia said, rolling her eyes. "You are SUCH a baby sometimes!", and then she flounced out of the kitchen, leaving Felicia to roar at her retreating figure.

And almost before I knew it, it was Saturday night and Eric was due back in the morning. "Will he be here when I wake up?" Amelia asked, after I finished the story that night.

"No, I think by the time he gets here it will be breakfast time." We'd tried to figure out a way for me to go and pick him up, but it was just a bit early in the morning to start dumping the kids on people, or to drag them out to the airport.

I still wished I could be out there though. Just…well, just because I really wanted to see him, as soon as I could.

"ONE MORE SLEEP!" Felicia yelled, right in Amelia's ear. Poor Amelia, she looked at Felicia and frowned. "You are loud" she said.

"ONE MORE SLEEP!" Felicia yelled again, completely unrepentant. I was slightly worried about getting her to calm down enough to actually go to sleep.

And I was right to be worried it turned out. It was a good hour after going to bed before Felicia finally lay down and finally succumbed to sleep. Before that she'd repeatedly got out of bed and run around the house and Amelia had come out of her room at least twice to find out what was going on. "She won't go to sleep yet" I said to Amelia, as I tried to persuade Felicia to stop bouncing on her bed and lie down. God knows, I needed a lie down and at this rate there was a good chance I'd be asleep long before Felicia was going to be. It was like Christmas Eve in our house, only worse.

"Felicia, if you don't lie down now, then you'll be too tired to see Daddy in the morning" I warned. I was really running out of ideas.

"Nah!" Felicia asked, still bouncing.

"You might bounce off and die!" Amelia predicted. "I don't think you can see Daddy if you're dead…can you, Mummy?" she asked me.

"Oh, well probably not" I said, wondering why Amelia always had to go for the worst case scenario about everything.

Felicia actually stopped bouncing and looked thoughtful. "Oh" she said. "Don' wanna be dead then." She sat down on the bed.

"No, dead is bad, Felicia" Amelia lectured. I kissed Felicia and tucked her and Sockie in and then hustled Amelia out of the room. "She's a bit naughty" Amelia said. "But that's because she's little and doesn't know any better. But it's OK, because I'm here to tell her. Aren't I, Mum?"

"Yeah, you are. Now go back to bed please."

"Fine!" Amelia huffed. Obviously she'd thought that if I was letting her boss her sister around, I was letting her stay up, but that wasn't happening.

The baby and I weren't up for much longer anyway. "You can probably sympathise with your dad about now" I said to my bump. "He'll be all crushed up too, just with less floating and more annoyance." I thought for a bit. "Actually I wouldn't want to be sharing an armrest with him, so I kind of feel sorry for the person he's sitting next to. You should be grateful there's only you in there."

And then I re-arranged all my pillows, which took a fair while, and finally drifted off to sleep.

EPOV

The flights were shitty, although at least doing the trip this way the planes got progressively larger. The amount of room you got was relative though, and somehow it was never enough for me to get properly comfortable, or sleep at all, so by the time we arrived in Auckland I was pretty fucking tired and completely over being stuck on a plane. But not so tired that the cold didn't hit me as I dragged all my shit out to find a taxi. Fuck, I'd kind of forgotten it was winter here.

The taxi driver didn't seem to mind though. He wanted to know how I was staying for and was a bit confused when I said I lived here. Luckily at 8am on a Sunday morning the drive to Mt Eden takes about 15 minutes, so I didn't have to explain myself in great detail. And almost before I knew it, I was home. Only the greeting I got wasn't quite what I expected.

SPOV

The high level of excitement in the household on the day Eric was due back wasn't exactly conducive to getting anything done. Despite the fact we'd been up since about 5.30am when Felicia had arrived in bed and started moving my pillows, as though she thought I was hiding Eric under them all, we were still in a bit of a state. There'd been a lot of running around and jumping about, along with a rather gleeful crossing off of the last day marked on the calendar, but somehow I hadn't had time for the shower I'd planned. Bugger. I'd wanted to look nice, and not like I just woke up. And when I heard Eric open the door and yell "It's me", like there would be anyone else letting himself in the door this early on a Sunday morning, I had to fight the urge to go to the bathroom and try to make myself look more presentable. He kind of knew what I looked like first thing in the morning.

And when I heard Felicia in the hall I had to give up any thoughts of what I looked like anyway.

EPOV

As I stepped in the door and called out to them, Felicia came charging around the corner of the hallway, and then she stopped dead in her tracks and just stared at me. "Hey" I said. "I'm home."

Felicia continued to stare at me for a moment, as I put my bags down, thinking she'd run straight for me, but she didn't. She burst into tears, huge noisy sobs which seemed to signify complete and utter misery. Fuck. I didn't really know what to do.

"Oh, Leesha" I said, going over and picking her up. "It's OK." She didn't say anything, just continued to sniff and sob as I cradled her in my arms. "Ssssh" I tried, but that didn't work either.

"I don't know what I did" I said, as Sookie appeared around the corner. She was wearing that terrible pink bathrobe of hers, and she looked wonderful. Like home.

"I think she's just a bit overwhelmed" Sookie said. "She should come right."

"Yeah" I agreed, holding out the arm that wasn't holding Felicia. "Do I get a proper welcome home?" I asked.

"Yeah" Sookie said, taking her eyes off Felicia to look at me. "You do." She came over and I bent down as best I could to kiss her and then I held her against my side, which meant she had to kind of stand sideways to accommodate Sam as well. She put her arm around my back and rubbed it a bit. I realised that Felicia was doing almost the same thing to my shoulder. And then I realised something else, Sookie was crying now.

"Hey" I said. "Um...are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm good" Sookie said, wiping at her eyes.

"I'm starting to get a complex" I said, as both of them sniffed loudly.

And then Amelia turned up. "Oh" she said. "You are back."

"Yeah" I agreed.

"You knew it was today" Sookie added.

Amelia thought for a moment. "They're crying" she said. "Why are they so sad? I thought we were going to be happy when you came back." She thought again before announcing "I'm happy!"

"We are happy. These are happy tears" Sookie said, wiping her eyes and moving her head from its resting place on my chest.

"That doesn't make sense" Amelia said, sounding a bit annoyed.

"No, probably not" Sookie agreed.

"So…can I have a hug too?" Amelia asked, suddenly sounding a lot younger and less sure of herself.

"Yeah. Course you can" I said to her. Sookie stepped to one side and I crouched down and put my arm around Amelia. She sighed, and looked at me. "I don't feel like crying" she said.

"No. That's good" I said. It was nice someone wasn't crying.

Felicia finally seemed to run out of tears and looked up from my now very damp shoulder. She stroked my cheek. "Prickly" she said.

"He is" Amelia agreed. "Mum, he didn't shave!" She looked over her shoulder to get Sookie's reaction to my transgression. Sookie shrugged. "We'll let him off. This time" she said.

We stayed like that for a bit longer, me crouched with a small girl in each arm, and Sookie standing behind me with one hand between my shoulder blades, and then Sookie announced. "OK, let Daddy go and put his stuff away."

Amelia sighed and stepped away. Felicia seemed a bit more reluctant to let go, but after a final squeeze, she followed Amelia back into the family room. I stood up and dragged my suitcase and the duffle bag into the bedroom.

SPOV

Once I had Eric home, I was kind of reluctant to leave him alone, so when he went into the bedroom I followed him. We'd managed to peel the kids off him, but they were bound to come back any moment, so I was taking all the time with him I could.

In the bedroom Eric turned around and grabbed me for a kiss. A proper kiss, although it was really awkward with the baby in the way. "I want to see" he said, stepping away and untying my dressing gown.

"Oh, well there's not really much to see" I said, feeling a bit self-conscious. I felt pretty huge and ungainly and in need of a shower. Although Eric probably needed one too. I had to admit that when I'd been squished into his armpit earlier he had smelt kind of, well, sweaty. It wasn't bad though. It was kind of nice in a way, I guess because it was definitely Eric's smell or something.

When Eric had the belt of my dressing gown untied he pushed it open and stepped back. I tried to tug my pyjama top down so it actually met the pyjama bottoms I was wearing, but that was a losing battle, it really was. Eric just stood there, looking at me, which made me feel even more self-conscious. I half expected that at any minute he might laugh at me for being so huge, although probably that was more a Tara thing to do.

But you never knew.

Instead he just kept looking, and then he came forward again and kind of ran his hands over the bump, feeling it. The baby did a somersault at just the right time for him to feel it and he laughed. "Hi Sam" he said.

"He might not be Sam" I said. "I started a list. _After_ I found where you stashed that book."

Eric shrugged. "But he answers to Sam now." There was another swoosh around my insides. "See?" I gave up; sometimes there was no arguing with him.

Eric stepped back again. "You're a lot bigger" he said, looking at me critically.

"Am I?" I asked. "Crap. I don't want to get any bigger."

"No, I think it's great. It's just…weird, to have missed two weeks. You grew a lot in two weeks."

I knew he didn't mean it that way, but I kind of felt fat when he said that. I guess that it showed on my face because Eric cupped my chin and said "You're lovely, Sookie. You always are."

I took a few deep breaths and willed away the tears. "So, you'd better get a shower in" I said to him.

"Do I smell that bad?" Eric asked.

"Well it's not bad…" I said. Eric laughed. "OK" he said, pulling off his t-shirt. I noticed he'd worn the merino one with the weta on it that I'd bought him for Christmas. But it was maybe better without the t-shirt.

"There's mousetraps" I said to him, kind of admiring the view. Eric immediately started looking at the floor. "Fucking Bob" he said. "I might have known he'd be a pain in the ass when I wasn't here."

"No, you've got the wrong end of the stick" I said to him. "I mean mousetraps to eat, not actual ones. It's what we had for breakfast."

"Oh, the grilled cheese things? Open-faced?"

"Yeah, grilled cheese on toast. First thing I ever learnt to cook in Form One." Eric didn't look any the wiser. "When I was 11, at Intermediate school. Never mind, go and have your shower and I'll make you one."

Eric started for the bathroom, just as Felicia appeared in the bedroom. "Daddy?" she said, tremulously.

"I'm still here, Leesh" Eric said, stepping out from behind me. Great, so I was now so big I could successfully hide Eric.

Felicia pushed past me to follow Eric into the bathroom, and Amelia wasn't far behind. I guess if he was trapped in the shower he couldn't go anywhere so they were secure in the knowledge he was all theirs for a bit.

When he emerged, with his entourage still in tow I'd finished his mousetraps and he took he plate off me gratefully. Felicia and Amelia trailed him to the table, and I decided it was probably time for my shower.

When I got out I found that Eric and the kids had moved out to the playhouse. "We had to go to the museum with Sebastian's mummy" I could hear Amelia say. "She's boring. And she makes Chloe cry. You were better with Chloe. Although you did run off. Sebastian's mummy didn't run off. Mostly she was worried about whether Sebastian had to go to the toilet or not."

"I's not runned off" Felicia said.

I poked my head in the door. Eric was only sitting half in the place, but even so it was pretty crowded, no way was I getting there in there as well. "So, um, where's all your washing?" I asked Eric.

"Um…" he said, looking thoughtful. "Duffle bag."

"You had to buy a bag for the washing?" I asked. Had he not cleaned anything while he was away?

"Well, Indira gave me the bag…" Eric said. "And I did do some laundry, with her, once…"

"Wouldn't she do yours?" I asked.

"No!" Eric said, pretending to be shocked by that. I think he was pretending. "She's not a very good underpants fairy."

"Mummy's the underpants fairy" Amelia said, and then she looked at me critically. "I don't think you can fly though. You'd have to have really big wings. Really big."

"Yeah…thanks…" I said. Nothing like being reminded of just how round I was.

"You're welcome, Mummy" Amelia said cheerfully, and without the slightest worry that she might have offended me. I guess the fact Mummy was getting bigger and bigger was Mummy's problem.

"OK, well I'm off to find this washing then. That seems like a good job for an underpants fairy."

I grabbed the bag out of the bedroom and lugged it to the laundry. Yeah, there was quite a bit of stuff in here. And I was slightly worried that if Eric had crammed a suit in here, which was going to have to be dry-cleaned now because it was all crumpled and dirty, then what the hell was in his actual suitcase?

Eric helped me hang the washing out when it was done, which was nice, and not just for the other pair of hands but actually for having a bit of adult company. The kids ran around, making the most of it being sunny, although cold. Andy appeared outside his house and Eric and I had a chat to him. It was almost like Eric had never been away.

I figured if no one had been doing Eric's washing then no one had been feeding him either, so I did bacon and corn fritters with tomato salsa for lunch. That went down quite well, although Amelia was a bit dubious about the bacon. "I don't like bacon" she said.

"Yeah, you do" Eric said automatically.

Amelia wrinkled her nose and looked at her bacon again. After a minute she said "No. Actually I don't" and went back to eating her corn fritters. Eric looked mildly confused for about 30 seconds and then gave up and took the bacon off her plate and added it to his own.

After lunch Eric clapped his hands together. "Presents" he said.

"Presents?" Amelia squealed. "We get presents?"

"Presents?" echoed Felicia. Yeah, Eric was definitely beating Santa Claus for popularity in our house at the moment.

So we all crowded round the bed and Eric opened the suitcase. I kind of understood the need for the duffle bag at that point. The kids got a pile of toys each, which they were ecstatic about. Amelia's haul included a new Barbie, which she didn't really need. "I picked it especially for you" Eric said, handing it over. I peered at it over her shoulder and I could see why he'd bought it.

"Thanks" I said to him quietly.

"Yeah, it took me a long time to find the one with the green eyes and the brown hair" he said. "And actually Indira found it in the end. She said she'd spent all her life without a Barbie who looked like her she was determined that Amelia wasn't going to have the same problem."

Felicia got a Barbie who played soccer and a heap of other stuff. Even the baby seemed to have a pile, although I was pretty sure he'd never know what to actually do with a baseball glove.

"And this one" Eric said, handing me a carrier bag "Is for Mummy." I looked inside and pulled out…a handbag. Although on closer inspection, it wasn't. It was a nappy bag, in a kind of cranberry coloured leather with a turquoise lining. It was beautiful.

"Thank-you" I said, leaning over to kiss Eric.

"You like it?" he asked.

"I love it" I said. I really did. It was so nice. I'd never had such a fancy bag before.

Next out of the suitcase came clothes for all of us. Amelia was slightly more impressed with her stuff than Felicia was. I even got a couple of new maternity tops, which was a nice touch. "Indira thought you shouldn't miss out" Eric said.

"Yeah, that's brilliant" I said. There wasn't a huge amount of choice in maternity clothes here, so stuff from the States was a huge treat.

Once again there was stuff for the baby. "I picked this out" Eric said, "For Sam." I looked at the little outfit he laid on the bed. It was a tiny pair of jeans, a checked shirt with little buttons, and a sweater vest. It was the most impractical thing I could think of to try to dress a tiny newborn baby in.

"It's perfect" I said. "He'll love it. And he'll look really cute."

"You think so?" Eric asked.

"Oh yeah. He'll look like a tiny version of you, although maybe not as much as if I dressed him in something with holes in it."

"Yeah, very funny" Eric said, leaning over to kiss me.

"Is that part of the special cuddle?" Amelia asked from the other end of the bed, where she was trying to pile up her stash.

"No!" I said. "And you can take your stuff to your room." Amelia sighed and trotted off.

I didn't really see Eric for much of the afternoon as he seemed to be simultaneously setting up the train-set for Felicia and playing various board games with Amelia. I guess it was nice they could share him so well, but I did wonder how he was going to manage being split three ways.

It was only when I was starting to get dinner ready that Eric appeared in the kitchen. "So what are you roasting?" Eric asked, as he watched me peeling carrots.

"How do you know I'm roasting anything?" I asked.

Eric just shrugged. "Good guess?"

I sighed. He was actually right. "Pork" I said. "Well, I'm having a go, anyway. We watched Masterchef, and I got inspired." I hadn't actually really cooked pork much before, mainly because it was high on the long list of things that Bill wouldn't eat. I didn't realise how restrictive his diet actually was until I had Eric around instead.

"We?" Eric asked.

"Me and the baby. _He_ actually likes Masterchef."

"Yeah, sure he does."

"He does!" I replied, but Eric had left the kitchen by then.

When I had it all in the oven I found the rest of the family in the living room watching the Hi-5 DVD I'd let the girls rent the day before. Well, Amelia and Felicia were demonstrating their best dance moves to Eric and Eric had a sort glazed look on his face, faced with two small girls and a TV screen full of manic looking Australians in Day-Glo outfits.

"This DVD is pretty awful" Eric said.

"I know!" I agreed. "I think it's the accents. They can't even say dance properly."

Eric looked at me. "Really, Sookie?" he asked.

"Well, yeah. You can hear them" I said.

"I don't think the way they say dance is the problem" Eric said, as another song and dance number broke out on the screen. "You do know" he continued "that that word doesn't actually have an 'r' in it don't you? Neither does can't for that matter. It's not _darnce_, its dance. They're actually quite correct. You guys…just kind of sound like you're Australians trying to be English."

I stared at Eric. "You spent far too long in the States" I said. "Your ears have gone all funny. Of course they say it wrong. As do you, by the way. You'll all wrong!" I walked back to the kitchen to the sound of Eric laughing his arse off. I would never say it, but I'd kind of missed the teasing.

Although everyone knows really that Australian accents are downright bizarre. It's like they think they're American or something.

Dinner went well. I was quite impressed with my pork roast even if I did say so myself. Eric wolfed his down, although I wasn't sure that was a true recommendation, it might have been more like Bob eating everything in sight after the time he accidentally spent the night locked in Andy and Halleigh's shed.

Amelia poked hers around and made lots of comments about how it smelt an awful lot like bacon, but I think she had a few bites in the end. Felicia discovered the joys of crackling and was thoroughly happy with the whole affair.

By popular vote Eric got to do the bath, which took twice as long as usual, and the story. I thought with Eric being home Felicia would be a bit happier about going to bed, but no sooner were we sitting down with our coffee and tea, than she appeared in the door of the living room clutching Sockie and looking at us with big eyes. "Daddy's here?' she asked.

"Yeah, I'm still here Leesh" he said.

Felicia trotted over and climbed into Eric's lap and just sat there for a bit until he said "OK, bedtime now" and he carried her back to bed.

EPOV

It felt good to be home, but at the end of the day I was fucking shattered. I hadn't slept much on the flights to New Zealand and then having a full Sunday at home with the kids, well, I'd thought it was hard work watching Clancy but I'd obviously forgotten quite what Felicia was like.

I'd been thrown by her reaction to my arrival, but I guessed she was a bit overwhelmed. She still seemed a bit clingy at bedtime, but I hoped she'd get over it.

Sookie didn't seem to mind that I wanted to go bed early and she happily skipped off to the bathroom first. Well, maybe not skipped. She kind of…well, there was a definite gait now that denoted she was pregnant even when you saw her from behind.

It was kind of sexy.

So by the time I was ready for bed, Sookie was already in there. I'd been looking forward to getting back to my own bed, after two weeks on a fucking pull-out couch, but I'd maybe in my head been over-estimating the size of our bed. I didn't think I could fit.

"Um, Sookie?" I asked, standing beside the bed.

"Yeah?" she said, opening her eyes.

"Um…where do I fit?" There were pillows fucking everywhere in the bed, in front of Sookie, behind Sookie, I think she maybe had her feet on some as well. There was really no room for me.

"Oh" she said, looking around. "Oh, yeah. I've been using the pillows to help me sleep. My hips get really sore these days."

"Oh." Fuck, I'd been wondering about sex and whether it was going to be on offer. I may have been tired after all, but I wasn't dead. However that didn't sound promising. "Um, but maybe I could replace those ones?" I said, pointing to the pillows behind her back.

"Um, OK. Yeah" she said, tossing them over the side of the bed so I could get in. I lay down behind Sookie and snuggled into her back. That was fucking nice. I'd missed this, just lying here, cuddling her. She was all soft and warm and…fuck. Yeah, I may have realised that sex wasn't happening but my cock had other ideas. I sighed. There wasn't much I could do really.

Sookie squirmed around, probably trying to get comfortable. That really didn't help at all. She squirmed a bit more and I wasn't sure whether or not she was doing it on purpose. I tried running a hand up her arm and around to her boob. She didn't swat it away, so I gave it a squeeze.

That didn't seem to upset her either, so I tried shoving it up under her pyjama top, which wasn't easy as it was so tight, and then I unclipped the front of her bra and traced her nipple gently.

"Eric" Sookie said, sounding a bit breathless.

"Mmm?" I said, as I nuzzled the back of her neck. I figured she hadn't pushed me away yet, so maybe I should just keep going.

"Do you want to? Have sex?"

"Yeah, I do" I said. I really fucking did. Two weeks is a long time.

"Even though I'm huge?"

"Probably more because you're huge. Fuck, your boobs are amazing." They were they felt so good in my hand.

"Well, OK then…but…um…" She trailed off.

"Um?" I asked, propping myself up on my elbow so I could see her face. I had a feeling this wouldn't be a good 'um'.

"My hips" she whispered. "I don't think…I can't…you know. Straddle you."

"Oh" I said. Fuck, I thought, I didn't want to make her feel bad as it wasn't really her fault. But I felt a bit disappointed all the same.

"We'll um; well…you'll have to um…" Sookie trailed off again. "You'll have to be…behind me." She whispered the last two words and then bit her lip, looking worried.

"Oh" I said again. "Well…that's OK? I mean, is it OK?" I wasn't sure. Was it wrong to want to do it doggie style with your pregnant wife? Because I did, but maybe Sookie wouldn't think it was OK.

"Yeah, I think…yeah, it is. It is OK" she said, so I leant down and kissed her, while starting to knead her boob again. "I want to see them" I murmured.

"OK" she agreed, and with a bit of effort she sat up to remove her top and bra. Yeah, they were fucking fantastic, and I had a lot of fun reacquainting myself with them.

And then I reached into her pyjama bottoms and found how wet she was for me. "Oh, Sookie" I moaned.

"Yeah" she said.

I pulled her pyjama bottoms all the way off and then took off my own clothes, while trying to continue to kiss Sookie, which wasn't easy. And then it took a bit of rearranging to find a position where it was comfortable for Sookie to be on her knees, and even then, it probably wasn't going to be comfortable for long.

It was probably a good thing that I'm awesome at being quick.

It felt so good to be inside her again, so fucking good. I hoped it felt as good for Sookie. She wasn't complaining about her hips though, she was breathing hard and pushing against me, and when I reached around to stroke her clit she came, and sent me into coming right after her.

I helped her get cleaned up and back into her pyjamas, and then we spent a while re-arranging all her pillows so she was comfortable and there was still room for me in there. It took a fucking long time.

But eventually we were settled. I kissed Sookie on the shoulder. "It's good to be home" I said. I lay down and felt the pull of sleep. Yeah, I was fucking tired.

Sookie reached back and patted my leg. "We're glad you're home" she said. She sounded really tired too. "We all missed you. A lot. Even Sam."

It took me a couple of minutes to process what she'd said with my sleep-deprived brain, and by the time I had, Sookie was snoring with abandon next to me.

**A/N Intermediate schools are kind of an in-between school you go to after primary school (elementary) and before high school. You only go there for two years, it used to be for Form One and Two, but it's called Year 7 and Year 8. So basically it's 11 and 12 year olds. Sometimes high schools do start at Year 7, especially private ones.**

**Hi-5 are a kid's entertainment troupe from Australia, it's basically like a bad pop group.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	66. Chapter 66

**A/N This was very nearly delayed by the baby's internet addiction, but we got there! Glad everyone liked the last chapter and the fact that Eric is back now. I'm sure Sookie and the girls feel the same way.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It was great having Eric back. Really great. Except that the bed was getting a bit crowded now. I'd forgotten how much room he took up. I'd had to sacrifice some of my pillows so he'd have a place to sleep, which wasn't too bad until the middle of the night. I was finding that I could only sleep for a couple of hours on any one side, because my hips would get sore and I'd need to change, and at that point I normally moved all the pillows around too. Except it was a little bit more difficult to move Eric to the other side of the bed. For one thing he was completely zonked out now, for another, well…you try moving a dead weight like that.

So I sat up in bed and poked him in the chest. A few times. "Eric!" I hissed. Nothing. I pulled a tiny, weeny bit of arm hair. That worked.

"What?" he said. "I just…yeah, give me a minute." He didn't open his eyes, but he did make an amazingly accurate grab for my boob.

"Um, I just need you to move…not do anything else Eric" I said.

"Oh" he said, opening his eyes finally. "Where am I going?"

"Other side of the bed."

"But…that's the wrong side" he said, frowning.

"Well, you wanted to replace the pillows, Eric. So you know, be the pillows and switch sides."

"Fine" he said, getting out of bed and walking around it. "I don't know why I'm doing this though. You kick."

"Oh, I do not" I said. He was probably imagining things. Sure, sometimes I kicked him when he was a bit hot and I needed him to shove over, but it had actually been quite nice having someone to warm my feet against in bed again.

Eric helped me with pillow placement and we finally fell back asleep. Well, for an hour or so. Except that the next time it wasn't my sore hips which woke me up, it was the little hand on my face and the voice attached to the hand saying "Daddy?"

I lifted my head to look at Felicia and she took a step back. "Not Daddy!" she gasped, looking upset at that fact. Yeah that was pretty much how her world was divided up, Daddy and Not Daddy.

"Other side of the bed" I said to her.

"Wha'?" she asked, confused, but at that point Eric leant over me, grabbed her under the arms and pulled her into the bed, accompanied by some giggling and a squeal of "Daddy!"

Then we had to rearrange ourselves, the pillows and the two year old child and finally we could go back to sleep.

Eric took the day off work on Monday, which pleased Felicia no end although she was kind of torn between wanting to do mother help at the school and staying with Daddy, who hadn't really made it out of bed properly yet. In the end hanging with Daddy won out and I decided I might walk up to the school.

I possibly needed the exercise. That was the problem with having Eric home and trying to feed him up, I'd eaten so much the previous day and it was just weighing heavily in my stomach. Maybe it had just made the baby bigger. At any rate, a walk it was.

Emily was back in class, after having missed a few days with her ear infection and having missed the museum trip, so while the others wrote about that, she decided to write about her baby brother, who seemed to be her sole topic of conversation that morning.

"My baby brother Leon is really cute!" she announced. "He poos in his nappies, but it's not smelly. It looks yucky though. Megan let me hold him…well; watch him, while she had a shower. That's because I'm his big sister. He's just my baby brother" Emily said, basically just directing her comments to the table at large.

"But he's your _half_-brother" Amelia said, looking up from her page.

"Oh. That doesn't make a difference at all" Emily said, with all the snotty disdain only a five year old girl can summon.

"But you said…" Amelia started and I bumped her arm. "What?" she said, turning to me.

"Just leave it, Amelia" I said.

"But…he's a half…" Amelia started.

"It doesn't matter. Emily's right. It doesn't make a difference." Emily preened in the background, happy that an adult was backing her up.

"But she _said_…" Amelia whined.

"She was wrong" I said. "What she said before was wrong because it doesn't matter and she's realised that now." Emily stopped preening and went back to writing.

"Em was wrong?" Amelia clarified, starting to look a bit happier. I nodded. "OK, well that's alright then. We're all allowed to be wrong sometimes." Amelia went back to her work and I tried to ignore Emily glaring at my back.

"I don't have a brother" Maisie said, not sounding too upset.

"I don't either" Chloe whispered. She did sound upset, but it was possible she was actually upset she was reduced to using a purple felt-tip that was about to run out. It was hard to tell with Chloe.

"Me either" Sebastian mumbled. I think that's what he said anyway. Usually he pretended the girls at his table didn't exist, but I guessed without Felicia here he was stuck with us all.

"I'm getting a brother!" Amelia crowed. "From there!" she poked me in the tummy.

"Ow, Amelia!" I said to her. "That's me you're poking."

"Yeah" she said, giving the impression that didn't really matter to her. I guess I was just reduced to being the receptacle for her baby brother. Who at that point decided to give me a good kick. Guess his big sister had woken him up. We should all probably get used to that phenomenon.

"Ow" I said again, and Amelia frowned at me. "I didn't do it!" she said, protesting in exactly the same way she had when Felicia used to fall randomly when she was just learning to walk.

"No, it was the baby" I said. "He's started moving around now."

Amelia frowned, and then stuck her hand on my tummy again. "Huh" she said. "He is." She turned to the table. "My baby brother's moving!" she announced.

"Can I feel?" Maisie asked, almost knocking her chair over in her rush to get to me.

"Oh, um. OK" I said. I wasn't thrilled about being today's object of curiosity, but I wasn't sure it was a good thing to discourage curious children. Although when Chloe and Emily started lining up behind Maisie so they could all give my tummy a good poke, I kind of felt like one of the guinea pigs in the petting zoo bit of Butterfly Creek.

I could see Sebastian looking at me. "Do you want a go?" I asked him through the throng of small girls crowded in front of me. He shook his head for no. Poor kid, I felt a bit sorry for him, but there wasn't much I could do.

I finally managed to get all the kids to sit down and finish their work. It was just about the end of my time there when I saw Eric and Felicia appear in the doorway. Felicia ran across the classroom, completely at ease with a room full of five year olds these days, and headed straight for Sebastian.

"Hi Bessian!" she said happily.

"Oh. You're here" he said.

"Yeah! This my Daddy" she said, turning around and pointing to Eric who'd followed her in.

"I know" Sebastian said, not unkindly. "I've seen him before."

"He was away. In da Stays. Now he's back!" Felicia carried on.

"That's good" Sebastian said, and Felicia nodded in agreement.

Eric started to walk around the table to where I was sitting but he got waylaid by Chloe. "Meela's daddy, my felt doesn't work anymore" she said, looking up at him through fair, wispy lashes.

"Um…" Eric said, kind of at a loss of what to do. Yeah, I guess they'd figured if he was going to turn up he was fair game. "Have you got another one?" he asked.

Chloe looked perplexed at that question. Then she looked worried. "No" she whispered. "I don't." She looked around a bit and seemed on the edge of another breakdown.

"Chloe you can use this pencil" Maisie said, handing it over and exchanging a look with Amelia. "It's got Tinkerbell on it."

"Oh. Cool" Chloe said, taking it. Eric looked relieved.

When it was time to go, Amelia looked momentarily worried that she wasn't coming with us. I guess it's never nice to see your whole family walking off without you, but I assured her that they needed her at school and we'd be OK without her for a few more hours. Amelia seemed to accept that and stayed put, while Eric and I walked home swinging Felicia between us while she giggled like there was no tomorrow.

EPOV

It felt good to back at home again and it was surprising how easily I seemed to fit back in. Well, maybe not in the bed. The bed was a bit of an issue. Me, Sookie, Sam, a pile of pillows and sometimes Felicia made things really fucking crowded, but it was the same old problem, to get a bigger bed we needed a bigger room, which required a bigger house. And the house was always the sticking point.

One of the first things I did when I was back in the office was ring Maudette and see if she'd made any progress while I was out of the country. She didn't sound exactly thrilled to hear from me. She mentioned she had a few properties possibly coming onto the market soon, but nothing concrete at the moment. Which was fucking annoying, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Except maybe actually start door-knocking. Although first I had to start catching up on some of the stuff I'd left when I'd been in the States, not to mention I had a few emails from Clancy and Indira already wanting my input into the project they were doing.

So I had a busy first week back really, followed by a busy weekend taking Felicia to soccer and generally hanging out with everyone, and then another busy week. And another. Sookie was getting bigger all the time; although I got the feeling she didn't like it when I said that. But it was true.

Unfortunately it also meant more nights of interrupted sleep with Sookie trying to get comfortable, kicking me repeatedly and then berating me for taking up her space. There wasn't much I could do about that though. Not until I fixed the house problem. Fuck.

I did get to see Sam again though. At Sookie's next appointment with Russell I was kind of anxious to get to the bit with the ultrasound and it didn't disappoint. "Hi Sam" I whispered, looking at the monitor and ignoring Sookie's eye-roll behind me. She acted like he wasn't named yet, but she kept slipping up and saying Sam when she really meant to say 'the baby' so I figured she'd come around.

Russell did the whole growth chart thing again, and it looked as though Sam had had a bit of a growth spurt while I was away. Fuck. At this rate things weren't looking great for Sookie. I could kind of understand why her hips were starting to give way.

But she didn't seem too upset. In fact she seemed kind of resigned to the whole thing and she and Russell sat and discussed things like inductions and membrane sweeps which I was none the wiser about.

We also had Sookie's birthday. She didn't seem thrilled to be turning 36, but she did like her new watch. We had dinner at the Thai restaurant just up the road from us and the girls enjoyed being fussed over the waitresses. Sookie, and perhaps Sam, enjoyed the fried appetisers and I didn't have the heart to fight her over the last money bag.

"Your birthday next" she said. I sighed, I wasn't really big on birthdays, but Sookie always seemed far more interested in my birthday than hers. "Uh-huh" I agreed, handing Felicia a strip of the beef out of my dinner for her to try.

"Ooh, broccoli" Amelia said happily, digging around in her bowl of food.

"It's the big Three-oh this year" Sookie continued. "So we should do something special. Celebrate it." She looked at me and we both went a bit quiet remembering the previous year.

"Yeah…" I said. I wasn't totally thrilled with the idea. I thought maybe we could just move on. "Won't it be a bit close to when Sam's due though?"

"Who's Sam?" Amelia asked, before putting a large piece of cauliflower in her mouth. Sookie glared at me across the table. Yeah, well that was bound to happen sooner or later.

"The baby" I said, at the same time Sookie said "No one". There was a bit more glaring across the table.

"The baby?" Amelia asked, wrinkling her nose. "I don't like it. There was a Sam at pre-school. I didn't like _him_. Maybe we could call it…" she chewed her dinner thoughtfully. "Maybe Philip" she said in the end.

"Philip?' I asked.

"The prince in Sleeping Beauty" Sookie supplied. "Maybe" she said to Amelia. I didn't think so. Phil just sounded…like someone my dad would go drinking with. Yeah, not happening.

"Have you got any ideas for the baby's name?" Sookie asked Felicia. Felicia looked blank. "Baby?" she said in the end.

"Yeah, what we could call him" Sookie said.

"Bessian?" Felicia asked, looking at me.

"Um…probably not. You already know one…um, Sebastian" I said.

"OK" Felicia said, not really that worried about the whole thing.

"I like Philip" Amelia said.

"It's alright" Sookie agreed. They both looked at me.

"No" I said. "That's not his name."

"How do you know?" Amelia asked. Sookie looked at me expectantly.

"Um…I just do" I said.

Sookie went back to eating her dinner but Amelia narrowed her eyes and asked "Have you ever named anyone before?"

Fuck. No, I hadn't. I'd wanted a dog for years, but Dad wouldn't let me get one, so…yeah. I had never had the chance.

"Um…" I said, trying to stall. "Not really…"

Amelia turned to Sookie. "I don't know if you should let him pick" she said. "You might be better at it…although, no one else is called Felicia."

Sookie shrugged. "I didn't pick that one" she said.

Amelia looked concerned. "Really? But who did?"

"Your other daddy. The first one" Sookie said. "He liked it." She went back to eating her dinner but there was something about the way she said those last three words that set off warning bells in my head. Fuck, she'd let Bill name Felicia, and now she thought it was her turn again.

But surely I got a turn too?

Later on, when we were going to bed I figured I'd have to broach the subject. "So, does it feel like I'm pushing you into it?" I asked her.

"What? Pushing me into what?" Sookie sounded confused. "We can't go back now, he's nearly here."

"No, the name. Into calling him Sam. Did, um…did you not get a choice about Felicia?"

"Oh" Sookie said, and there were a lot of ways I could take that 'oh'. I just wasn't sure which the right one was. So I waited.

"I guess I got the final choice" she said in the end. "I mean, Bill was pretty much long gone by the time I was registering her birth, it's just…well that had been his pick with Amelia. He'd wanted Felicia instead. I'd argued for Amelia, and been successful. And then of course…well, we split up. Although maybe I didn't think it was really forever. So I was trying to…it sounds silly now, but I wanted to please him, I guess. I wanted to show him that he was still a part of the family. So my baby, who was going to be named Sienna, ended up being Felicia. And in the end, it made sod all difference. It didn't bring Bill back. I just lumbered Felicia with a kind of…well, as Amelia said; no one else around here is called Felicia."

I wasn't sure what to say. "I'm sorry" I said. "I'm sorry for trying to push you into naming him Sam. We can make a list."

"Oh no. It's OK" Sookie said. "I'm a big girl. You're not really pushing me into it. I mean, Bill didn't exactly make me choose Felicia either…I just did it as a grand gesture…or something."

"You know you don't have to agree with Sam for a name just to make me happy, don't you?" I asked. I thought she did. I hoped she did.

"Yeah" Sookie said in the end. "If I know anything it's that what you call your kids doesn't make or break your relationship. It's not that I hate Sam or anything. It's high on my list of possibilities…I just…I just want to get it right for him."

"Maybe Sam is the right choice? For him?" I asked. I thought it was, but Sookie was kind of right, there was no way of knowing.

"Maybe it is" she said. And then she started re-arranging the pillows again so she could try to get to sleep.

SPOV

One of the good things about having Eric back was that there was another adult around to take the kids places they needed to be. It's especially handy when you double-book yourself.

In addition to my lovely new watch with the pink strap and the crystals, Eric had bought me a voucher to a Thai massage place in Ponsonby who did amazing foot massages, he'd been told. I have no idea who told him that of course, but I was hoping they knew their stuff.

So I gleefully made an appointment for a day I could squeeze it in between finishing my classes and picking up the kids. Except that I forgot about the dental nurse.

"How busy are you on Wednesday?" I asked Eric over breakfast on a Monday morning, as I was re-tying my dressing gown. It was really difficult now I had to tie the belt above the bump and it kept coming undone.

"Not that busy. Why?" Eric's eyes stayed glued to my stomach. Yeah, he really liked sizing up how much bigger I'd grown. Sometimes I felt like his prize-winning pumpkin or something.

"I need someone to take the kids to the dental nurse. They have appointments in the afternoon."

Eric frowned, and put his cup in the dishwasher. "Dentist?" he asked.

"Dental nurse" I said.

"Hygienist?" Eric tried again, turning back around.

"No. Different thing altogether. Dental nurse. It's a whole other profession here."

"Oh. Um. OK then. Give me the details."

So I told him the ins and outs of what he was doing and where he had to go. "It's in a school?" he double-checked.

"Yeah, they have a tiny clinic there, in the back of the Intermediate school.

"Oh. Well I guess if they have the clientele…" Eric said, trailing off.

"Yeah, it's all kids. OK, well thanks for that." I rushed off to see if Amelia was anywhere near ready for school yet, happy that I'd solved that problem.

EPOV

I was a bit fucking confused about the whole dental nurse thing. As far as I was concerned the nurses weren't the same as the actual dentist, but Sookie seemed to think that was all that was required. I guess it was just a check, but even so.

First up, I had to get Felicia out of pre-school. She wasn't keen to leave mat-time. "Sit down Daddy" she said, pointing to the floor.

"We've got to go" I tried.

"Nuh. Sit down."

"OK. For two minutes only." I sat down behind Felicia, and several of the kids stared at me openly. Yeah, fuck. Nothing like being the token adult. Then a small girl, about a head shorter than Felicia, sort of backed into me and sat on my lap. I wasn't sure what to do, so I just kind of left her there.

But Felicia turned around and her expression darkened. "I no like THAT on your lap!" she spat out, pointing to the girl. The girl was obviously used to Felicia and didn't budge. I decided it was time to make a move before anything bad happened. Like biting. So I carefully placed the girl on the floor and scooped Felicia up.

I hoped she'd get better at sharing in the next couple of months before Sam arrived.

Then we had to get Amelia who was ecstatic to be leaving school a half hour early and made a big fuss about going, making sure that everyone at her table said goodbye to her and got the full story about why she was leaving and where she was going. I was kind of worried that the school bell would ring before I got her out of there and we'd be late, but eventually I dragged her out to the car.

Next mission was to find the fucking place.

I followed Sookie's direction to another school behind the Mt Eden village and parked in their parking lot. "So do you know where the clinic is?" I asked Amelia.

"What?" she asked.

"The clinic. Where the dentist is?"

"Nurse" Amelia corrected.

"Whatever. Where is it?"

"I don't know" she said, shrugging. "Mum knows."

Yeah, that didn't help. I knew that Sookie knew, and she'd tried to explain to me how to get there from the parking lot, but it had made no sense. I figured it would be near the office, so we'd ask there.

I dragged the girls to the office and waited for one of the staffmembers to come to the window. A few kids wandered past, obviously older than any at Amelia's school and she stared at them and kept quiet. Felicia tried saying "Hi!" a couple of times but got ignored.

Eventually the woman behind the counter gave me some directions which were just as confusing as Sookie's about walking around the building, through a playground, past some classrooms and finding something called a prefab. Fuck. Why couldn't we just take the kids to a dentist with a nice, easy to find office in the village?

In the end, and after going around the wrong corner, we found it. The prefab was some kind of outbuilding you'd maybe put the janitor in. Except, when you stuck your head in the door, it had the world's smallest dental clinic.

"Hi!" one of the two women sitting in there said to me. "Who do you have?" I gave the kids' names and let her take over.

"OK" she said. "I'm Lyn, who's going first?"

Felicia shrank back behind me, but Amelia said "I am!" loudly, so that solved that problem. Lyn showed her how to climb up onto the chair and then pretended that pressing Amelia's nose made the chair go up and down, while Amelia giggled. Loudly. Then Amelia got to pick a pair of sunglasses to wear, to shield her eyes from the light, and finally the woman started poking about in her mouth.

Felicia watched with interest from the safety of my lap. She wasn't really enthusiastic about being here at all.

Eventually Amelia was done. Lyn had called out to the other woman who was sitting at a computer and they'd made notes of what teeth she had, and the condition, and she was rewarded with a sticker and a stamp on the hand.

She skipped over to where I was sitting looking very pleased. "I was a good girl!" she announced. "Now it's Leesha's turn."

Felicia looked at me. "No" she said. I carried her over to the chair. "Noooo Daddy!"

"It's OK. I'll be here" I said. Lyn gestured to a seat next to the examination chair and I sat in it while trying to hold a squirming Felicia in place. Amelia wandered over to the woman sitting at the computer to have a proper chat about how good she'd been.

Felicia didn't buy the nose button game, and wasn't impressed with the sunglasses either. She stopped squirming, but she wouldn't open her mouth. At all.

"Come on, sweetie" Lyn tried. "Just let me a have a look and then you can go home."

Felicia eyed the instruments she was holding and just shook her head for no. I sighed. I wasn't paying them for nothing. "Felicia" I tried. "Please open your mouth."

"Nuh-uh" she said, with her lips clamped together.

"Felicia. You realise this is your chance don't you?" Felicia looked a bit intrigued at that, but didn't say anything. "You get to roar" I said. "Roar as much as you like as long as you open your mouth. The dentist wants to see how sharp your teeth are."

Felicia is really fucking loud sometimes. But at least she opened her mouth. And her teeth were pronounced lovely and sharp.

When she was done, I looked around the tiny room. They didn't seem to have any kind of reception desk or cash register or anything. "So, uh…where do I pay?" I asked, wondering if maybe they'd just send the bill.

The two women burst out laughing. "Oh, yeah. That's funny" Lyn said. I didn't really think it was.

"I guess it's not like America, huh?" the other woman, whose name I didn't know said and I wasn't quite sure what to say to that. Meanwhile Felicia and Amelia were looking on curiously, wondering what was happening.

"It's free" Lyn said. "You don't pay. That's it."

"Free. Oh, OK. Well, thanks" I said, wanting to beat a hasty retreat. Yeah, Sookie hadn't mentioned that part of it.

"No problem. Bye girls!" Lyn called out. They both said bye and I walked them back to the car.

When we got home Sookie had just arrived as well. "That" she said "was sooooo nice. They had this chai tea, and I don't normally like chai, but it was awesome. And the woman doing the massage was really good. She didn't even tickle."

"I'm glad you liked it" I said to her.

"I did, thank you very much. It was a great present. How'd they get on at the dental nurse?"

"Oh, great. No problems. You just didn't mention it was free."

Sookie frowned. "Well of course it's free."

"Since when is dental care free?" I asked.

"Since I don't know…for kids it is anyway. That's the point of the dental nurses. Free dental care. I pay my taxes for something you know! And teeth are important."

"Fuck" I said. "It's like living in a communist country sometimes." It was really fucking odd.

Sookie shrugged. "But we have better supermarkets. So any requests for dinner? I was thinking pizza, because these feet are far too relaxed to stand on for any length of time."

"Yeah, that's fine" I said, walking off to the bedroom to get changed, to the sound of Sookie saying "But we can't tip the delivery person, remember? He'll probably be young enough to still qualify for his free dental care. I'm sure they're all about 17 these days."

"You know it's not nice to make fun of people from other cultures, don't you Sookie?" I yelled back, but I discovered she was right behind me.

"Oh, you poor lost American" she said, rubbing my back. "Never mind, you ring for dinner and you get to put that on your credit card instead of dental care."

"Ha ha."

"You wouldn't be laughing if you had to pay for three kids to go to the dentist. Make the most of it before some government takes it all away from us." With that she walked off again.

She was probably right though. Three kids would be fucking expensive. It was a good thing I had received my first payment through from the contract in the States. All I needed now…was the same thing I'd needed before. A house to buy for all of us.

I was going to have to hunt Maudette down.

**A/N So dental nurses who are trained separately to dentists, work in schools and provide free dental care for kids aged 0-18, as long as they're registered with the service. They do a lot of the things dentists do, they check teeth, can do fillings if required, or quite often these days put the coatings on teeth. They're basically a lot about education and making sure teeth are healthy. If they need to refer you to a dentist, they do. It's a great system, it really is. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	67. Chapter 67

**A/N I don't have any exciting news - the mouse never showed up, the baby still won't do more than a few steps, it's all pretty much the same-old here. So thanks again for reading this and reviewing it. It keeps me plugging away at it!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It had been a slightly trying day. Well, the last bit of it had been. After much whinging from Amelia we'd set up a playdate with Emily after I'd spoken to a rather grateful sounding Tanya. I'd guessed it was a day she wouldn't have to pay for after-school care.

So Emily had come home with us and there'd been a couple of hours of the pair of them basically battling over territory, which was to be expected as neither of them were exactly the shrinking violet type. I'd mostly left them to it and hoped they could work it out themselves. I had Felicia giving me reports every so often though. She'd wander into the kitchen and say "They's bossy" or "Amealya's not sharin'", or "Em'ly's no playin' right." Yeah, poor Felicia. She was kind of used to this part of the afternoon being the time she got Amelia back, and even if that meant she got bossed and told what to do, that was OK. After all, that was pretty much life as she knew it. It just seemed plain wrong to Felicia that Emily was here taking all of Amelia's attention and she wanted me to make her disappear.

Thankfully, Eric came home and Felicia wandered off to give him the rundown on everything that was going wrong in Amelia's bedroom. "Daddy, Em'lys here and Amealya's bossin' her…" I could hear Felicia telling Eric as she followed him down the hall to our bedroom.

I went back to making dinner. I thought I'd picked something fairly plain for our meal; roasted chicken pieces, roast potatoes, cauliflower cheese and peas. What was not to like about that? Lots, apparently, if you were Emily.

She sat down with us and looked at her plate. "I don't eat chicken" she said.

"Really?" Amelia asked, pausing briefly from drowning all of her dinner in tomato sauce.

"Well…not this chicken" Emily elaborated. "I eat chicken nuggets."

"Um…" I said, while my family all looked at me expectantly to see what would happen. "Um, just leave it then…" I wasn't sure what else to do. She wasn't my kid, so I wasn't about to make her eat it, or have Eric tell her she did like it, but I wasn't going to go and get her anything else either.

"OK" she said, shrugging. "I don't eat veges either." She looked over at me.

Felicia took this one. "Is cauliflowa cheese!" she said, pointing to Emily's plate with a spoon. Obviously she figured Emily hadn't learnt the rule that cheese sauce cancels out any vegetable content.

Emily just shrugged again. "I don't eat _that_" she said. "And I don't eat peas."

"Peas are good. They're round!" Amelia said, kind of appalled. Emily didn't seem particularly worried.

Eric looked at me and frowned and I decided it was my turn to shrug. What could I do? I wasn't Emily's mother. "Well, eat your potatoes" I said, as cheerfully as I could.

"Um…I normally have chips…" Emily said, staring at her potatoes.

"Just, um...maybe you'd like some tomato sauce on them?" I asked. She nodded, so Amelia passed it over.

"I guess…they're kind of like chips?" Emily asked, looking at me.

"Kind-of" I agreed. I wasn't sure how nutritionally balanced a dinner of roast potatoes and tomato sauce was, but, again, she wasn't my long-term problem.

"I's like chips!" Felicia piped up.

"But you've got potatoes tonight" Eric said to her, and she didn't seem unhappy with that. "Thank you Sookie for the lovely dinner" he added.

"Tank-you Mummy" Felicia chanted, while Amelia swallowed a mouthful of cauliflower cheese and then added her own "Thank you Mummy for dinner", before they both went back to eating.

Emily kind of looked over at them, and then back at me. Yeah, I guess she wasn't going to thank me for providing a dinner she didn't really want to eat, although maybe she just wasn't used to the Eric Northman school of politeness. He was always really good about thanking me for dinner, even the experimental dinners which kind of missed the mark, or the times I did silly stuff like burn the Yorkshire puddings, and it had become the norm for the kids to do it too. It kind of made that rather boring routine of thinking of what to cook then actually producing it day in and day out slightly better.

Everyone was quiet for a bit, although I noticed that Emily wasn't eating much potato. She was mostly pushing stuff around on her plate. I pretended I hadn't seen and concentrated on my own dinner. I didn't think it was all that bad. Amelia and Felicia weren't exactly turning their noses up at it, and Eric was making his way through his with one eye on the chicken Emily was leaving on her plate, as though anyone was going to fight him for it.

Well, maybe Bob would. But he wasn't sitting at the table, so Eric was probably OK.

We got through the main course, and as predicted Eric made the most of the chicken that was going spare. Then I broke out the ice cream and Emily perked up a lot. She did, apparently, eat ice cream.

And when the ice cream was finished I was faced with the problem that Tanya hadn't turned up yet, like she said she would. I could see that Amelia and Emily were pretty much fed up with the sight of each other, so I sent Tanya a text, to see how long until she got here.

I didn't get a reply.

At a loss of what else to do I sent Eric and Felicia off so she could have a bath. Felicia didn't really think she should be going off to the bathroom without Amelia, but she'd have to lump it. I parked Emily and Amelia at opposite ends of the couch, switched on the TV, and went back into the kitchen to clean up dinner and hope that Tanya turned up soon.

I'd just finished packing the last plate into the dishwasher when there was a knock at the front door. I waddled out to answer it and Amelia trailed after me. "Is it Emily's mum?" she asked me.

"I think so" I said. I hoped so, anyway.

"Good" Amelia muttered, as I opened the door.

"Hi!" Tanya said brightly. "Sorry, I'm a bit late…there was, uh…a thing at work. Anyway, I'll take her off your hands now."

"Yeah, no problem" I said, wishing I was the sort of person who would tell Tanya she was late and it was annoying.

Amelia had run off to the living room and I'd heard her announce "Em, you have to go home now!"

Tanya smiled and looked down at my bump. "How long now?" she asked.

"About nine weeks…well, closer to eight now" I said, hoping Emily would hurry up.

"Oh. Really? You're so big!" Tanya said, still looking at the bump.

"Yeah" I agreed. I kind of knew that one.

Eventually Em sloped into view. "I don't want to go home" she grumbled at Tanya, and then she turned to me. "Can I sleep over?"

"Oh…um…" I stammered, thinking that God knows what I'd feed her for breakfast if she did stay.

"Not this time. Some other time" Tanya said, without checking with me at all. I looked at Amelia, and I was pretty sure she looked as annoyed as I felt.

"Where's your bag, Em?" Tanya asked. Emily gave a loud sigh, and shuffled off to Amelia's room with Amelia trailing behind her going "You'd better hurry up so you can get home!"

"So…work busy?" I asked Tanya.

"Oh, yes! It's just that time of year. Everyone's trying to work out staffing levels for next year's projects and it's running me ragged."

"Oh. OK." I didn't have a lot to add to that, other than maybe asking if she could avoid letting the council hire any more contractors to dig up roads in Mt Eden, but that was possibly beyond the scope of her job.

Eventually Emily shuffled back down the hall, looking pretty miserable. Amelia was looking fretful, like she was worried that Emily wasn't really going. Eric and Felicia appeared from the bathroom, and that made Amelia look even more worried. "I missed my bath!" she hissed at me.

"You can have a shower afterwards" I said to her.

"Well, say thank-you to Amelia and her mum, Em" Tanya said, trying to pull Emily towards her, as she smiled at Eric over Emily's head.

"Thank-you" Emily mumbled.

Felicia pushed through to the front of the group standing by the front door. "She din' eat nuthin'!" she said pointing to Emily and looking at Tanya.

Tanya tried to pretend Felicia wasn't talking to her and just said "Thanks, again. We'll have to have Amelia over sometime."

Amelia didn't look thrilled at that statement, and neither did Emily who mumbled "I like it here". Tanya just ignored that too and dragged Emily out the door.

I kissed Felicia goodnight and sent Eric off to put her to bed, while I gave Amelia a quick shower and she grumbled at me that Emily had basically been a pain in the bum the whole time. I simply nodded along, feeling pretty certain they'd both be back to being best friends after a good night's sleep away from each other.

By the time I had Amelia in bed, Eric was off doing God knows what in the study that probably wasn't going to be a study for much longer. He was a bit grumbly about that, but he had a perfectly good office to go and work in, and he'd just have to use the dining room table like the rest of us if he did want to work at home.

So I drifted into the living room and changed the channels on the TV until I found something good and then tried to get myself as comfortable as possible, with my feet up on the coffeetable. After a little while Eric stuck his head in the door and asked if I wanted tea. I said yes, and he disappeared again, presumably to make it.

When he reappeared he was balancing two mugs and the tin that held the baking I'd done earlier in the week. "So what are we watching?" he asked, putting everything down.

I tried to figure out how to make this sound more appealing to Eric. "It's a show about…food…" I said. Eric sighed. I realised I hadn't done a very good job of making it sound like anything he'd want to watch, so I gave up and decided to come clean. "It's _New_ _Zealand's Hottest Home Baker_" I said.

Eric gave me a look. "Oh, fuck" he said. "That sounds…worse than Masterchef." I shrugged. I thought it was interesting.

Eric looked at the screen, then at me, and then back at the screen again. "They're not that hot" he said in the end. "You're much hotter."

"Yeah, um…thanks. But that's not actually the point of the show. It's really the baking."

"But, it's in the title" Eric said, sounding confused. I could see he was surreptitiously looking about for the remote. Yeah, I'd wedged it between me and the arm of the couch. No way was I letting him get his paws on that. Not until this show was finished anyway, and then I might discover I'd accidentally knocked it down there.

Eric sighed. "So I'm just stuck watching food I can't eat again?"

"You've got that to eat" I said, pointing to the tin on the table. Eric reached over, opened it and took out a couple of pieces of chocolate crunch before handing one to me. I took a bite and ended up with a pile of crumbs all over my cleavage. Not a good look. Although Eric didn't seem exactly disgusted when he watched me picking all the crumbs up.

Eventually he turned back to the TV. "They've got to do enough for a bake sale this week" I said to Eric.

"Oh" he said, and then he was quiet for a bit. "Maybe you should go on this?" he commented, after a while. "You're hot, and I like your baking. It's really very good." He helped himself to another piece of the chocolate crunch, and offered me one, which I waved away.

"Mmm" I said, thinking baking under pressure on TV sounded like my worst nightmare. "But have you noticed how this week because they're doing so many different items, the women have all got help?"

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly.

"So, um, they've got their partners in there with them." There were a few shell-shocked guys wandering around all the kitchens on the set, trying to work out how you could tell when savoury muffins were cooked. "I think that one has her dad with her" I continued, as they changed to look at what another contestant was doing, "But obviously I can't do that, so…I'd have to take you on there…" Yeah, that might put him off the idea.

Eric watched the TV and chewed his slice. "That woman has her brother with her" he pointed out.

I snorted. "Can you imagine me and Jason in a kitchen? He'd be making himself endless cups of tea and worrying about when he was going to finally get to eat anything. No, I'd have to take you."

"Yeah…maybe you should just bake at home then" Eric said, as we watched a couple from Tauranga have a small domestic over pinwheel scones.

"Probably best" I agreed, as I watched Eric's gaze give the room a quick sweep again, obviously trying to find that remote. He gave up and flopped back against the back of the couch, kind of resigned to his fate. Well, semi-resigned anyway. I could tell he was going to do what he always did when he was bored in the evenings, find a way to make someone play with him.

Only these days, it wasn't me he wanted to play with.

He reached over and started poking the top of the bump, not all that gently. I was used to it by now though, and ignored him. Eventually he found what he was looking for. "Got it" he said, as he pushed against the baby's foot.

"I think he's asleep" I tried.

"Mmm, I don't think so" Eric said, as the tiny foot pushed back against his hand. Eric laughed. "Got you!" he murmured, pushing the foot again.

I tried to ignore them as best I could, well I watched some poor woman tearfully running out of time to ice her cupcakes, but it wasn't exactly easy given there was a game of footsy going on with me in the middle. Eric was enjoying himself though, he kept laughing as the little foot kicked out against his fingers.

"Are you having fun?" I said to him, when an ad-break came on.

"Well, it's training, isn't it Sam?" Eric replied. "We're getting in early for soccer so you'll be ahead of the class."

"Yeah…not sure this really counts as training. And what are you going to do if Sam doesn't want to play soccer?" I asked, watching Eric's fingers and the small protuberance from my bump as it moved around.

Eric paused and looked at me, and then said "I think will Sam will be fine with it. Plus it's only Soccer 4 Tots isn't it? He can pick something else later on."

"Like cricket" I said.

"Or baseball" Eric countered.

"Yeah…I kind of hate to burst your bubble, but no one plays baseball in New Zealand. It would have to be softball."

"Oh."

"There's always basketball I guess. It's not huge here, but we do play it."

"Yeah, maybe." Eric went back to poking my side so he could make the baby play with him. He seemed to be having a good night playing his weird baby-version of soccer on the couch. It was nice, because he'd been a bit distracted for the past week or so and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why. I just hoped he wasn't going back to the States or anything.

EPOV

The house situation was really fucking me off. I'd honestly thought that by the time I had some money through from the States there'd be something to buy. But that wasn't the case. I was pretty sure Maudette was now trying to hide from me and talking to other realtors hadn't produced anything useful either. I was now spending any free moment I could get trawling through real estate listings on the internet in a desperate attempt to find the perfect place. But it just wasn't fucking working. And I felt like I was running out of time, the weeks were flying by now and the countdown to Sookie's due date, or 'happy-happy-freedom day' as she had named it, was well and truly underway.

At least Sam was happy where he was for now. And he was big enough now that I could kind of interact with him, even though it meant prodding Sookie in the process. It was really fucking amazing playing with his foot and having him kick back at me. Sookie tried to tell me that he just did it because I was an annoying person with pokey fingers, but I think he liked it. He was probably getting a bit bored in there, just hanging around, upside-down, waiting to be big enough to be born. I think he liked our little games, even if his mother sighed and sounded annoyed about the whole thing.

But she was calling him Sam more and more. I was tempted to point it out to her, but I didn't like to gloat. Well…maybe not over this anyway. Just in case Sookie decided to get all defensive and declare he was being called one of those fucking weird names she seemed to like.

And at night, sometimes, when Sookie was asleep I'd talk to Sam and tell him that I was doing my best to find a new place, I really was.

I was sitting in the office, trying to work out how to end an email to Clancy without actually writing the words 'don't be a fucking retard about it', when the phone rang, and it was the last person I was expecting to call me.

"I must be an absolute sucker for punishment" Maudette said, after I answered, "Because I've been asking everyone I know if they have something suitable for you, and I think I finally have it."

Given what she'd shown me before, I wasn't expecting much. "OK" I said. "I guess I'll have to see it though."

"Are you free this morning?" Maudette asked.

"Yeah, I can meet you in about thirty minutes" I replied, figuring I'd get this email finished first and maybe take out some of the swearing and insults before I sent it. Or maybe not.

"Great" Maudette said, and then she paused. "You did, uh, say you were interested in, well, properties with renovation potential didn't you Eric?"

That didn't sound fucking good. "Yeah, I guess" I said slowly, wondering just how much potential there was in this one.

"Terrific. See you soon then!" Maudette disconnected and I was left to wonder what the hell she was going to show me.

When we got to the place I found out pretty quickly. Yeah, it had a lot of something. I guessed you could call it potential. It needed a fuck-load of time and money spent on it to get it up to standard. It was fucking perfect.

After we'd looked through and Maudette was waiting expectantly for my thoughts I turned to her. 'I'll have to show my wife" I said.

"Well, of course. So just let me know when she's available and we'll set it up. But I wouldn't wait too long. The Trust that owns this is looking to dump it asap, so the auction is next week. They're not hanging about."

"OK. I'll figure something out" I said, as we got back into Maudette's car to drive back to her office.

SPOV

I was having a day off in order to let Irene and Judith run classes on their own. Judith had taken to it like a duck to water, not only was she really good with the kids, but she was one of those people who was able to just talk to anyone. I had never figured out how she and Sarah and Caroline had ended up like that and Bill and Portia had missed out, but I guess that was families for you. They didn't always share out all the good genes. At any rate, Judith was now firmly ensconced as part of my Jumping Beans team telling all and sundry that she was my sister-in-law and it was so much fun working with family.

So I figured I could have a day to do stuff. What stuff I hadn't quite decided, although I did have appointment with Russell in the morning and we were going over the birth plan.

"So I'll see you there?" I asked Eric, as he was walking out the door.

"What?" he asked, turning to look at me, and then he must have realised what I was talking about. "Oh yeah" he said. "It's at eleven, isn't it?"

"Yep" I agreed. "And you can take me for lunch afterwards."

"OK" Eric said. He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then turned to walk out the door without saying anything else.

"Are you OK?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I'm fine Sookie" he said. "See you later." Well, he didn't sound all that fine, but there wasn't much I could do about it as Amelia stomped over at that point demanding to know where I'd put the polar-fleece jumper that was part of her uniform.

I dropped Amelia at school and Felicia at pre-school and then I had nearly two hours all to myself. I was almost giddy wandering around St Luke's until I realised I had nothing to buy and there was no point looking at any clothes for me. In the end I bought some baby clothes and some new cot sheets and treated myself to a hot chocolate in the café.

Just before 11am I parked in Mt Eden and walked over to Russell's offices. Eric wasn't there yet, which somehow didn't surprise me. He was thinking about something and I just had no idea what it could be.

With about a minute to spare Eric swooped in the door and once again, all eyes turned towards him as he walked over to me. Stupid hormonal pregnant women, I thought.

Russell called us in and did the usual checks of my blood pressure and checked with his nurse that my urine test was OK as well. And then it was down to business.

"So…birth plan" Russell began. "I think we'll just, um, see how it goes. As we discussed, we might need to kick-start things off, so the baby doesn't get too big."

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"And your labours weren't long before…so, no reason to think anything would be that different" Russell said confidently.

"Yeah" I said. And then we spent the next few minutes chatting about what I wanted. I always got the impression that at a certain point Russell was just going to do what he thought was best anyway, so there wasn't a lot of point making really concrete plans, and luckily I'd never been someone who'd gone into labour expecting to play my own soundtrack or have 20 candles in the room or anything like that. I was pushing a baby out and surroundings were really secondary considerations.

And then we got to pain relief. "So…what did you have before?" Russell said, checking his notes.

"Um…" I said. "Just gas…well, a bit of gas…" I wasn't that fond of it, the mask was kind of annoying.

"Mmm" Russell said frowning. "You should maybe think about something more. If this baby is, um, larger than your previous ones you might find it all, um, quite different. I strongly suggest you should use the best pain relief that's available."

"Oh" I said. "You mean, um, an epidural?"

"Yes" Russell comfirmed.

"Oh. No, no I don't think I want one of those" I said. "I mean, if I _have_ to, but otherwise…no…" I trailed off. I had my reasons.

"Sookie" Eric said, deciding he'd butt in as well. "If Russell thinks it's a good idea then maybe you should consider it." Yeah, sure, I thought. Take Russell's side why don't you?

"Um, no. I just…I'd rather not if I can…" Russell looked at me for a moment, and then realisation dawned on his face. "Oh, I think I remember" he said, turning to the screen and scrolling through some text.

Crap, I thought. Did he take notes on everything?

"What?" Eric asked, leaning forward in his chair and looking at me with a concerned face.

"Nothing" I said. Eric didn't look convinced.

"Ah, yes" Russell said. "We had this conversation before. I remember now, why you don't want one."

"Why?" Eric asked, still looking worried, and probably thinking that I'd pass out or something if they stuck a needle in my spine, and while I wasn't exactly thrilled about the idea of the needle, that wasn't my main concern.

Russell just looked at me. Great, now I'd have to confess. "BecauseImightwanttorunaway"I said quickly.

"What?" Eric asked.

I sighed. "Because I might want to run away." Russell snickered and I refrained from yelling at him that he couldn't talk until he'd actually been at my end of the bed.

"Run away?" Eric asked. "Where to?"

"Well, it's not like it's a real plan…it's just, I don't want to be tied to stuff. If I'm in pain I want to go somewhere else."

"But…where?" Poor Eric, I think he was worried he was going to have to lock the door to the delivery suite in case I suddenly took off while no one was looking.

"The bathroom" I admitted. "I like it in there. It's quiet."

"You…sit in the bathroom?" Eric asked.

I nodded. "Until they make me come out." I always felt much happier sitting on the toilet and enjoying my own company. It wasn't glamorous, but it was what worked for me.

Eric still looked confused. "But you could still get an epidural?" he asked.

I sighed. "I still don't want one. But we'll see when the time comes I guess" I hoped that would appease both of them.

We made it through the rest of the appointment. Eric agreed he'd cut the cord, even though he didn't seem that thrilled at the idea. After it was over and I'd made the time for the next appointment, we walked around the corner to Circus Circus café to have lunch.

"It's OK" I said, as we sat down after ordering our food. Well, Eric sat down, I sort of lowered myself gingerly part-way down, then half-fell the rest of the way down. "I'm not really going to run off. I just don't like the idea of being tied down."

"Yeah…OK" Eric said, not really looking at me.

"You sure you're OK?" I asked.

"Fine" Eric assured me, and I let the matter drop.

When we'd just about finished our food, Eric asked me what I had planned for the afternoon. "Not much" I said. "I thought it was going to be nice, having all this time to myself, but honestly, I'm not sure what to do with it. I should maybe go and look at bassinets as we still need one of those."

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "Do you want to come and see something with me?"

"See something?" I had no clue what he was on about, although I wondered if it was code for sex, and while that would have been nice in a way, I just wasn't sure I could manage it. My hips were killing me, my back felt kind of wonky and I mostly felt ungainly, not sexy.

"Mmm" Eric said, by way of an answer, which of course wasn't an answer at all. "I just have to go and make a call" he stood up. "Just, um, don't go anywhere" he said, and then he walked outside to the footpath where I could see him talking to someone on his phone. I drank the last of my decaf coffee and worried that Eric now had the idea I'd run off at any opportunity.

He came back and said "We'll meet her there" so I stood up, still none the wiser about what was going on.

"Who?" I asked, but what I got in reply was "We'll take your car as its closer."

So, because I had no idea where we were going or what we were doing, I had to hand my keys over. I didn't mind Eric driving my car. Well, not too much anyway. Mostly I was just annoyed about the mystery outing to see the mystery woman. He wouldn't have had time to hire security guards for the delivery suite, would he?

The drive only took two minutes. Eric pulled up in a street not far from the village, full of lovely old villas that were probably worth a small fortune. I bet Debbie Pelt lived in one that was just like the ones here.

There was a middle-aged woman in a suit standing on the footpath, with a cellphone to her ear and a set of keys in her hand. She looked remarkably like a real estate agent. Huh.

"So I thought" Eric said. "Well, I said…you know, before. We should look at property." He pulled out the keys and got out of the car.

"Oh, OK" I said to the thin air, and got out myself.

"Hi Maudette" Eric said to the woman on the footpath. "This is Sookie." We shook hands. "So, do you want me to just let you in?" she said.

"That'd be great" Eric said, flashing her a winning smile.

Maudette turned and walked up the path of something that was definitely not a beautifully restored villa. It was, to put it bluntly, a shithole. I was briefly worried that as she unlocked the front door it was going to fall on her head. I'm sure it had once been a villa, but right now, it was pretty hard to tell.

Eric walked up the front path, and I followed him. As I drew closer something occurred to me. "Eric" I said. "It's got two front doors. It's been made into flats."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, stepping aside so I could enter. I didn't particularly want to go first, but I didn't feel like I had a choice.

"So…what?" I asked. "You get one, I get the other? I'm not having all the kids with me, all the time." I laughed. Eric didn't.

I looked around. Yeah, I was probably being mean to shitholes.

"So you're thinking _investment_ property?" I asked Eric, trying to clarify why we were here. "I can't say I disagree, I mean, property is always a sound investment, but I think this might need a lot of work and really, wouldn't we need something that just needs a coat of paint before we rent it out?"

Eric pursed his lips. "No, I was thinking for us" he said.

"But we don't need flats" I said, poking my head into a living room that contained old furniture, ripped net curtains and a weird smell.

"It doesn't have to stay as flats" Eric commented, hovering behind me as I carried on to the next room. It wasn't any better in there. I kept going and found a kitchen. It had probably been the height of modernity in about 1959, although I wasn't sure the sagging ceiling didn't pre-date that.

"Lot of work though" I said, looking around. "And you'd have to rip out the other kitchen I guess…" I looked at Eric, he shrugged. "Although maybe you want me chained to two kitchens, who knows?" I poked around a bit more. "There's a dead mouse in that corner" I said, walking out of the room.

"One less thing for Bob to bring with him" Eric said cheerfully.

I walked through the door which connected the two flats and found it much the same on the other side. "That's rotten" I said, pointing to a windowsill.

Eric came over to have a closer look. "How do you know?" he asked.

I poked my finger into it. "You shouldn't be able to poke your finger into wood" I said to him. "That was my first clue."

Eric sighed. "I don't think you're really grasping the potential here" he said.

"Seriously? Potential for what? Disease?"

Eric sighed. "I thought you'd like it" he said. "You always say you like villas."

"I don't think this has been a villa for a long time Eric. I suspect it's been more a…a…half-way house for drunken losers for the last twenty years or so. It's kind of…decrepit…" I was trying to find a redeeming feature, but it was a losing battle.

"Just think about it Sookie. Look out there", Eric pointed out the window. "We could build a nice big deck and sit out there in the summer…"

"Have sex on it…" I added sarcastically.

"Well, whatever you want, of course" Eric agreed. "But it's got a lovely flat backyard." I walked closer to the garden to examine the backyard.

"It's got a hulking great Totara tree in that corner" I said.

Eric came and stood behind me. "Oh, well we can cut _that_ down, of course" he said dismissively.

I turned around. "Yeah, not likely. Remember how you thought we were communists? Actually we're all tree-hugging hippies, which you will find out pretty quickly if you try to cut that tree down as a tribe of them will move into the garden in protest."

Eric looked like he didn't really believe me. "Fine, we'll just trim it then" he said.

I looked around the house again. "Really?" I asked Eric. "You like this house?" I just couldn't get my head around it. I didn't even know he wanted to move.

"Yeah, I think it could be great Sookie. We could turn that other kitchen into a nice laundry room. We could probably even fit the freezer inside it." Oh, well that did sound good, I had to admit. Having spent winter going out to the garage to use it hadn't been all that great.

"Mmm" I said. "But I don't know about moving." I started to walk back towards the front door. "I kind of like our house."

"This could be our house" Eric said.

"I don't know. I'm not really getting a good vibe off it. I think I need to see some more houses."

We stepped outside and I looked at Eric. He looked exasperated. "I've looked at houses, Sookie" he said. "I feel like I've done nothing but look at houses for fucking months, and let me tell you there is _nothing_ else out there that comes close to this. Nothing! Everything else is just too fucking expensive, or too small, or in the wrong neighbourhood. Maudette's sick of me fucking calling her to find out what's new on the market. You just…you have to look beyond the house, Sookie. We can fix the house. It's the classic worst house on the best street, so it's worth the time and money we'd have to put in. It's got fucking potential, and you know it. It's in a good school zone, it's in a cul-de-sac, and it's got a fucking park on the corner of the street, what more do you want?"

Months? He'd been doing this for months? "I want to be involved from the start, Eric, that's what I want. But right now I just want to go home. Come on." I walked over to thank the real estate agent, who went to lock the place again, but not before reminding Eric that the auction was the next week and there was a lot of interest, and then I walked to the car, with Eric walking behind me.

The ride back to Eric's office was silent, but that was OK. I had pretty much nothing to say to Eric. Well I had lots I wanted to say to him, but I held my tongue.

I pulled up on the street across the road from the offices. Eric climbed out, and then stuck his head back in the car. "Just think about it, Sookie" he said again. "I really have been doing this for all of us, and I was trying to…well, I thought it was easier if I just found something first." He looked at me, waiting for a response.

"Uh-huh" I managed. "See you at home, then." Eric shut the door of the car and I drove off. "Arsehole" I muttered under my breath, as I drove down Mt Eden Road.

**Tauranga is pronounced Tow (like towel)-wrong-ah**

**Totara is pronounced Toe-ta-ra**

**Well, that's about as close as I can get them!**

**We use the word flats for small apartments that have either been made out of a larger house, or blocks of flats, anything up to say a two storey block of flats. Bigger than that we'd probably call them apartments, but we're flexible.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	68. Chapter 68

**A/N Just to give you an idea of the kind of chaos some of this is created in, while I wrote the last bit of the chapter today the baby emptied an entire drawer of plastic containers, broke into the pantry, stole two muesli bars and crawled off with them after the cat, who is now being poked with the bars while I pretend I can't see. It's a slightly better scenario than the one earlier where I found her dancing on the coffeetable with the remote control for the TV in her hand, after she'd turned the volume right up. Yep, I officially have a delinquent toddler. I blame fanfiction - where was the mother?**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, starting to worry my kids might be worse.**

EPOV

Showing Sookie the house really didn't go like I'd fucking hoped it would. It was possibly my own fault, I'd been kind of swept up in the whole househunting thing, and then when it came to showing her the place I think I kind of forgot to prepare her. I should have maybe taken her shopping first, like I did when we bought the car. I tried to ignore the voice in my head that was saying that the car wasn't in the same league as a whole house, and walked back to the office.

Sookie had said that she'd see me at home, so I figured that was something. She could have said 'enjoy your new house, asshole', which would have been worse. I walked back inside and sat down at my desk. Fuck. I'd totally fucked the whole damn thing up. I glanced at my emails, noting there was one from Clancy. I read it, and then read it again to marvel at his stupidity. I started to type a reply and then thought, fuck it, I'll just call him. So much easier to tell him what I really think of his ideas that way.

SPOV

I drove the rest of the way home, fuming silently. Or not so silently. "Arsehole" I muttered a second time.

I parked the car in the driveway, got out, and walked up the steps to the front door. Bob suddenly appeared at my feet so he could get in the door first. "He's just a total arsehole wanker" I said to Bob. Bob looked at me in agreement, because he knew exactly who I was talking about, and then he wandered off down the hall. Yep, Bob was on my side.

Someone else wasn't though. "Complete and utter selfish prick" I said, as I was kicking my shoes off in the bedroom. Something kicked me though. Hard.

"Oh, don't you take his side" I said to the baby. "You know he should have said something earlier, rather than go off on his own and just show me the house he's buying at the last moment. Seriously, do you want to live in that hovel?"

The baby kicked again.

"You've been seduced by promises of your own room, haven't you Sam? Don't listen to Daddy, he bullshits for a living."

There was a bit of prodding.

"Yeah, well. He likes to talk me into stuff, and sometimes that's OK, but not this time."

The baby went back to making a lot of swooshing movements which could have been him trying to defend his father or could have just been him marvelling at the fact his hand moved around. Either way, I decided to ignore him.

I wandered around the house looking for something to do to pass the time. I was feeling a bit keyed up from all the…well, the annoyance I had built up inside me.

God knows, Eric Northman was nothing but annoying.

I stuck my head into Amelia's room. Her Barbies were piled on the floor where they'd been dumped in a hurry that morning. Maybe I'd clean those up, I thought.

I lowered myself down to the floor and started sorting through all the stuff and returning the dolls and their many, many accessories to the storage box. Near the bottom of the pile I found one poor doll who'd been stripped and left naked. It didn't seem right. I thought I'd find her something nice to wear.

I sorted through the dolls' clothes looking for something to wear that wasn't too slutty. It was a bit of a losing battle. In the end I went with a pink satin dress with black lace that didn't show off too much of her cleavage. She needed shoes though. The shoe selection was even sluttier than the clothing, and I couldn't decide between black or pink shoes. In the end I went with black. It was a little bit classier.

Her hair was a mess though. I shuffled over to Amelia's dressing table and found a small hairtie and pulled the doll's blonde hair back into a ponytail. "See" I said to her, "Doesn't that feel better?" I sat her on the floor so she could watch me round the others of her tribe up.

I picked up the blond Ken. He'd been jammed into the pink convertible, only his legs were too long to go under the steering wheel and he couldn't fit in the driver's seat, so he was stuck being a permanent passenger. Serves him bloody right I thought. He's a poor design, obviously.

When this particular doll at arrived at our house, possibly from Eric's first trip back to the States if I remembered correctly, he'd been dressed really nicely. He'd had a grey suit and a black shirt and a pink tie and shoes. There had definitely been shoes.

Only now he was wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else. His hair stuck out at a weird angle and I'm pretty sure if he could have grown facial hair, he would have. So that was pretty much standard for our house I thought.

I looked around for his shoes without any luck. "You should make more of an effort" I told the doll. "Barbie's all dressed up and you look like a slob. And I bet you've been trying to persuade her to move into that empty cardboard box in the family room, the one Felicia's been using a cage for the T-Rex, by spinning her some sorry tale about how it could be her dream house. Yeah, not likely."

I chucked more clothes and shoes in the storage box, but nothing of Ken's was turning up. "I don't know where your suit went" I said to him. "But don't you blame Barbie for not picking it up from the drycleaner's. She's not responsible for your crap."

I sighed and picked the Barbie up again. "I don't know, Barbie" I said to her. "Don't you ever just want to run away and live in that all-female commune the Polly Pockets are running in the other storage box? It seems like it might be a nice place to go for a break?"

I looked at the doll's unblinking blue eyes and felt slightly ridiculous. But still, I had the feeling she understood me. Or maybe not.

"Yes, I know it's endlessly fascinating to stare at Ken with his shirt off" I said to her. "But doesn't it ever frustrate you that he thinks he can talk you into anything just by wandering around like that? It doesn't? Possibly that's because you're a lump of plastic."

I gave up and packed the dolls away in their box. Not sure of what to do next I grabbed my cleaning supplies and headed to the bathroom to give it a good clean.

Cleaning the shower was a bit awkward for me these days anyway, in fact just fitting in the shower was a feat in itself. But the job was never made any easier by all the shampoo and shower gel bottles that had collected on the shelves because someone, someone who wasn't me, could never be bothered using up that last tiny bit in the bottle and would just start on the replacement one I'd carefully placed next to it. It infuriated me no end, but it didn't matter how many times I'd suggested nicely, Eric never bothered going through the whole routine of turning the bottle upside down and removing the cap to squeeze the last few drops out.

Most times I just let it go and made sure I finished the bottle of whatever it was up, but today, well today it just symbolised all that was annoying about the man. "Fucking Eric Northman!" I yelled, from the confines of the shower. That felt a bit better.

I set about scrubbing everything down, and by the time I was on my hands on knees scrubbing around the edge of the shower with an old toothbrush, I felt a bit better about everything.

Those almost-empty shampoo and conditioner bottles might have signified just how annoying Eric was at times, but they were also reminders of the fact that I was never going to change him. Not at all. Well, apart from the fact that living here seemed to have made him scruffier, but I liked to think he was just hiding his tendencies to look like a bum really well from me when I first met him.

So, for better or for worse, I was kind of stuck with him, and all his annoying habits including the ones which led him to go house-hunting without me. All I could do was cope with it in the same way I coped with the unused shampoo, and figure out what my level of acceptance was. I didn't think it was quite like the shampoo, I wasn't going to just give up and let him do it all his way, but there had to be a way we could compromise, surely?

EPOV

I delayed going home for as long as I could without looking like I'd been late on purpose. Well, I hoped I had. It was a fine line.

I opened the front door and Sookie didn't immediately stomp out to yell at me, so I took that as a good sign. I called out "Hi!" but there was silence from Sookie, all I had was my normal greeting from Felicia which consisted of her running around the corner and throwing herself in my direction while I scrambled to get ready to catch her.

"Daddy!" she yelled as she launched herself at me.

"Hey, Leesh" I said, catching her with both arms. "So, um, where's your mother?"

"In da kitchen. There's besahnyah for dinner. Frow me!"

"Uh-huh. In a minute. What's her, uh, mood?"

"Mood?" Felicia asked sounding confused.

"Is Mommy happy?" I tried.

Felicia nodded enthusiastically. "Uh-huh, really happy. Frow me!"

That seemed odd. "She's not, um, grumpy?"

Felicia looked thoughtful. "Yeah…" she said slowly. "She's grumpy. Frow me!" I gave up, obviously Felicia was not the barometer of Sookie's moods that I'd hoped she be.

Eventually I managed to persuade Felicia that I'd thrown her in the air enough and I started walking down the hall, I briefly considered going into the kitchen where I presumed Sookie was, but I still wasn't sure about the reception I'd get. Amelia appeared out of her room and looked at me. "You're home" she said.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"It's nearly dinnertime" Amelia added.

"I figured that. Is, um, your Mom OK?"

"Mum. She's really fat now. I didn't think anyone could be that fat."

"But is she, you know, grumpy?" I asked.

Amelia just shrugged. "I don't know" she said. "I'd be grumpy if I was that fat though. It can't be nice." With that she wandered off to do something else.

I carried on into the bedroom and tripped over Sookie's fucking shoes because she'd just left them half-sticking out from under the bed. I didn't know why she always insisted that shoes lived at the bottom of the bed and not in the closet, but I got fed up with fucking tripping over them. Sookie was never sympathetic and just said I should watch where I was putting my feet. I couldn't persuade her that I wasn't the problem.

"Fuck" I muttered as I kicked Sookie's shoes back under the bed.

"You decided to come home then" Sookie's voice said behind me. She sounded grumpy, but I wasn't sure whether that was because of the house, or the fact she'd just watched me kicking her shoes out of my way. Possibly it was due to both.

"Mmm-hmm" I said, taking off my tie and waiting to see what the prevailing mood in the house was.

Sookie sighed and sat down on the bed. "I'm really annoyed about you springing that house on me" she said.

"I get that" I said. "But I still think it's a good buy." Fuck it, I thought. I'd just stick with my opinion and she could fucking yell at me for it. I figured the yelling was coming at some point, so best to get it over with.

Sookie didn't yell. She just sat and watched me as I took off my shoes and put them away, in the closet, so no one would trip over them. "I understand that too, Eric" she said, eventually. "I mean…I get that you were trying to do something nice…but sometimes you kind of just...assume we're all following along in your wake."

I wanted to argue that point, but at the same time I knew it wouldn't do any good. I'd kind of fucked up the way I'd introduced the whole idea of the house and I didn't think that arguing with Sookie over my supposed failings was going to do much at this point in time, other than delay dinner. And I was kind of hungry.

So I didn't say anything, I just carried on getting out of my suit and changing into jeans and a t-shirt. "So what I was thinking" Sookie continued "was that you need to sell me properly on this idea."

"What, the house?" I asked, looking at Sookie.

"Yeah. The idea of moving for a start, and why that house…if you even want to call it a house, in particular. I figure that's right up your alley, isn't it? Telling me why it's such a great idea. So give me your best business case and I'll see what I think. Only don't bullshit me, because I'll know if you do."

Sookie did her best to look stern and failed miserably. "Really, Sookie?" I asked. "Would I?"

"Yes, you bloody would. And you can't take any clothing off while you're presenting. That's not allowed." With that she pushed herself up from the bed, which looked like an awkward manoeuvre these days, and started to walk off.

"My clothing or yours?" I asked Sookie's retreating back.

She looked back at me over her shoulder. "Either, Eric. Clothing stays on while you make your pitch. Dinner's in five minutes." Having issued her challenge, Sookie left the room.

Dinner was the usual affair. Sookie had made lasagne which the kids normally ate without much complaint, although Amelia was pretty slow. Telling her that she'd be considerably faster if she didn't spend half the time updating us on who'd said what to whom and why at school didn't seem to persuade her stop talking, all it got me was an annoyed glare, which was the same fucking annoyed glare I got from Sookie half the time, but I didn't really have anyone I could point that out to. Not anyone who'd appreciate hearing it, anyway.

Maybe Sam would. Maybe he'd commiserate with me that they were capable of stomping around acting all annoyed when it suited them. That was a nice thought in a way, that I might have someone who was actually vaguely on my side occasionally. Maybe he'd even be good at interpreting Sookie's moods?

I let most of the chatter wash over me though, and even ignored the exchange between Sookie and Amelia over some Barbie dolls that had, apparently, been put away incorrectly, or before Amelia had finished playing with them, or something or other. I had my mind on other things. I was figuring out how I was going to get Sookie to agree with me.

I had some ideas so when the kids were in bed I got out my laptop and sat at the dining room table. I figured it wouldn't take too long, that we'd go through a few properties, talk about what I wanted to do with the house we'd seen that day, and it would be all be fine. Sookie, however, had other ideas.

First up, she wanted to know about the financial side of things. "So tell me why we need to spend this money, Eric?" she asked. So I went through all the calculations I'd done about adding onto this place, versus buying a new house and how we were never going to recoup that money back in capital value.

"Uh-huh, but what about the fact you're suggesting we own two properties at once for a time, how are we going to fund that?" Sookie asked.

I opened up the spreadsheet I'd been working on which projected our borrowing, versus income with allowances made for the cost of renovations etc. All of which interested Sookie enormously and she asked quite a few questions. Sometimes I forgot she had a background in banking.

Maybe this wasn't going to be as simple as I thought.

Where I came unstuck that first night was when I started to outline what my plan had been for the initial search for a house. "So I wanted something in the Grammar zone…" I said.

"Why?" Sookie asked.

"Why what?" I asked, wondering where I'd lost her.

"Why the Grammar zone? What makes Auckland Grammar such a great school, other than everyone says it is? And anyway, it's only the baby who's going there, what about Epsom Girls' Grammar? Is that a good school too? What makes either of them more desirable than Mt Albert Grammar?"

Fuck. I hadn't really looked into that. "Well, it's…" I said, and then I stalled. "Probably time for bed. We'll carry on tomorrow night." So much for thinking this would only take a couple of hours, I was going to have to do more research.

"OK" Sookie said. "We'll do that then."

The next day was spent trawling through the Education Review Authority website reading reports and looking at various other websites so I could present my case to Sookie. I was starting to think that this was going to be more work than the presentation we'd had to put together when I went back to Shreveport.

Once again I sat down with Sookie after dinner and went through it all. It was frustrating when she wanted to sit and read the same reports I'd already read, but I managed to resist the urge to tell her to just take my word for it, and simply sat there while she absorbed the information. "I think you're right" she said in the end. "If we're spending that kind of money it would make sense to go for the Grammar zone, not just for the education but for the re-sale value of the home."

"Thank-you" I said, patting myself on the back for a job well done.

"But what else could our money buy in that area?" Sookie asked. "I want to see what my options are."

The next day was Friday and I had a few clients I needed to see, but in between my appointments and dealing with a rather fucked off Clancy who was still annoyed I'd yelled at him the other day for being a moron, which had made Indira send me an email telling me to lay off him for five minutes, I spent my time compiling a list of the other properties for sale in the area, plus a list of past sales that Maudette had given me.

I took it all home to Sookie and again after dinner we sat there so she could go through all the information and see what was out there.

"So, see?" I asked her. "The properties that have already been renovated are selling for a fuck of a lot more than the ones that haven't, more than the cost of the renovations themselves. People will pay through the nose not to have to go through the fucking drama of renovating a place."

"I don't blame them" Sookie grumbled.

"But you get it, though, right?" I asked her. "You see what the advantage is in doing it yourself?"

"Yeah…" she said. Yay, I thought, I've done it. This is it and we're on the same fucking page. "I'd kind of like to see though" she said.

"See? See what?" I asked. She'd already seen the house. She hadn't been impressed, of course, but it wasn't staying like that.

"See other houses. I mean, you got to. I just want to…have a look around, see what the options are. Poke a few other windowsills, you know?" Sookie looked at me. I sighed. I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but probably if I'd thought that someone who didn't even like buying fucking groceries over the internet because she couldn't actually examine each individual banana was going to be happy just looking at some pictures of houses, I'd been fucking fooling myself.

"Yeah, I know" I said.

So Saturday, after soccer with Felicia we left the kids with Andy and Halleigh and went out to see some open homes. Andy was sitting in their dining room reading the paper and waved cheerily as we headed out the door. Fucker.

It was horrible. Every house we went to was jam-packed with other couples all trying to look in every closet and there were fucking realtors stationed at the door trying to push brochures in your hand and telling you that 'the vendors were super-motivated to sell, but there'd been a significant amount of interest in the place so pricing expectations were high'. That was real-estate speak for hand over all your money if you ever want to buy a place in this market.

"See" I said to Sookie, when we were visiting the third place on our list. "It's a fucking nightmare. I was trying to spare you all this…hassle…" I said, as a young couple, who looked fucking desperate, pushed past us to get into a bathroom that was smaller than the fucking ensuite we had now.

"Yeah…it's not so bad" Sookie said, sticking her bump out so some guy would make way for her. She wandered into a bedroom, and started moving the curtains aside. "Bad mould in here" she announced loudly, which made the other couple in the room start whispering to each other. Sookie grinned broadly and wandered off. Fuck, she actually enjoyed this?

We saw six houses on Saturday afternoon and I'd had more than enough. "They were all really crappy" Sookie said on the drive back to our place.

"Uh-huh" I said. They really had been.

"But maybe tomorrow's ones might be better" Sookie added.

Sunday we left the kids with Calvin and Judith. For a while there Judith and Sookie got involved in a discussion about what they should be doing with the dinosaur theme for the coming week's classes, and I hoped that maybe we'd be calling off the house-hunt. But no such luck. Sookie ushered me out the door and into the car and we were off again.

We saw five more houses and they were all pretty crappy and overpriced. I was getting fed up with Sookie exclaiming about the lack of decent storage in the bathrooms and I think she was getting fed up with my pained expression. Well, I know she was, because she told me I'd better cheer up or she was leaving me in the car as we went into the third house. The car didn't sound that bad, actually, but I couldn't see that sitting out there while Sookie looked at the house alone wouldn't lead to good times later on.

By Sunday night I was exhausted and fed up with the sight of other people's houses, realtors and other people generally. Especially other people who were all looking for another house themselves and who all looked at Sookie and me as though we were the enemy. Well, I wasn't, I didn't want any of those houses. I wasn't sure about Sookie.

Sookie made roast lamb for dinner which went some way towards making me feel a bit better. I tried to have a sneaky game with Sam too, but got told off for playing while she was cooking. In the end I had to make do with throwing Felicia in the air a few times while she screamed in my ear, and eating many, many imaginary cupcakes that Amelia kept producing from her kitchen.

After dinner I didn't even bother getting the laptop out. I was over it, I really was. Either I went to the auction on Tuesday, or I didn't. In either case if I never went to another open home in my life, I'd be fucking grateful.

I sat on the couch as Sookie tucked the kids into bed and lay back and closed my eyes. I felt Sookie sit down next to me, it was kind of hard not to these days. But I'd learnt it was best to keep that one to myself.

I opened my eyes and looked at Sookie. "I think you are right" she said.

"About…?"

"Well, everything. I think that is the best buy…the, uh…well the flats we looked at last week. So you'd get Calvin to project-manage the renovations?"

I nodded. "And do the basic ripping stuff out and minor building jobs."

"Uh-huh, and an architect?"

"Calvin gave me a few names. We might even be able to get away with just using a draughtsman for the plans, I had a few ideas and we won't be changing the external structure too dramatically. That would push through the time to get Resource Consent." Thank fuck I'd actually looked that one up.

"OK then" Sookie said. "Better go to the auction on Tuesday." And that, thank fuck, was that. I'd made my case and she'd gone with it.

"See" Sookie said a little while later, as I brought her a cup of tea. "If you'd just included me from the outset, it would have been fine."

"I would have had to visit a shit-load more open homes, though" I muttered, taking a sip of my coffee.

"Yeah…you don't like that, do you?" Sookie asked, looking at me like I was strange. "I love it. It's a whole excuse to be nosy."

"I have no interest in anyone else's house other than my own" I said, taking another sip.

"Mmm" I guess that's where we're different" Sookie said.

"Yep" I agreed.

"But different is good…sometimes" Sookie continued. "So long as we agree on the important stuff."

"Uh-huh."

"And if we don't agree, then that's OK too, right?"

"Yeah…what are you getting at Sookie?"

"Well…just that you need to give me a chance to agree or disagree with you next time, don't just present the done deal and hope I'll be happy with the wonderful surprise you got me. I'm not that good with surprises. Look at the whole baby thing. You tried to spring that on me and that didn't work either. I like my babies to be planned."

"Um…it's not the same thing." I tried. I thought a baby was kind of different to a house.

"Yeah, but it's the surprise factor. Just don't sit and think about it all and then talk to me. Talk to me first. I'm actually quite nice to talk to."

I kissed the top of her head. "Yeah, you are. And OK, no more surprises." I put my cup on the coffeetable and poked around trying to find Sam's foot.

"I think he's busy" Sookie said.

"Nope, he's there" I said, feeling the foot push back.

"You're as bad as each other" Sookie muttered, giving up and watching TV.

**Thanks for reading!**


	69. Chapter 69

**A/N There's really not a lot of news here, so I guess I'm stuck making small-talk about the weather. It's quite warm again, having forgotten it's meant to be Autumn. So that's pleasant. Only other thing to say is thanks for all the reviews!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

The morning of the auction Eric was kind of focussed and I had the feeling that he wasn't really listening to what I was saying about going to buy a bassinet. I let it slide.

Felicia wasn't quite so forgiving. "Daddy!" she said, as she stood next to him in the kitchen. "Daddy! DADDY!" she was getting increasingly loud and I wasn't sure how Eric was managing to tune her out.

"Mmm?" he said in the end, looking down.

"I's going with you or Mummy?" Felicia asked.

"Um…Mummy's taking you today" Eric said, looking over at me for confirmation. I nodded. Felicia sighed theatrically. Occasionally Eric took her to pre-school while I did the school drop-off and those were the best days, as far as Felicia was concerned, the days when she got to have Daddy all to herself in the car for a bit.

Disappointed with the answer she'd been given, Felicia started to shuffle out of the kitchen. "Can you find your sweatshirt, please" I said to her.

"I don'know where 'tis" she informed me before wandering off. I wondered whether I should say something to Eric, something that might make him feel better, but I couldn't think of anything. So I kind of rubbed his back as he was rinsing his cup and went to see if I could find Felicia's sweatshirt.

We tracked the sweatshirt down to where it had been shoved into her backpack the day before, and then I went to supervise Amelia getting ready. She was dreadful if left unsupervised for too long, she'd get distracted and then get annoyed with me when I tried to hurry her along.

"How do you want your hair done today?" I asked her, grabbing a hairbrush off her dressing table.

"Just down" Amelia said.

"No, that's not practical. Do you want pigtails, a ponytail, a half-ponytail, what?"

Amelia thought for a bit, and then sighed. "I want a French braid."

"OK" I said, thinking that of course she did, she couldn't have something easy. As I was doing Amelia's hair, Felicia drifted in to watch. I'd already scraped her hair back into a couple of slightly wonky pigtails, and all she needed was a pair of shoes and we were ready.

I didn't see Eric again until I was about to leave with the girls. "So, um, good luck" I said to Eric, after I kissed him goodbye.

"Yeah. I'll be fine" he said. "It's only an auction." He gave a kind of half-shrug, like he went to auctions every day of the week.

"OK, well, I'd better get the kids in the car and head off then."

I dropped the kids off to their destinations, and then came back to get my van and drove to the War Memorial Hall in Mt Eden to set up for the day's classes. All the time I was worrying about Eric and the auction that morning. Mostly I was worried about what happened if we didn't get the place. At this point in time we kind of had all our eggs in one basket. My tours around the open homes of Mt Eden at the weekend had showed me that there was a lot of rubbish out there, and the places that weren't rubbish, well, you had to fight tooth and nail to buy those.

I'd been chatting to another couple who were due to have their second baby in December. They'd been looking for four months already and had nothing to show for it. They were full of stories about auctions where the interest was so high that places were selling for $200,000 above the current valuation and where so many people had turned up to bid that they couldn't all fit in the auction rooms.

But there wasn't much I could do from where I was, singing and dancing with a bunch of toddlers. Well, I was kind of rocking from side to side as best I could. My dancing days were kind of behind me.

EPOV

I'd never actually bought an entire house before, and certainly not by bidding at auction. The condo I'd owned in Shreveport had been a fairly straightforward purchase, and I hadn't had to bother buying anything when I moved to Auckland because Sookie had never actually got around to suggesting I move out. And she kind of came with a house, so that worked out for everyone.

But this, well this was kind of huge. I'd spent all that time persuading Sookie that not only was it a good idea to buy a new place, but that this was the new place we needed to buy. This was fine, if no one outbid me. If they did, then, fuck. It was back to the drawing board I guessed. Or not, because perhaps Sookie would decide that it wasn't such a great idea after all.

It seemed like a lot of responsibility. More, somehow, than when I'd been in Shreveport pitching for the contract with the bank and trying to make sure we didn't get pushed out of the way by Victor and his team. Because this, well, this was for my family.

I did a couple of hours work in the office, as best I could. There was an email from Clancy that I needed to answer. He seemed to have calmed down from the previous week and was mostly just doing what I asked him to do, which was a fucking improvement. Indira was keeping an eye on him as well, and I was pretty sure the pair of them could handle it.

The auction was being held in some realtor's offices in the city. So I drove in and parked in one of the parking lots and found where I was supposed to be. There seemed to be quite a few other people milling around. I gave my name to a girl with a clipboard and took a seat in one of the chairs that had been set out in rows, facing a kind of plinth where the auctioneer would stand.

The first few lots were all apartments and the bidding was half-hearted. The people interested in those were all looking for investment properties.

After those had been sold, or not sold, there was a small break while the agents gathered amongst themselves. I could hear a guy in the row in front of me talking about how he was going to develop the property he was looking to buy by moving the house off the section and building three townhouses. It was a few moments before I realised he was talking about my house.

Yeah, not if I had anything to fucking do with it.

Eventually they announced our house was about to go under the hammer, and I sat up a bit straighter.

Possibly it was jumping the gun a bit to call it our house, but I wasn't sure what else to think of it. The-place-I-hope-to-buy-if-everything-works-out seemed a bit clumsy, and Sookie's description of 'shithole' seemed a bit mean, if probably fairly accurate. But I had plans to fix that. Once of course, I'd bought the house.

The auctioneer asked for an opening bid, and the guy in front of me, the one with the plans for the three townhouses, raised his hand.

The auctioneer asked for an increased bid, and some other guy over the other side of the room, threw up his hand. Then on the next bid another guy jumped in.

Fuck, there were a few people here who were interested. I just hoped that wasn't going to push the price up beyond what I was comfortable with.

I waited for a while to see where the bids were going. One of the guys had dropped out, leaving just the developer and the guy on the other side. And me, when I raised my hand.

The guy across the room, glanced at me, but the guy in front never turned around. He just stuck his hand up to bid against me. Then the guy on the other side had his turn, and it was back to me. We did that one more time, and then other side of the room guy dropped out.

So now there were two of us. And the guy in front didn't seem to show any signs of wanting to drop out any time soon, possibly because his plans for the property didn't involve also funding extensive renovations while not releasing the capital from his current property, because he couldn't move his wife, two kids and small baby into a shithole. Because that was my problem, there was a limit to how much I could spend because I had to fund the whole price of it from surplus cash and borrowings in the first instance. No way could I ask my family to live in it while they were tearing it to bits.

Well, Bob perhaps. I might move him. If any more mice turned up I might have to.

I bid again, willing the guy in front to shake his head and say he was out, but he didn't. He bid against me. Fucker. So now it was back to me, and I was fucking running out of cash. I raised my hand. And hoped for the fucking best.

The auctioneer asked for another bid. I watched the guy in front start to raise his hand, hesitate, and then raise it anyway. Fuck. So not the outcome I wanted.

One last bid, I thought. Just one last one. I raised my hand without hesitation, wishing that the guy could actually see me, because if nothing else maybe the impression I wasn't going to give up in the next two minutes might put him off continuing.

The guy looked down at something in his hand, it seemed to be a list of numbers, and I wondered if he'd reached his limit. Obviously not, because his hand went up.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. This was it, this was the limit I'd agreed with Sookie. But it was so close. So fucking close. I wasn't going down without a fight.

We could cut back somewhere. God knows, Bob ate like a fucking king. And maybe there was something hidden in the roof space we could sell. I wondered what the going rate was for old doors and whether the developer sitting in front of me would buy them off me.

The auctioneer asked for an increase in the bidding of $10,000. I doubted we had enough doors to fund that. I did a quick mental calculation. "Five" I called out, raising my hand. We could go another $5,000, I was sure of it.

The auctioneer looked at the guy in front of me, and asked if he was going up by five as well.

I held my breath. The guy looked down at his paper again. I watched as his shoulders slumped down slightly, and then he looked up at the auctioneer and said "Nope, I'm out mate."

"Are we all done?" the auctioneer asked the room, as he looked around. No one raised a hand or said anything.

"Sold" the auctioneer said, repeating my last bid and banging his gavel down on the plinth. Thank fuck for that, I'd actually bought the fucking place.

SPOV

We had a small break between sessions, so I wandered into the kitchen to make a cup of tea for me and Judith. Irene had taken the day off, and I was keen for her to take as much time as she needed now, because once the baby was born, she and Judith were going to be on their own for a while.

I checked my phone and there was a text from Eric that just said "Got it. Be there later with paperwork."

"Well" I said to Judith, as I handed her a mug and waved to a mother who'd just arrived a bit early for our next class, "you can congratulate me as I am now the owner of a hovel."

"Congratulations" Judith said. "At least it's a big hovel. And about to be an open-plan one, I think. Cal said that when settlement comes through he and Eric are off to knock some walls down."

"Well, Calvin might be. I'm not sure about Eric" I said. "I don't know that knocking walls down is his thing." I couldn't really imagine it, I was sure he'd much rather watch Calvin.

"Phft" Judith said, sipping her tea. "They're blokes; of course they want to knock shit down."

"I don't know. Did you ever see Bill knock any walls down?" I asked.

Judith thought for a minute. "Yeah" she said. "But it was the neighbour's wall and he used Mum's Cortina stationwagon to knock it down."

"You were there?" I asked. That was something we didn't talk about. Ever.

"Yeah, me and Sarah were in the back. He'd taken us to the movies in the school holidays, 'cos Mum had told him to, that's why he was allowed the car. Fuck, it was funny. We had Bill bribing us for days with stuff so we wouldn't tell Mum, and then she noticed the broken tail-light anyway, and put two and two together, and had to go and apologise to the neighbours. She was ropeable. Bill blamed Sarah and me for making too much noise and distracting him, but honestly, I'm pretty sure he was fiddling with the radio and that's what did it." Judith laughed. "We were pretty bad at winding him up, but I don't think we were car-crash bad."

"Yeah. Shit, I just remember Bill would never talk about why the neighbours hated him."

"No, they were not pleased at all. There was much muttering about teenage boy-racers from them" Judith said, nodding to another mother who'd just arrived.

"Yeah, well they used to let everyone get their licence at 15, remember? Jason got his the day after his 15th birthday. Total nightmare that was. But he did occasionally give me a lift to school in that old Ford Escort he had, and that was kind of cool. If you could cope with him bunny-hopping it down the Great South Road."

"Well, you were probably nicer to Jason than I was to Bill. Fuck, he just annoyed me. He was Mum's favourite and he always took Sarah's side in _everything_. That's the trouble with big families. Everyone splits into groups and its all-out war at times."

"Yeah, I guess" I said, draining my tea. "Right, off to wipe down some of the mats" I said, grabbing the bottle of cleaning stuff and the cloth. It was kind of nice to talk to Judith about Bill…sometimes, anyway. She was probably one of the few people left who cared about him but hadn't canonised him after he was gone. It was just a simple fact that he'd been a big part of both of our lives and nothing was going to change that.

Part-way through the next class Eric arrived. I didn't even see him walk in the door, but I knew the moment he entered as I could see the heads of the other women scattered around the hall start to turn towards the entrance.

Their gazes all followed him as he made his way across to where I was helping a mother swing her child around the monkey bars. Even the one lone stay at home dad who was part of this group was looking at Eric kind of wistfully, but it might have just been that he was wishing he was the one in the suit, and not the one dealing with a temperamental toddler who did not want to share with the other kids.

"Hey" Eric said, looking incredibly uncomfortable amongst the group of women, toddlers and colourful climbing equipment dotted about the place.

"Yep" I said, preparing to stand up. It was harder and harder to manage easily these days. I felt kind of idiotic. Eric took pity on me and held out his hand and helped me up, which made a kind of collective sigh echo around the hall. I felt like pointing out it was his bloody fault I looked like this in the first place, so a hand up was the least he could do under the circumstances, but I didn't like to sound ungrateful.

I walked over to the table we had set up as a kind of check-in desk, where we got the parents to sign in and laid out the hand-outs for them, and heard one mother saying to Judith "Is that your brother?" Yeah, she was a bit confused about the situation, but I was leaving Judith to sort that one out.

"Well done" I said to Eric, pulling him down so I could kiss him. Briefly. I wasn't sure how many people were still watching us and I wasn't about to give them a show. God knows they were probably all trying to work out why he was with me in the first place.

"Yeah, thanks" Eric said. "It was bit close at the end but we got it, and I only had to go $5,000 over our budget."

"Oh" I said, a bit taken aback. I thought we'd set a limit and would stick to it. But I'd delegated the auction to Eric and it was a bit late to give him a hard time about it all now. It could have been worse. I shrugged. "Oh well" I said. "We'll just have to cut back a bit, and if the worst comes to the worst I'm sure there's a great market for blond, blue-eyed babies in parts of Asia. What am I signing?"

Eric looked a bit worried. "Um…" he said.

"I'm kidding, Eric. I'd sell one of the ones that can talk before I'd get rid of the baby. Hand over the stuff because I'd better get back to it." Truth be told it wasn't a big class and Judith was coping OK, but it was going to be bubbles at the end of this class, and I liked blowing bubbles for the toddlers, so I wasn't about to miss out on the fun bit of the day.

Eric handed over the contract for the house and I had a quick look at it. "It's OK?" I asked him. I trusted he wouldn't get us into anything stupid.

"Yeah. They wanted a quick settlement and we don't have to sell anything, so it settles in two weeks."

"Cool." I started signing and initialling where I had to. "There you go" I said, handing it back to him when I'd finished. Eric checked through it to make sure I hadn't missed any, and then he bent down to kiss me on the cheek. "See you at home" he said, before he strode off through the door without looking back, or noticing just how many pairs of eyes were boring holes into his back.

The kids were a bit confused about the whole house thing when we told them that night. "But we have a house" Amelia said.

"Yeah" I agreed "But this will be a different house. It'll be bigger."

"Will my room be bigger?" she asked.

"Um. Probably not really" Eric said. "It's more about the number of rooms…and making sure there's one for everyone."

"Oh" Amelia said, completely disinterested now that it didn't really benefit her all that much. She went back to eating her dinner.

"Baby in new house?" Felicia asked.

"Yeah, the baby will get a room in the new house" I said to her.

Felicia frowned. "You goin' too?" she asked.

"We all are" Eric said to her.

Felicia thought for a moment. "Leavin' baby here?" she asked.

"No, the baby comes too. We're all moving to a new house. Together" I tried. Felicia still looked like she didn't really get it, but she stopped asking.

"Can I pick what colour I want my room?" Amelia asked when it was bedtime.

"Possibly" I agreed.

"Pink and purple?" she asked.

"Perhaps." It sounded a bit like something she'd grow out of really quickly to me, but we might have to go with it for a while to soften the blow of moving.

"And flowery curtains. In blue. I like blue too" Amelia added. Maybe not that one I thought, Amelia's clothing choices were bad enough sometimes, I didn't think she needed to be let loose with interior design as well. "We'll see" I tried.

"Can I pick tomorrow?" she asked.

"Um, it'll be months until we get to the stage of picking paint and stuff" I said to her.

"Oh. Oh, well…what's the point in having a new house then?" she grumbled.

"You'll like it when you get it" I told her.

She gave up after that and I tucked her in. When I went to do the same to Felicia she'd moved on from the house thing, but was stuck on where the baby would sleep. "Baby's gettin' a room?" she asked.

"Yes, in the new house. So he doesn't have to share the one here with Daddy, because Daddy still needs a space to work."

"No share wif Daddy!" she said vehemently.

"Yeah, that's what I said. He gets his own room. But at first he'll sleep in the room with Daddy and me."

"Wif you?"

"And Daddy."

"Not Daddy."

"Well, Daddy sleeps where I do." That kind of stumped Felicia for a bit. "I no sharin'" she said in the end.

"You won't have to; you get your own room. And the one in the new house might even be bigger." I wasn't sure quite what the final layout of the place was going to be, but it wouldn't be difficult for her to have a room that was bigger than this one. It was pretty small.

I tucked Felicia in, and Eric appeared having just said goodnight to Amelia. I left the pair of them to it and went to the bathroom, and when I joined Eric in the living room there was a cup of tea waiting for me.

"Well, congratulations to us" I said, raising my mug, so Eric could clink it with his.

"We should probably have had champagne, except…" Eric trailed off, looking at my bump.

"It's expensive and you spent all our spare cash on a rundown villa."

"Yeah, that too" Eric sighed.

"But it'll be a nice villa, once you and Calvin rip some of the walls out."

Eric frowned. "Calvin said I'm helping?"

"Judith did. I told her I didn't see it happening, but she thought you'd want to because you're a bloke."

"I hope you told her I'm not a bloke."

"No, actually I should have pointed that out to her. I take it guys don't knock walls down then?" I sipped my tea and looked at Eric.

He shrugged. "Maybe we do. You'll have to wait and see." He gave me a big grin and then took a mouthful of his coffee. I snuggled into his side.

"Well, you did a good job with the auction" I said. "It would have been a shame to miss out on the place."

"Yeah" Eric agreed. "It would have." He wasn't saying it, but I could tell he was feeling pretty pleased with himself now that we'd actually got the place.

I turned to the TV. "What on earth are we watching?" I asked Eric. It looked…kind of bloody and disgusting, but there was probably no point trying to find the remote control. Eric got to the living room first, so it would have been well hidden by now.

"It's a movie" Eric said, which didn't really enlighten me much, except that it was probably not something I would have picked for myself.

"Nigella might be on" I tried. "And you know…she licks things and stuff…"

"Mmm, but I started watching this" Eric said, putting his arm around me and laying it on top of the bump.

"Well I think we know how it finishes. Everyone dies. Horribly. With missing body parts and everything. So we could maybe forego the ending and try another channel?"

Before Eric could answer the baby kicked Eric's hand. "See?" I said to him. "Your mate wants to play. And while you and Sam are busy doing that, I could have the remote."

"No, that was Sam voting for this channel. And the remotes pretty lost I think, I couldn't find it earlier."

I sighed, and tried shoving a hand between Eric and couch. "Distracting me with sex isn't going to work until the end of the movie, Sookie" he said.

"I'm looking for the remote" I grumbled. I couldn't feel it back there so I didn't know what he'd done with it.

The baby kicked again. "Fine!" I said. "You two watch your stupid movie; I'm going to read my book. I heaved myself off the couch, with a shove from Eric, wandered into the bedroom and came back with my book. After a bit of re-arrangement I got myself comfortable again. The baby was kicking up a storm, obviously now looking for his usual nightly entertainment.

"Sam's trying to play with you" I said, and Eric obliged him by poking the kicking foot a few times.

I opened my book but got distracted by what was on the TV. "That head doesn't look at all real" I commented.

"No, but I guess not many actors are signing up to be actually decapitated" Eric replied, giving the baby's foot another poke.

"They could use CGI" I countered.

"It would be hard to make it look realistic rolling away like that" Eric said, without looking away from TV.

I shrugged and looked at my book again, except that I was distracted by the noise from the TV. "She's loud" I said to Eric. "And she's screaming A LOT. I don't think it's called for."

"She just saw a head bounce past. She's probably a bit traumatised."

"But it didn't really look like a head, so I think she's overdoing it a bit."

"Well, maybe come back to me when you've seen a head go past" Eric said, giving my bump another poke at the same time. A small foot kicked him in return. I wondered when they'd get bored of this game.

And then something occurred to me. "You know there'll be blood, right?" I asked Eric.

"What?" he asked. "I'd expect it if a head comes off, yeah."

"No. When a baby comes out. How good are you with blood?" This was the problem with the whole having a baby with someone else thing, Eric was kind of missing out on the joys of an ante-natal class and the video that went with it. A video that had made Bill go a very funny colour and put him off food for the rest of the day.

"Oh. Oh, I'll be fine" he said, going back to poking me and watching the TV.

"Well, I'll take your word for it" I said. "And that, is a terrible looking zombie, or whatever it is. I wouldn't so much want to run from it as give it a decent meal."

"Yeah, sure Sookie" Eric said. "If any zombies ever visit us, you can be in charge of catering for them."

"Well, put a big enough kitchen in the new house and I'm sure I could feed a truck-load of zombies."

Eric looked at me. "You're excited about the house, aren't you? Now?"

I smiled at him. "I am. Am I allowed to ban people from using the brand new toilets?"

"Um…no."

I shrugged. "Just a thought. It's going to be great though, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is" Eric replied. He kissed me and then had another back and forth kick and poke with the baby.

EPOV

I'd been fucking thrilled we got the house. Really excited. It was a fucking good day. Until Sookie mentioned that blood thing. I hadn't really thought about there being blood. It was one thing in a movie, but in real life.

Fuck, I wasn't so sure about the blood.

**Thanks for reading!**


	70. Chapter 70

**A/N So yeah, chapter 70. I remember commenting at chapter 50 about how it wasn't going to be too much longer. I blame Eric and Sookie. Or possibly Amelia, she likes to talk. Anyway, we are in the final stretch, although I'm loathe to put a number on how many more chapters there will be (i.e. I don't know). So once again, thanks for sticking in there, it means a lot to me! **

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and mostly I'm nice to them. Never once have I had them deal with the trauma that is trying to get a Barbie out of her box. Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sew her hair to the packaging?**

SPOV

The Friday the contract on the house settled was kind of exciting. Eric came home with the keys that he'd picked up from that real estate agent who didn't really seem to like him very much. Of course there were a lot of keys because of the whole two front door thing. Eric put them down on the kitchen bench, next to his other set of keys and said "I went over and checked it was all locked up."

"And was it?" I asked, while spooning casserole out of the crockpot onto mashed potato. I wondered for a moment if Eric would actually answer me, because he seemed far more interested in the food I was serving up. Or possibly he was just wondering how my arms were managing to reach into the crockpot when I had to stand so far away from the bench because of the bump.

"Yeah" he said, with a sigh. "It's…well, it's kind of shitty, isn't it? The house? Or whatever they are…flats. I don't really get that term." He stopped talking and just stood there frowning.

Oh, good grief, he was just noticing that now? "Yeah, but it'll be better, when it's gutted and remodelled" I said, putting down the plate I'd filled and picking up another one.

"Mmm, I hope so" Eric said. He didn't sound convinced.

I wasn't sure what to say to him, and I needed to dish up dinner, so in the end what I said was "Well, go and get changed so we can eat."

"Yeah, OK" Eric said, drifting off to the bedroom.

Eric was still a bit distracted after dinner and didn't even spend very long telling me that Masterchef was a crappy program and it really didn't matter who won the entire series. Luckily I knew he was kidding; we'd watched through this much of the series, of course we wanted to know who won now.

He just kept sighing a lot though, and I wasn't sure that was entirely a reaction to Masterchef being on.

"Are you OK?" I asked him when an ad-break came on.

"Yeah…it's just a lot of work though, isn't it?"

"Mmm, but they're down to the last two people, so I think they're used to it now. Although I can't believe that advertising guy's still in there. After the total balls-up he made of the curry the other week, he should really have been kicked off."

"What?" Eric looked confused, and now I was.

"Masterchef" I said slowly "You know, the program we're watching?"

"Oh. No I was talking about the house."

"Ohhh! Right. Yeah, I agree, but we knew that." I snuggled further into Eric's side as Masterchef started up again, and hoped I wasn't squishing him too much. "I wish my dinners looked a bit like that" I said, pointing to the screen. "They do all that fancy stuff, and don't just plonk casserole on top of the mashed potato."

"It still tastes good" Eric said. Yeah, whatever might be worrying him he hadn't been put off his dinner earlier.

"I guess" I said, "but maybe I could add some kind of garnish." Eric didn't say anything to that, he just kissed my head and ran his hand over my bump. I wanted to help Eric, but I wasn't sure what I could do, and I was feeling exhausted anyway. The weeks seemed to be getting longer and longer and it was all I could do to just drag myself around these days. Trying to pull a rather reluctant Felicia off the trampoline that afternoon when it had started to drizzle had been about the end of it for me. I was going to be lucky to make it through Masterchef still awake.

EPOV

The day we got the house finalised I couldn't sleep at all. Partly it was due to the fact that I was stuck sharing a bed with Sookie, and most of the fun had gone out of that these days. She snored. A lot. And she couldn't sleep for more than an hour or so herself, so every so often, there'd be a lot of shuffling around, muttering, pillow re-arranging and I'd be pushed or kicked in the process.

But that night mostly I was just worried. The lawyer had said the mortgage money had come through from the bank, and the contract had settled with the vendor. I'd gone to pick up the keys from Maudette, who looked fucking happy to see me and kept asking when I was going to put our existing home on the market, as I think she was already counting on the commission for selling that one.

And then I'd driven over to check on the place that was now mine. Well, mine and Sookie's. Actually, mostly it belonged to the bank, but technically I was responsible for it.

I opened the front door. One of the front doors. I didn't think the other one did actually open anymore, anyway. I walked in and just felt…this huge weight settling on me. It was horrific. I'd never owned anything so big and decrepit and fucking smelly in my life before. Fuck, what was that smell anyway?

I decided I didn't want to know. I walked back out the door, locked it, and walked back to my car.

But I couldn't get the house off my mind. It was a huge undertaking. Absolutely huge. And there was so much going on…Sam was going to be here in a few weeks. Possibly, unless he got wind of what the new house was like and decided not to put in an appearance. I couldn't really blame him.

So I lay there, staring at the ceiling, listening to Sookie snore as her leg occasionally kicked out against my shin, and although she did that pretty much every night these days, I couldn't help but feel she was kind of punishing me for buying that stupid fucking house.

I rolled over trying to get comfortable, but it wasn't easy when the bed was stuffed full of pillows. I wasn't sure what was worse, the bed full of pillows or children. They both tended to take up too much space and push me out during the night, although the pillows at least didn't wake up and demand someone put the TV on for them.

I lay there for a bit longer just thinking through everything. I was sure that buying the house had been a good move…mostly. Mostly I was sure of it. Despite her initial doubts about the whole idea of moving, Sookie seemed almost blasé about it all now. She'd told me countless stories of watching her parents renovate houses and even shown me the photos of her crawling around on the floor aged about 9 months old, as her dad laid some carpet. Sookie had laughed at the photo and pointed out where she was attempting to put a chubby fist in exactly the spot where her dad was trying to hammer in a nail. I made a mental note to keep Felicia away from Calvin and any tools he might possess.

But I'd never done anything like this. Not that I was exactly going to be laying carpet myself, but I was still responsible for it all. If it all got fucked up, if we ended up throwing our money away, if we had to sell this place and move into it half-finished, that was all going to be at my door. Sookie was going to be kind of busy with Sam and I had to figure this out for myself.

It would be kind of nice to talk to her about it just then, just for…well, a bit of reassurance maybe. I was hopeful when she started shuffling around and moaning that she might wake up and we could chat and she could tell me one of the renovating stories from her childhood, which mostly seem to involve Jason and various cats ending up covered in paint, but she didn't really wake up. She just half-sat up, without opening her eyes, rolled over and shoved a pillow further into my side.

So it was just me awake. I moved the pillow and tossed it out of the bed, and brushed the bump in the process. And that was when I realised that I wasn't the only one awake, Sam was too.

I wondered if maybe talking to Sam would be as comforting as talking to Sookie. So I shuffled down the bed and put my hand on the spot where I'd felt him moving.

"Hey" I said, quietly. There was a lot of movement against my hand. It wasn't really kicking so much these days, I guessed because there wasn't so much room in there as there had been. "So what do you think, Sam?" I asked. "Do you think it was the right thing?"

There was a flurry of movement and I glanced up at Sookie's face, but it didn't seem to wake her up. It still fascinated me that she could sleep through all of this, all that movement going on inside her.

"I thought it was the right thing, but now I'm not so sure" I said to Sam. "I thought…I guess, I just wanted a home, that was ours. Where we weren't sharing a space for starters. Your mother says I don't share well, but I think I'm OK at it. Indira stopped shouting at me after a while. Mostly she stopped, anyway. So I just wanted...and then I got the house so now…now it's all very real."

Sam made some more movements, which I did my best to interpret. I think he was trying to be reassuring. I rubbed Sookie's stomach in return. "I think I did the right thing" I whispered to him, but I couldn't really tell whether he agreed with me or not.

"What are you doing?" Sookie's said, sounding almost as though she was still asleep.

"Talking to Sam" I told her, kissing the bump.

"You should both be asleep" Sookie said, as I moved back up the bed so I could see her face. Her eyes were still closed and I felt a little guilty about waking her up. Although it was quite possible that it was Sam who did it. He was the one bouncing around inside her, after all.

"Yeah" I agreed. Sookie opened her eyes and looked at me, and then she brought her hand up and stroked my face. "You're worried?" she asked.

"A bit" I admitted.

"About the house?"

"Yeah."

"It'll be fine" Sookie said, stroking my face again. I turned my head and kissed her wrist. "I hope so" I said.

"I know so" Sookie said. "And so does Sam."

"Well…I hope you're right" I said, trying to get comfortable again.

"Yeah…we are. Aren't we Sam?" Sookie moved my hand so it was back on the bump and I felt Sam's response.

"So we're taking Sam's word for it?" I asked Sookie.

"Yep, and if it all goes to pot we'll send him up chimneys or something to pay for it."

"Umm…that seems very Victorian, or something?" I asked, it was a weird thing to come out with.

"I loved _The Water Babies_ as a kid. But trust me, and Sam, it'll be fine. Face it, the house could fall down and I doubt we'd lose money on the land it's standing on. And we've budgeted for the renovations, including problems, so we'll be OK. And if we have to, we can sell this place early and rent for a bit. It'll work out." Sookie shuffled around in bed a bit.

"OK…so you and Sam have put a bit of thought into this, have you?" I asked, it sounded like Sookie had come up with several worst-case scenarios.

"Yeah…we did. Well, we're awake a lot at night, so we've gone through it. More than once. We're OK about it now. Sam had some very good points about the continued appreciation of property in the Grammar zone." Sookie was sounding far more awake now, and like she had been spending quite a bit of time going over all of this in her head.

"Now Sam, tell Daddy not to worry any more" Sookie said, and there was a kick, or something, against my hand. "And tell him it's sleeping time" there was another kick. "Settled then. 'Night, Eric" She rubbed her hand down my arm and then used it to readjust the pillow she had between her knees.

"Thanks" I whispered to her, but she'd started snoring again so I wasn't sure she'd heard me.

SPOV

I was up early most of the time these days. The pressure of lying down on my side all night got too much for me and I was actually better off getting out of bed and having a hot shower rather than trying to lie there any longer and ignore the pain in my hips. It was bad enough when the full-sized version of Eric decided to lie all over me at night, but the miniature version inside of me was putting a lot of pressure on my joints these days and I was feeling it like nothing else. So the day after we settled on the house was no different, I got up, had my shower, and by the time I came out of the ensuite Felicia was sitting on the bed poking a sprawled and snoring Eric in the cheek and Amelia was fretting about when breakfast was being served.

Yeah, there were no allowances made for me being the size of the house.

I lumbered into the kitchen while Amelia skipped on ahead and was standing there looking bored by the time I caught up. "You took _forever_" she said, as I tried to manoeuvre around Bob. He didn't seem to realise that I couldn't see my feet, so his kamikaze runs through them were just dangerous for both of us these days.

"Moving isn't all that easy, Amelia" I said to her. "I'll be glad when the baby's born."

"Out of your vagina" Amelia added, just to make me feel better.

"Yeah" I said, as I grabbed the loaf of bread. "Do you want toast?"

"I guess so" Amelia answered.

"What do you want on it?" I asked her, as I popped four slices in the toaster.

"Ummm…" I left her to thinking about it as I fed Bob. Amelia was never good with choices. "Honey" she said in the end. "Or…actually, one piece of honey and one of marmite."

"OK" I said, as the toast popped up and Felicia arrived in. "Daddy says s'not up time. 'Tis though" she grumbled.

"Well, it is if you can't sleep" I said to her, thinking it would be kind of nice to be Eric and be asleep right about now. I had a vague memory that we'd had some kind of conversation about the baby and the house in the middle of the night, but I was pretty sure I was getting a lot less sleep than anyone else here, and that wasn't going to change soon. Unless the baby was a good sleeper. Please let this baby be a good sleeper, I thought.

By the time Eric wandered out, looking a bit rumpled and grumpy we had almost finished eating. "You all started without me" he said, wandering over the coffeemaker.

"Yeah, well you wouldn't wake up" I said "Despite the fact Felicia was trying to poke you in the face."

"Oh" Eric said, looking like he was trying to remember.

"I's no poke Daddy…I's just…um, touchin' him" Felicia said, before taking another bite of her toast.

"You were" Amelia said. "I saw you."

"Nah, I's just doin' snuggles" Felicia said, although she hadn't finished all of her mouthful, so it was a bit muffled. Amelia understood though.

"You don't cuddle with one finger, Felicia!" she said, pointing a piece of toast at Felicia.

"Just leave it" I said to Amelia, who glared at me, but at least went back to eating her toast.

I pushed myself up out of the chair, using the table as leverage, and wandered into the kitchen to talk to Eric. "You OK?" I asked him.

"Yeah…" he said slowly, watching the coffeemaker. "I am." He put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my hair.

"Good" I said. "It's a busy day ahead."

It was school holidays so there was no soccer on this weekend. It also meant I had the next two weeks free as no kids' activities, not even ones designed for pre-schoolers, ran during the school holidays. I was thankful for that, because it meant I didn't have that horrible problem of what to do with Amelia, but it did mean that I would have to keep Felicia home with us some days as she wasn't convinced we didn't do something fun without her. If the previous holiday breaks were anything to go by, though, it would only take a couple of days before she realised that staying home just meant being bossed and pre-school was a lot better.

But I had plans for today, so after we were all dressed I got the kids into my people mover and waited for Eric to come out of the house. We sat in the car and passed the time playing eye-spy using colours. Felicia's clue was usually green, and it was usually a tree, but at least this way she could join in.

When Eric finally came down the front steps he immediately walked around to the driver's side of the car. "It's not the States" I said to him, through the car window.

"Oh" he said. "You're driving."

"Yeah, I think you'll be fine, hop in." Eric walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and got in.

"Calvin's meeting us there?" Eric asked, as I reversed out of the driveway.

"Yeah, in a bit. We've just got one errand first."

"Oh. What?" Eric asked.

"Baby stuff. We need a bassinet" I replied, as I drove up our street to turn onto Dominion Road. I'd been putting off buying one for a while, but now it felt slightly more pressing.

I pulled in behind the large Christian bookshop at the intersection of Dominion and Mt Albert roads. Eric looked confused about where we were. To be honest, it didn't really look like there was much of anything down here, there was a gravel driveway, leading to a gravel parking lot, onto which opened a few shops that were below street level. It was odd, but this was where the baby shop that sold discounted products was situated.

"Where the hell are we?" Eric asked, as I parked and hoped that I wasn't going to get stuck in any huge ruts in the parking lot.

"Shops" I said. "See, there's the baby shop over there, with the pushchairs outside it."

Eric looked. "It seems a bit…" I cut him off. "They sell mostly on-line" I said, undoing the seatbelt that I had to carefully arrange around the bump these days.

"So we couldn't order something on-line?" Eric asked, turning to look at me.

"No! This shop is literally two minutes away from our house; I'm not paying them to freight something part-way down Dominion Road."

Eric just looked at me in disbelief. "We have to save our money now, Eric" I said. He shrugged, and then he gave up arguing and we got everyone out of the car. "Why are we here?" Amelia whined.

"To buy the baby a bed" I said.

"But it has a bed!" she said. "The cot's already there!"

"But we need a bassinet for when he sleeps in our room." I wished Tara still had hers to lend me, but she'd joyously given away all the baby stuff she had stored under her house and I hadn't thought to say I wanted it when she'd done that. Or possibly she hadn't asked me. At any rate, it was probably the one brand-new thing this baby was going to get.

Eric strode across the carpark, carrying Felicia, and looking around. Granted, the shop looked pretty awful, but it sold main brands at discounted prices so it made sense to shop here. Especially given our house situation.

"I think that might be a sweatshop" he said, nodding towards the shop a few doors down.

I sighed. "Honestly, Eric, I'm not sure a room full of Thai women with sewing machines is necessarily a sweatshop." He was probably right though.

We went into the shop and I browsed through the selection of bassinets, and then tried to talk Eric down from buying the enormously expensive hammock that you had to buy a separate stand for. In the end we compromised on a bassinet that kind of swung a bit from its frame. I went to the counter to ask them to get one out of the back storage room, while I thought Eric went to pull our kids away from where they'd been playing with all the baby toys in the corner.

But when I was looking for Eric so he could carry it for me after I paid, I found him standing around beside the pushchairs. I walked over to them and found Eric looking enthusiastically at one of those Phil and Ted's buggies, he was standing there poking the mechanism that folded it up. "We don't need another pushchair" I said to him.

"No…but this one seems quite good. And you know, the other one is a bit…um, well-used looking."

"Phfft. I can clean it."

"Yeah…but you know, this one lies flat. The old one doesn't."

"I have a bassinet attachment for the old one. It's in the roof."

"OK. But see this one" Eric said, pointing to the one he liked. "Can be added to so you can put two kids in it, but they sit one behind each other, so it isn't like one of those fucking stupid wide ones." Yeah, Eric had issues with double-width pushchairs; he was always convinced they were out to get him. When we went to the Mt Eden village market day where the footpath is jam-packed with people and stalls and various bands, he'd had a couple clip him on the ankle and he was not pleasant to be around after that.

"But we don't need one that fits two kids" I said to him. He was just being annoying about this all now.

"Well…what about Felicia?"

"Felicia's outgrown the pushchair, good luck getting her into one."

Eric sighed, and I hoped he was going to walk away, but then we got accosted by a sales assistant. "You guys doing a last-minute stock up?" she asked.

"I've got five weeks!" I said, probably a bit harshly, but honestly if one more person told me I looked like I was about ready to pop I was going to find something sharp, stick it in them, and see if they popped.

"Right" the sales assistant said, "So…um, the Phil and Ted's? You like that one?" I was going to open my mouth to say no, but Eric got in first. "Yeah" he said. "We do."

So she ended up demonstrating it to us, while Eric looked enthusiastic and I probably looked annoyed. When she'd done Eric turned to me. "What do you think?" he asked.

"Um…still don't think we need it" I said. But obviously Eric wasn't really listening because he asked if we could get a discount if we bought the pushchair and the bassinet. I gave up and went to find what Amelia and Felicia were up to.

Quite a bit of money later we packed everything, which now included a Lamaze lion toy that the girls had insisted the baby needed, into the car. "I still don't think we really needed to buy the extra seat for that pushchair" I grumbled.

Eric shrugged, as he climbed into the driver's seat, having got to it first this time. "I think it was a good bargain."

Well he had a discount on everything, but I was maybe slightly nervous about letting him loose on the house now, it was possible that we were going to end up with all sorts of stuff that Eric got a bargain on, but which we didn't really need.

Still, the house was our next stop and it was the first time the girls had seen it. Amelia climbed out of the car and looked around. "It's not a house" she said in the end.

"Yeah, it is, they just changed it a bit" I said to her.

Felicia just looked around her with big eyes and clung to Eric's leg. We walked in and the smell hit everyone. "It smells" Amelia said.

"Yeah…a bit. I think it will be fine if we open some windows" I said, walking over to one and trying to push it open. It had been painted shut at some point and wouldn't budge. Maybe we'd just leave the front door open instead.

"Not our house" Felicia said.

"It is now" Eric said to her. Felicia frowned. "You gonna live here?" she asked him. "We all are" he told her.

"Oh" Felicia's face fell, as she looked around her. "Smelly" she said, sitting down in the middle of the hall and looking miserable.

"Don't worry, we're not moving yet" I said to her. "We're getting it fixed up first." I looked at Eric and he looked at me and it was pretty clear both of us were a bit worried about what that would entail.

As if on cue, Calvin walked in the door then. "Hey" he said. "Right, let's have a better look at this place." Calvin started walking around and Eric followed him. I followed Eric, and the girls trailed after me. It was a strange procession, as we all moved from room to room. Amelia repeatedly asked which one was her bedroom, and wasn't satisfied with the answer that we were changing the layout, so it didn't exist yet. Felicia kept asking if Uncle Cal was 'gonna fix d'house now?', like he could do it magically. Eric just kept nodding at whatever Calvin said, as if he understood everything Calvin was saying about supporting walls, shifting foundations and tongue and groove panelling. I was OK, until Calvin took the hammer off his tool belt and started pulling off the windowsill in one of the bathrooms to see how rotted through it was. Although I knew it had to happen sometime, there was a part of me that wanted to slap Calvin silly for destroying the house I'd paid so much money for.

Eventually I left Calvin and Eric to it, grabbed some large rubbish bags I'd brought with us from the car, and started trying to gather up some of the debris that was strewn everywhere in the hope I'd find the smell. Eventually I found a dead rat decaying in a bedroom that was a probable cause, and I kind of rolled it in some old newspaper as best I could and shoved it in the rubbish bag.

I could hear Calvin and Eric still talking about stuff elsewhere in the house. There'd been a small amount of excitement from Calvin when he'd discovered an old fridge in one of the kitchens that still worked. I wouldn't have put anything in it, but Eric said he could take it with him as a beer fridge if he really wanted it.

Poor Judith.

Eventually Calvin left to go home for lunch and the four of us, or four and a half of us, were left alone with our new purchase. "So, no second thoughts?" Eric asked me.

"No" I said, from where I'd been standing contemplating how nice it was it was going to be to have that freezer actually inside the house. "What about you?"

"I'm OK about it all."

"Even though when Calvin starts working here we're going to be entirely responsible for the Norris family household income?"

"Um…maybe I hadn't thought so much about that" Eric said, "But about the house, I'm good now. It was just…well; it suddenly felt very real yesterday."

"Yeah, I know what you mean" I said, slipping my arm around his waist. He had a waist too. Bastard. I missed mine like anything.

"Talking to Sam helped" Eric said, looking down at me.

"I know" I said. "It does. It helps me a lot. He's full of good advice."

"Really?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, plus, you know, he's just good to talk to. I talked to him a lot when you were in the States. I think that's what helped me get through it. He looked after me."

"I did kind of tell him to do that" Eric said.

"Yeah, and he did a good job of it." We stood there for a moment and then I said. "But as much as we love him, you don't have to keep buying him new stuff…"

Eric sighed. "I just thought it was a good buy…"

"Well, it kind of was, but we also kind of didn't need a pushchair that fits two kids. We're not going to really have two little kids for much longer. So…just, you know. I don't think he needs too much stuff."

Eric sighed. "I just…well, I can't do that" he said, gesturing to my tummy. "And I can see that it's kind of hard for you." I nodded, it was hard. I wanted to do it, but even so, pregnancy wasn't something you could switch off. "I just want to do my bit."

"You are" I said. "And we bought him a house anyway; he'll love us for that."

"The house was kind of for all of us" Eric said.

"Well Amelia wants to know exactly what bit is hers, although at the moment her strategy is to try to keep Felicia out of every bedroom, just in case."

"Oh, what's Felicia doing?"

"I think she's set up camp in one of the kitchens, she's hiding herself in the cupboards. I just hope she doesn't find anything too nasty in any of them. I found a decomposing rat before. I think that was the source of the smell."

Eric screwed his face up. "Oh. Fuck, that's awful. Bob's going to fucking love it here, though."

"I think we all will" I said.

We took the kids home and Eric took them to the park so I could have a rest, except that I couldn't lie down comfortably and even sitting was awkward. I ended up folding laundry instead.

I made Asian flavoured meatballs on stir-fried vegetables and noodles for dinner. Amelia came and helped me which was nice, these days she was even old enough to have a go at chopping up a few of the vegetables for me, as well as rolling out the meatballs. I got told off for the fact that the ones I did were too large, and the fact that the carrot sticks I cut weren't long enough, but other than that I seemed to do OK.

I was exhausted though when the kids went to bed. I couldn't get comfortable on the couch, and in the end I gave up and started to get ready for bed. In the bathroom I stripped down to my bra and knickers to start the nightly slathering on of bio-oil. My skin was so dry it was flaking off, and I had patches of eczema on my upper arms that were hard to get rid of. It was awful.

But it wasn't for much longer.

I was kind of lost in thought, wondering about the possibility of getting one of those fancy double sinks in the new ensuite, when Eric opened the door and walked in, wearing only his underpants and with his clothes in his hand, ready to dump into the laundry hamper. He threw the clothes in and then he took a good look at me, his eyes went from my face, all the way down my body, and then back up again. "Oh" he said.

"Yeah" I said, quietly. "I know." The view wasn't good.

Eric shut the bathroom door. "Do you want help with that?" he said, holding out his hand for the bio-oil bottle.

"Um, OK" I said. I guessed he'd already seen me now, so he might as well get the full hands-on effect as well. It wasn't really like I could hide anywhere in a tiny bathroom at the moment.

Eric knelt down in front of me and poured some of the oil into the palm of his hand, before putting the bottle beside the sink and rubbing his palms together. He started to rub the oil into my stomach gently; almost as though he was afraid he might hurt me. "I haven't seen you…for a while" he murmured.

"I know" I said. I hadn't been keen on exposing anything I didn't have to. Sure, he'd poked and prodded me, but I guess coming face to face with a bare stomach that stretched out way beyond where it had any right to was something different. It didn't feel comfortable and it probably looked really gross. I had that weird dark line running down from my belly-button too now. Not attractive at all. Poor Eric. He most likely hadn't realised this was what he was signing up for.

It felt nice though, the way he was massaging me. "Can you do my back?" I asked. "That's really dry too."

"OK" Eric said, and he stood up to move around me. I couldn't help but notice he was sporting signs of an erection. Oh. Well…I couldn't figure that out at all.

Eric caught me looking. "I can't help it" he said, shrugging. "You're hot." He moved around to stand behind me, unclasped my bra, and, after pouring more bio-oil in his hands, started to rub my back.

"I'm really not" I said, enjoying his ministrations.

"Yeah, you are" Eric murmured into my ear. "I think you're really fucking hot."

"But I'm so big!" I wailed. I felt like a beach-ball with arms and legs, not in the least like a sex-object.

"Yeah" Eric said. "I like it."

I thought for a minute. "You…like pregnant women?" I asked. I was slightly worried I'd discovered that Eric had some kind of weird fetish.

"No, I like you. You're hot. You're always hot. But I think you're really hot like this." Eric pushed his hands under my unhooked bra and around to my front so they could grab my boobs, while he pushed his groin against my bum. Yep, there was no mistaking how much he liked me about now.

"Oh" I said, kind of lost for words. "Yeah?"

"Oh yes" Eric said, still rubbing my boobs and breathing rather hotly against my ear. I was feeling rather good at this point, in fact I was feeling something I hadn't felt in a long time, and that was desire.

One of Eric's hands drifted down over my rather sticky bump and inserted itself into my knickers. Yeah, that felt nice. I'd kind of forgotten how nice that felt. I threw off my bra and leaned back against Eric and just enjoyed the pleasure that was building low in my abdomen.

"You have to tell me" Eric murmured, kissing my neck. "You have to tell me what you want."

"Oh." I still wasn't good with this, I really wasn't. I twisted around in Eric's arms, which wasn't easy because he tried his hardest to keep his hand in my knickers and I looked at him. "Just tell me Sookie" he said, and I realised he looked a little bit unsure. I guess this was kind of new for him. He was asking me what my limits were, how far I wanted to go tonight. "I just…I just want to make you feel good" he said, as he pushed his hands up to knead my boobs again. "We'll just do what you feel comfortable with."

"Kiss me" I said, and he did, bending down and managing to make it around the rather large obstacle between us. We broke apart and I looked at him. "Fuck me" I said.

"OK" Eric said, smiling at me. "I can do that."

He helped me pull my knickers off and I needed help these days. It's amazing how much you take bending at the waist for granted until it's just not an option. He kissed me again, and then he led me to the bed.

EPOV

I was kind of surprised when I walked in on Sookie in the bathroom. I'd had my mind on the house, thinking about how I needed to call the architect again on Monday because I wanted those plans finished asap so we could lodge them for planning permission, and Sookie standing there, in just her underwear, kind of took me by surprise.

She was so fucking big. The skin on her abdomen was stretched and tight looking. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to have that happen to you, to change shape so dramatically. It was mesmerising. And I hadn't seen her like that in a while. I had the impression she'd been hiding from me, embarrassed about what she looked like.

She looked fucking beautiful. And hot, definitely hot. She let me put that oil stuff on her skin, which was just as erotic as hell, and made my cock stand up and take notice of what was going on. I saw Sookie eyeing my erection when we changed places and I was worried she was going to back off, to banish me out of the bathroom until I could control myself. I wasn't sure that was going to happen in a hurry, not when she looked like that. Fuck, it was awesome.

But she let me continue, although she couldn't grasp the fact I actually found her attractive. And it was her, I'd figured out. It wasn't every pregnant woman around, most of them I didn't even notice. But Sookie was…well, I wanted to fuck her. Badly. But I'd settle for anything. I'd be happy just to get her off because fuck knows, she was struggling with carrying Sam around all day and if anyone deserved a bit of relief, it was her.

I needed Sookie to tell me what she wanted though. I wasn't sure where she was drawing the line, and wherever it was, I didn't want to push it. Yeah, I wanted to have sex with my heavily pregnant wife, but I wanted her to want to have sex with me, and I wasn't going to push her into doing it if that wasn't the case.

Luckily it was.

But as I led her to the bed, she stopped and suddenly thought of something. "Eric" she said quietly, "I don't know how we can do this…my, um…my hips…"

Yeah, her hips. They were the source of a lot of her problems at the moment. And the cause of a lot of pain for her. I felt fucking bad about her hips.

I thought for a moment about how we could do this. If I'd been shorter maybe she could have lain on the bed with her legs over the end, but I didn't think that would work. "Can you lie on your side for a bit?" I asked.

"I guess" she said.

So I helped her lay on her side, and kind of adjusted a pillow under the bump to support it, then I got in behind her after shedding my briefs.

It didn't take too long before she was responding to my hands on her boobs and on her clit, and she came with a small shudder and a whisper of "Oh".

"Yeah" I agreed. "Now, um…can you lift a leg for a bit?" I pulled up her top leg and rested it on mine. "Is that OK?" I asked.

"Yeah" she said. "Yeah, that's fine."

It felt so fucking good to be inside Sookie again, even though I couldn't exactly get very deep in this position, although I figured that too deep maybe wasn't a good thing about now. Fuck, I hoped this was OK.

Sookie seemed to be enjoying it though. And I really liked the way it felt and the view I had of her boobs when I leant over her to look. They were so fucking big.

Sookie came again, quietly, and then she said "You turn" so I braced my foot on the bed and thrust a bit faster until I came too. "Fuck, Sookie" I muttered into her hair. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

She giggled. The moaning was always good, but I liked the giggling too. "Yeah" she said. "I kind of needed that."

I draped an arm over the bump and we lay there, recovering. Then something weird happened, I felt the bump go rock-hard under my arm, just briefly. It wasn't like it was when Sam moved around, this was different. This was something else.

"Um, are you OK?" I asked Sookie.

"Yeah, I'm great" she said dreamily.

The tensing thing happened again. "Is that OK?" I asked. "Did I hurt you?" Fuck, it didn't feel good.

"Oh, no I think that's just a Braxton-Hicks contraction. You know, a pretend one. There's no pain."

"Oh." It was good to know she wasn't hurting, but it felt fucking weird. I hoped Sam was OK in there.

"I think orgasms can set them off" she said, as she tried to struggle up.

"You stay there" I said, reluctantly moving myself away from her and walking to the bathroom. I came back with a washcloth so she could clean up.

"You know" Sookie said "Sometimes I miss condoms."

"That's kind of an evil thing to say" I said, taking the washcloth back off her. "I don't."

She giggled again. "Can you get my underwear out of the bathroom?" she asked, so I brought that back for her, and helped her into it. "You know, though" she said, "You'll have to get used to them again, don't you?" She retrieved her pyjamas from under her pillow and I helped her get into those too.

"I do" I said. "I don't mind really." I did, but there wasn't a choice. It wouldn't be forever though.

"Poor you" she said, when she had her pyjama top on.

"Yeah, poor me. It's not the same."

"No, and you had to tell Russell." Yeah, I hadn't realised that part of the birth-plan discussions involved us spilling the beans on after birth contraceptive choices. Fuck, it was kind of awkward and made me feel like a teenager again. Sookie seemed to take it in her stride though and informed him we'd be using condoms until she felt ready to go on some kind of pill again.

Hopefully that would be soon.

So when Sookie was dressed and positioned correctly in the bed, I threw my underwear back on, and found a clean t-shirt and climbed in behind her.

"'Night" she said. "Well, for about two hours anyway. Then I'll be the one moving the pillows around."

"Yeah" I said. "That's OK though. And it's not for long, is it? Now?"

"No, not long. And then we'll be woken up by a whole other problem in the middle of the night."

"I guess…" I said, trying to imagine a newborn baby, and failing miserably. I only knew about, well, however old Felicia had been when I'd got here. Not that young anyway. ""Night Sookie, love you."

"Love you too" she said, and then she snuggled down into her nest of pillows.

**Thanks for reading!**


	71. Chapter 71

**A/N Well I've made it to 1000 reviews, just by hanging in there! So thank-you all for that. More than anything though, I'm just happy read this and it keeps them entertained. I get such a kick out of that, and it's kept me sane all these months I've been at home with just the baby and two grumpy cats for company.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I made it to 38 weeks but only by the skin of my teeth. I was so fed up. And I think everyone was fed up with me telling them I was fed up. Even Eric's sympathy was waning slightly.

And I'd now officially given up working, although I was still going along and hanging out with Judith and Irene for at least a bit of the sessions. I'm not sure they really wanted me there, and I got the feeling their sympathy for me was decreasing as well. And Judith was blaming me slightly for the appearance of an old fridge on the spot on her back deck where there was supposed to be an ensuite being built.

So I'd hang around at the front table and talk to the mothers as they arrived and left, and who had some sympathy for me still, and then eventually I'd figure no one needed me and I'd waddle back to my car and go home.

I'd cleaned out a lot of cupboards. It made sense if we were moving. I'd sent Eric up into the roof to pull a lot of stuff down from there and we'd sorted out a large pile of things for the Salvation Army, which they'd sent their van around to collect.

The kids had definitely run out of sympathy for me. I'd go and collect them and bring them home and try to find out what they did but it was hopeless. Felicia would deny that they'd fed her at pre-school and it would take a lot of pushing to get her to admit what she'd done during the day. Mainly, I think, because she seemed to spend a lot of time doing sand-angels in the sandpit and she knew that meant getting her hair washed.

Amelia was slightly better, as I could usually get a bit of information from her. Or at least I'd find out how many times Chloe had cried, whether Amelia was friends with Maisie or Emily or both that day, and whether Sebastian had actually acknowledged the presence of any of the girls he was forced to sit with.

Best of all was when Eric got home and I could get a bit of adult conversation. Apart from the day when I'd cleared out our wardrobe and he discovered some of his t-shirts were missing. How he kept track of them all, I have no idea. And some of the more dire specimens were really well hidden as I hadn't found them on any of my regular forays into his half of the wardrobe to retrieve the sock farm he liked to cultivate by tossing his socks in with his shoes when he took them off.

And on the day I hit 38 weeks I got Eric to bring home Burger Wisconsin for dinner so he was even more popular than usual. I was starting to find standing around cooking really difficult. As was sitting or lying down of course. Nothing was comfortable.

Eric brought the food into the kitchen and we served it up. He had the venison burger again. I was going to say something about Bambi, but Amelia wandered in and you had to be careful about stuff like that around her. She was starting to get a bit funny about what she was eating.

After dinner I cleaned up while Eric got the kids bathed. I could hear Felicia yelling "NO HAIR WASH!" so obviously it had been a sandpit day again.

I didn't think I could face an evening of sitting on the couch though, so I had a bath myself after the kids were in bed, in the hope it would help my hips a bit. It kind of did.

Eric wandered in as I was lying there, contemplating the size of my stomach as it rose above the water.

"Hey" he said. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine" I said with sigh, knowing that if I listed everything I had that wasn't fine Eric's eyes would just glaze over.

Eric sat down on the lid of the toilet. "You didn't eat much at dinner" he said.

"No. I don't really have the room" I said, pointing to the bump. I could only eat small amounts at any one time now. My appetite had dropped right off.

"Oh" Eric said, and then he just sat there watching me for a bit. Ever since we'd had sex, the last time we'd had sex, and there had been some Braxton-Hicks contractions as a result, Eric had tended to look at me as though I was a bomb about to go off, and no amount of me telling him that I was fairly certain I'd be able to tell when I was actually in labour seemed to satisfy him.

So I decided to change the subject. "I found the suit" I said, leaning back and closing my eyes.

"What suit?" Eric asked, sounding confused. "I haven't lost a suit."

"Not you. Ken."

"Ken…who?" Eric was still lost.

"The doll. You know, he's shacked up with a harem of Barbies in Amelia's room."

"Oh. What about a suit?"

"I couldn't find it. For ages. But I went through some of Felicia's stuff and her Barbie was wearing it. It was a little big on her. Maybe we need to buy her a Ken doll."

"Oh. Um, maybe?" Eric still sounded lost. "Is that weird though, that she has a cross-dressing Barbie?" he asked.

I thought for a bit. "No, I don't think so. I think she just likes Ken. I liked my Ken doll."

"You did?" Eric asked me.

"I did. But he was the '70's model, so he came with a beige suit that didn't have a shirt and was open to his navel."

Eric snorted. "How long before you made him get rid of that?"

I opened my eyes and looked at him. "No, I said I liked Ken. I let him keep his crap around the place."

"Yeah, you're fucking funny Sookie" Eric said.

I sighed. "He came with stick on facial hair; you could just peel it off when you were bored of it. Ken doesn't really prepare you for real life."

"Uh-huh. Sure, blame the plastic doll for your unrealistic expectations of me."

I shrugged, I didn't think it was too much to expect Eric to not be too prickly and dressed in raggedy old t-shirts. Still, it's easier when it's Ken and you can just pick him up and force him to look clean and tidy.

"Do you want a cup of tea when you get out?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, that'd be nice" I said, and he left the bathroom.

I woke up the next morning stiff and sore and eye to eye with Bob who was sitting on the coffeetable looking at me. I'd moved onto the couch in the middle of the night when it got too hard to sleep in bed. The first time I'd moved it was because I was worried I was disturbing Eric too much and I wanted to give him a decent night's sleep. He felt really bad and said it should have been him on the couch. But I'd discovered it was actually easier to sleep on the couch, I think because it was firmer than the bed and gave me a bit more support. So I'd taken to moving there at about 2am when the bed got too much.

I hauled myself up and started towards the kitchen, remembering to stop as soon as Bob jumped down and ran past me. He was determined to tip me off balance and I was a bit worried I would crush him when I fell.

I fed Bob, and had a shower, but which time everyone else was up and I started the daily routine of getting breakfasts and dressing small people who'd rather stay in their pyjamas, like Felicia, or wear their best dresses rather than their school uniform, like Amelia. Eric wouldn't let me dress him, so that saved me one job.

He wandered into the kitchen last, looking all rumpled and sleepy. "Morning" he said, kissing me.

Amelia, who'd been hanging about waiting for another piece of toast, said "Chloe says her mummy kisses the other mummy that lives with them. But you don't kiss Aunty Tara like that."

"No" I agreed.

"So that's weird" Amelia said. I wasn't sure if she meant Chloe's family or me not kissing Tara so I let that one go and just gave her the toast.

"How are you?" Eric asked, looking at me as though I was a bomb again.

"Alright" I said.

"You don't have to sleep on the couch" he said.

"I like it. I actually sleep better out there."

"Oh. I kind of miss you though."

"Even the kicking?"

"Sam can't help it."

Eric started making coffee and I wandered over to the table to eat with the kids. To be honest the baby was starting to slow down a bit in movements. I really hoped that was a good sign. But I had an appointment with Russell for that morning so maybe there'd be some news. He'd mentioned that he might try doing a sweep this time in an attempt to start labour, so you never knew.

Eric came to sit with us. "You're going to be OK there today?" he asked me. "At the appointment?"

"Yep" I said. "I'll be fine." Eric had client meetings he couldn't get out of. And I needed him out earning all the money he could at the moment. We hadn't exactly started the renovations yet, but it was still going to be expensive to be paying things like rates and insurance on two houses.

Calvin had been going around in the weekends to start off what he could by removing the odd wall and rotten windowsill. We couldn't really start in earnest but it was good to be prepared. I'd found out that guys do knock down walls when Calvin had roped Eric into helping. I think Eric had enjoyed it. For about the first half an hour. Then it had just really bored him. And he'd come home tired and sporting some rather magnificent blisters that caused him a lot of distress until I pointed out I had to push a baby out in a couple of weeks and blisters couldn't top that at all.

I dropped the kids off and went to wait at Russell's offices for my appointment. He wasn't running too late, and he was probably grateful for that because Sophie-Anne was there again. She came out as I was sitting waiting.

"Hi Soph" I called out to her, as she stood at the reception desk. I was obviously desperate for conversation.

"What?" she said, wheeling round. "Oh. Sookie, hello."

I took a good look at her bump. I know she was less pregnant than me, but all the same. She was tiny. I knew I hated her.

Maybe the baby didn't belong to the giant boyfriend with no neck after all?

"How are you going?" I said, heaving myself up and going over to talk to her.

"Oh, well. Brilliantly of course. Russell is _very_ pleased with my progress."

"OK, well that's good" I said, hoping she wasn't going to be competitive about stuff. Except maybe baby sizes. Possibly I could win on baby size.

"I just have to get him pinned down for a date for my C-section" Sophie-Anne said with a laugh. "You know what he's like! When's yours?"

"Oh. I, um…well I don't know. He's doing a membrane sweep today. Possibly."

Sophie-Anne frowned. "Oh. You're just having it naturally?"

"Yeah, that's the plan. I've done it before, so…why change now?"

Sophie-Anne wrinkled her nose and gave me a look which suggested I'd just confirmed all her suspicions and I was definitely the peasant she always thought I was.

"Mmm" Sophie-Anne said in the end. "Well, I must head back to work. Its plan time, of course, so we're very busy." She looked around. "Where's Eric?" she asked.

"He's busy, with work" I said.

"Still in the States?" she asked, obviously digging for what the gossip was there.

"No, just busy today. You know."

"Mmm" she said in the end. "I guess he would be. I don't really see him around much these days."

"OK. Well, see you Sophie-Anne. Good luck."

"Yes, you too, Sookie" she gave me a look which said she thought I'd need it.

When it was my turn Russell called my name and I waddled down the hall after him.

"No Eric today?" he asked, as he held the door to his room open for me.

"No, he's got meetings" I said, wondering if everyone was going to be disappointed it was just me here today. If I could have, I would have sent Eric instead.

So we went through the usual questions and Russell asked me how I was getting on. I figured now was my chance to get it all off my chest so I told him exactly how I was getting on, or not getting on. I told him I was tired and sore and really over it.

"Hmmm, well we were going to do a sweep today, I think…" Russell said, checking his notes.

"Yep" I agreed.

"Well, hop up and let's have a look then."

I pulled off my jeans and knickers, while Russell gallantly kept his back to me. It was a nice gesture, although possibly made a bit redundant by what was going to happen next and what he'd seen of me before, but at least he tried not to treat me like cattle. I managed to get myself up onto the examination table and cover my lower half with the sheet that was on there. Russell put on a pair of latex gloves and I assumed the very inelegant position of soles of the feet together and knees apart.

There was nothing dignified about having a baby.

"Well" Russell said, having a good look and a bit of a prod. "You're about…three centimetres dilated already."

"That seems to be my default setting" I grumbled. For some reason every time he examined me just before I had a baby I was three centimetres dilated.

Russell laughed. "So we'll do this sweep then…it won't be comfortable." He stuck his hand into me and did something pretty unmentionable.

"Meh, I think I've had worse smear tests" I said, as I sat up afterwards. Russell laughed and handed me a sanitary pad from the stash he had in a drawer, then went back over to his desk and sat down with his back to me again, while I tried to get myself together. All in all it was a little bit more comfortablein the room than the last examination I'd had a couple of appointments previously. I'd complained of pelvic pain, so Russell had taken a look, but found nothing. He did however comment that my pelvic floor muscles were quite impressive for someone who'd already had two kids. I'd looked over at Eric hoping he'd give me a thumbs up or something, because I figured if the obstetrician was impressed I was impressive, but Eric was looking at the floor. Not his most comfortable moment watching Russell examine me and then pass comment.

When I had made it back to the chair by his desk Russell looked at me. "So" he said "how do you feel about going to the hospital tonight and getting your waters broken? See if we can get this thing started and the baby out."

Oh. Well I hadn't been expecting that. He made it sound like a purely casual invitation, but I wasn't sure if I had a choice. I guess I did. Was I ready though?

Hell yes I was.

"OK" I said. "Sure, we can do that."

"Great, well just head to the reception desk in the delivery ward at…4.30pm and I'll see you there."

"OK. See you then." We said goodbye and I walked to reception to tell them I didn't need another appointment because I was having a baby tonight, and then I walked back to the car to phone Eric.

Only he didn't answer his phone, which kind of put a spanner in the works. And also wasn't particularly sensible when you have a partner who's 38 weeks pregnant. So I left him a terse message and headed home.

He rang just as I was pulling into the driveway, so I parked the car and answered.

"What's happening?" he asked, probably thinking I was in labour. I explained about going to the hospital that night. "Oh" he said. "That sounds…weird."

"Mmm, I think Russell has another induction booked for 7.30pm and he thinks he can knock me out of the way before she's likely to deliver. So it looks like we're going to have a baby tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Well I don't muck about, Eric. If we're going in tonight, I'm doing it tonight." I'd never had a really long labour and I wasn't about to start now.

"Oh…OK" he said, still sounding a bit shell-shocked.

"Yeah…um, we'll have to cancel tomorrow though…" I said. "Sorry." We were supposed to be going out.

"That's OK" Eric said. "I'll call them."

"Thanks, I'll be kind of busy here" I said.

I walked inside and put some washing on, gave the floor a vacuum and put the washing in the dryer. I wiped down the bathrooms. I made a lasagne and some macaroni cheese and put them in the freezer. I wrote a note about the food in the freezer and put it on the refrigerator. I folded the washing and put it away. I put the last few things in my bag.

Amazed at where all that energy had come from I sat down, only to realise it was nearly time to go and collect the girls.

I grabbed the bags I'd packed for them, and drove to pick them up. I didn't bother saying anything until I had Amelia in the car as well as Felicia.

"So, I'm going to hospital tonight…" I began.

"The baby's coming? Can I see?" Amelia asked immediately.

"There's nothing to see. Not yet. I haven't even…well, when I get to hospital it will start." Trying to explain breaking my waters to my five year was going to be too difficult.

"I thought you had to be in pain?" Amelia asked.

"Well I will be…later on…" I tried.

"Baby's comin'" Felicia asked.

"Yeah" I said. "So tonight you guys are staying with Aunty Judith and Uncle Calvin.

"And Daddy?" Felicia asked.

"Um, no. No Daddy's staying with me."

"Oh" Felicia said sadly.

"But you'll have fun with Aunty Judith. And Jessica will be there" I said, brightly. Felicia didn't reply to that.

"So_ when_ do _I_ see the baby?" Amelia asked.

"Probably tomorrow. Daddy will bring you in to meet him" I said.

"But I go to school first, right? Because otherwise how will everyone know. I want to tell them, _and then_ I want to come and see him."

"Well…we'll see" I said.

"Daddy's comin' to get me?" Felicia asked.

"In the morning."

"He's no'stayin' wif da baby?"

"Not while we're in the hospital. But we'll bring him home in a few days."

"Daddy?"

"The baby."

"Oh" Felicia said. She didn't sound enthused.

"Can I see him tonight?" Amelia asked.

"Who? Daddy?" I asked her.

"No! The baby. I want to see the baby tonight, then go to school in the morning and tell everyone at news time, and then have the day off school. Can I do that?"

"Well…no. No the baby might come after your bedtime."

"Oh. Well that's no good" Amelia said grumpily.

We got to Judith and Calvin's and I dropped off Amelia and Felicia. Felicia was a bit sad and Amelia was buzzing. Which seemed odd because last time this happened she got stuck with Felicia who she'd been trying to get me to ditch ever since. I guess she thought a brother was going to be different somehow.

Judith gave me a good luck hug and they waved me off. I drove home, grabbed my bag and waited at the front door for Eric.

EPOV

It was all a bit surreal really; I was stuck in traffic trying desperately to get home so I could take Sookie to the hospital so she could have a baby. Tonight. I felt there should have been more warning. Or something.

I guess normally you didn't get warnings, but I'd read a whole lot of stuff on the internet and they always seemed to suggest there were hours of sitting around at home watching DVDs and taking baths first. I felt like we were missing a step.

I pulled into the driveway and ran up the stairs to the house. Sookie's bag was waiting by the front door and she was hovering nearby. "I just have to get changed" I said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek and walking into the bedroom while taking off my suit in the process. I figured I was safe to just throw the stuff I was discarding anywhere because Sookie wasn't going to be around to see it all for a couple of days.

Now that was a fucking weird thought. Sookie was pretty much _always_ here, she was what made this home. I wondered how we were all going to cope without her around. But short of making her have a homebirth, and, to be honest, I wasn't really keen on the whole idea of her giving birth on the bed or the living room floor, there wasn't much we could do about it now.

So I changed as quickly as I could and then half-ran back to the hall to pick up Sookie's bag and carry it out to the car, while she trailed after me listing off a whole lot of things she wanted me to remember like the fact she'd already fed Bob and that Amelia had a mufti day on Friday, and Halleigh would watch Felicia for me on that day, and what the inventory of the food in the freezer currently was. It all sounded complicated and I couldn't really concentrate on it. Sookie finished up by telling me she'd written a note and I could just refer to that.

Thank fuck for that.

We drove to the hospital in almost silence, apart from when Sookie was trying to give me directions and yelled at me for going around the roundabout near the railway tracks by the prison. Apparently it's notorious for traffic jams when it's busy, but the traffic was fine.

I wasn't though. I was fucking jumpy. I kept glancing at Sookie. She looked the same and she sounded the same so I couldn't figure out how she was suddenly going to go into labour tonight. I wondered what Russell was going to do to her. I worried about what Russell was going to do to her.

We parked at the hospital parking lot, where Sookie had another moan about the lack of available spaces and poor planning which meant we had to walk through a whole different building to get to where we were going.

As we were heading along it was eerily familiar of the time we'd been here for the test, the one which told us Sam was OK. And now…now we'd actually get to see him. Touch him.

Well, maybe not me. I still wasn't sure about that. Newborns looked fucking tiny.

SPOV

It was always such a long walk to the main lifts from the carpark of the hospital. I kind of felt sorry for Eric as he had to walk along at a snail's pace for him to keep up with me. Every so often he'd just stop and wait for me to catch up. He was also stuck carrying my pink overnight bag and my pillow with the purple pillowcase I'd borrowed from the kids, so it would stand out against the hospital white. I liked having my own pillow, but I wasn't about to let them nick my pillowcase.

At the lifts it was tempting to push the over-ride button that would send us a lift which would take us straight to the maternity ward on the top floor without any stops, but really, that was for women already in labour. I'd done it before and it's not as much fun as you think it's going to be when you're having contractions and in pain.

I looked over at Eric as we rode the lift up. He looked nervous. I reached over and patted his arm and he gave me a weak smile. I just hoped he was OK with blood.

I felt…not nervous, but a bit apprehensive. I'd done this before and I knew it wasn't going to be pretty or painless and really, I just wanted it over and done with.

We went to the reception desk as we'd been told and they looked a bit flustered. Apparently Russell hadn't told them I was coming. I had a brief moment of pure panic when I thought they might send me home. I'd psyched myself up for this and no way was I leaving here tonight without my baby.

Then another woman showed up. "You're here to meet Russell?" she asked.

"Yeah" I said.

"Great. I'm Betty Joe Pickard, the midwife working with Russell." She turned back to the nurses working on reception. "Has Russell stuffed up again?" she said, laughing with them. "He's dreadful. So what room can we have?" she asked, and they checked their list.

Russell had said that he had private midwives working with him now. Before I'd just had the hospital ones. I think the idea with the private one was that you didn't have shift changes and personnel coming and going, but I'd never really been here long enough for that to be a problem.

We were shown a room down the corridor. It seemed a pretty standard delivery room; I may have even been in it before. I couldn't remember. I nodded to the big glass windows and said to Eric "You get a nice view." You did, you could see the harbour, and downtown and the harbour bridge and all the way out to Rangitoto.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, putting my bag down and not really looking at the window.

"You alright" I asked, hopping up on the bed.

"Umm, yeah" Eric said in the end. He didn't sound it.

"You get the Laz-y-boy" I said cheerfully, pointing to the chair.

"OK" Eric said, and he sat down.

Betty Joe took my blood pressure and temperature and then I unpacked the nightie I'd brought with me and went into the bathroom to get changed. I could have worn a hospital gown, but I didn't like them. So when I'd had Amelia I'd bought a cheap size XL nightie and worn that instead, as it was a nice soft cotton and felt a lot better than the scratchy hospital gowns. Now it was my lucky giving birth nightie.

I'm sure there are weirder things to own.

I walked back out of the bathroom and looked at Eric. He seemed very pale and quiet and nothing had actually happened yet. That wasn't a good sign. I tried to remember if Bill had looked like that when we'd had Amelia, and I couldn't really picture his face at all. I didn't think so, though. He was usually pretty good at keeping up appearances.

I sat back on the bed and pulled my cardi on. The nightie I'd bought had of course been for giving birth to babies in late summer originally. Late September wasn't that warm.

"You sure you're alright?" I asked Eric.

"Yeah, fuck. I'm, uh. I'm fine. What about you?"

"Oh, I'll be OK. When it's over." At that point Russell walked in the room. "Sorry I'm late" he said. "Traffic was kind of bad."

"I know!" I said. "I thought we were going to be stuck at the roundabout on Boston Road forever, it was just lucky a train didn't come through."

Russell went over to confer with Betty Joe, and then he came back over, pulling on some gloves. "So, nothing after this morning?" he asked.

"Nope. No contractions."

Russell looked a bit disappointed. "Let's break your waters then" he said.

I shuffled out of my knickers and lay back, and Russell went over to his tray of instruments and came back with that nasty one that looks like a medieval crochet hook. I hadn't had this procedure before, but I'd seen that at ante-natal classes.

I looked at Eric, and his eyes were watching that thing too. He grabbed my hand and then Russell shoved that thing up me and liquid gushed everywhere. So not elegant.

"OK" Russell said, taking off his gloves. "I'll come back in about an hour." He walked out of the room.

Betty Joe was muttering about getting a better pen, so she said she'd be back and she left the room as well. I managed to get myself kind of righted, sitting on the bed with a sanitary pad clamped firmly between my legs as every now and then another gush of fluid came out of me.

"Well that wasn't _so_ bad" I said. It hadn't been, I hadn't even really felt anything.

"So, uh…what happens now?" Eric asked.

I shrugged. "We wait" I said.

**A/N Rangitoto (pronounced Rung-ee-toe-toe) is an island out in the harbour which is basically just a large volcanic cone. I think it might be the one most likely (which is still not very likely at all) to blow and wipe us all out. You can go on day-trips out there and walk up to the summit if you're keen.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	72. Chapter 72

**A/N So I won't hang about and talk, because Sookie's anxious to get this show on the road!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I'm starting to worry the people I've borrowed them from might come looking. I seem to have had them a long time!**

SPOV

After about 10 minutes I could tell Eric was getting a bit bored of waiting. Me, I was kind of busy leaking large amounts of fluid and feeling like a poorly constructed water feature. It wasn't pretty, and it was in danger of soaking my lucky nightie and I was going to be gutted if I had to change into a hospital gown. I wasn't one for having candles or music or anything else in the delivery room, but I wanted two things, my own nightie and my own pillow.

And for Eric to be OK. I was a bit worried about him.

"Hey, look!" I said, pointing out the window. "The rescue helicopter's landing. I wonder who they're bringing in?"

Eric frowned and turned to look. "Oh. OK" he said, and then he turned back to me. Bum, he was harder to entertain than the kids. They would have been thrilled to have a view of the helipad. I sighed. I was going to have to bring out the big guns.

"I packed sandwiches" I said. "They're in my bag if you want one."

Eric had a look and pulled out the Ziploc bag I'd put them in. "What's in them?" he asked.

"Ham."

"Do you want one?"

"No. I'm not that hungry." I was a little bit hungry, but I didn't fancy eating too much at this point in time. Plus I wasn't sure if I could eat ham yet. Hopefully, it was only a few hours and then I could eat all the ham I wanted. That was something I was looking forward to.

We sat there in silence for a while, Eric eating and me just leaking and watching the sun go down outside.

Eric finished the sandwiches and looked a bit better. "There's some potato chips too" I said, pointing to my bag again. He pulled out the bag and opened it, offering it to me first. I took a couple, thinking I might need to keep my strength up. In case something ever decided to happen. So far, it was all kind of boring.

We talked a bit about the kids, and how they'd taken the news in the car when I'd picked them up. I said I was a bit worried about Felicia, as this was all new to her, but Eric seemed to think she'd be OK once the baby was here.

Betty Joe came back in "Anything happening?" she asked.

"No" I said "We were just having a snack."

"Good idea" she said. I waited for her to go out again, like the hospital midwives always did if you didn't need them then and there, but she didn't, she hung around, and, worse, she wanted to make conversation. I was a bit annoyed, but I didn't have it in me not to be polite, so we talked about her kids, we talked about my kids, we talked about how she'd come out from England as a teenager, her house renovations and how her son's driving lessons were going.

I was feeling slightly talked out.

Intermittently she'd put her portable whatever it was on my tummy and listen to the heartbeat of the baby. He was fine. Probably not as bored as his parents for one thing. I guessed he didn't know he was being born tonight so it was business as usual. I kind of wished I could have taught him the Morse code for 'please come out now' but it was going to take longer than I wanted to wait for that to happen.

Eric seemed OK now, he'd stopped looking scared. He just looked bored. He kept asking me if anything was happening.

"Um, tiny bit of backache" I said.

"Oh" Eric replied. Yeah, backache isn't exciting.

"Maybe try walking around for a bit" Betty Joe suggested. "Some pressure on the cervix might help speed things up."

I did my best, but walking anywhere with a sanitary pad clamped between my thighs wasn't really that do-able. They don't talk about the logistics of these things in ante-natal class when they say walking might help, do they? In the end I gave up and just stood there, hoping gravity might work. I even jumped a couple of times on the spot, but between the sanitary pad and the worried looks from Eric I stopped that pretty quickly.

Russell came back. "So what's happening?" he asked.

"Not much yet" I said.

"Oh" he said, looking disappointed. I think he was betting on me being a sure thing for getting the baby out quickly. He looked at his watch. "Um, maybe we should think about some gel…?" he said, half-addressing that remark to Betty Joe, but probably having already made up his mind.

I resigned myself to more stuff being done to me, but Betty Joe spoke up. "No, she'll be fine!" she said to Russell. "I think it's going to happen any minute now, you just come back in a bit. Shoo!" And with that she hustled Russell out of the room.

OK, well I dodged that one. Betty Joe went out for a bit to get some dinner, thank God, and Eric and I were alone again.

"At least I didn't get the gel" I said to Eric.

"Yeah…that's a good thing?"

"I guess. I've never had it, but the less they do the better I think."

"OK"

At that point two things occurred to me; one was that I needed to pee. The other was that the dull ache I'd had for a while was starting to become something more. Huh. Maybe I was starting. I looked at the clock. It was quarter past six now. Hopefully we'd be done before it got too late.

"I'm just going to the bathroom" I said to Eric.

"OK" he said, and he helped me jump off the edge of the bed where I'd been sitting so I could waddle off to the bathroom.

EPOV

I'd been prepared for a lot of things to happen when Sookie was in labour. Crying, screaming, and yelling at me had featured high on my list of possibilities. I'd even tried to prepare myself for the blood. But basically nothing had prepared me for spending an hour sitting by myself in a delivery room while Sookie sat in the bathroom.

I'd asked her if she was OK through the door a few times, and she'd yelled back that she was, although her voice was kind of strained. The nurse who she'd spent I don't know how long having a chat with earlier had gone in twice and come back out saying it was all going well. Then she'd tried to have a conversation with me. I didn't really want to talk to the woman at all, so she'd given up and gone out.

I really wanted to talk to Sookie, but it didn't seem I was going to get that opportunity. She was stuck in there, and I was stuck out here. It was fucking boring. Worse even than when I helped Calvin knock down those walls in the new house.

I really fucking wished I had something to do.

I finished up the potato chips that Sookie had brought along. I looked through her bag for anything else to eat and found some small candy bars. I ate one. Then I ate another one. I drank some of the bottle of water she'd brought with her.

I kind of wished there was coffee, but I'd seen a vending machine on the way in and I didn't trust it. Shit coffee was worse than no coffee.

Sookie had cleared out the spare room recently and I'd come home to a lot less stuff in there, although when challenged, I couldn't actually name anything of mine that she'd thrown out or given away.

I was pretty sure she had though.

But in the process of doing that she'd found the notes from the baby classes she'd done when pregnant with Amelia. She'd given me the set of notes for fathers to read. She'd been kind of apologetic when she'd done it, and probably not because she'd consigned some of my stuff to the trash. I figured it was because I wasn't the first owner of those notes. But I wasn't the first owner of a lot of the stuff I now lived with, so I didn't think one small booklet was going to make much difference now.

So I took the notes and read them through. Twice. They had a lot of pages of troubleshooting tips, which I'd hoped would prove useful. Nothing in there covered this situation though, 'what to do when your wife disappears into the bathroom and won't come out'. Mostly it was full of stuff about what to do if the cord appears first (push it back in, get her on all fours, and get to the hospital), or what to do if she is becoming dehydrated (offer ice chips). My particular favourite had been what to do if she seems out of control. The advice had been something about reminding her that this was normal and a good sign that the next stage was about to happen.

I couldn't imagine that working.

Of course Sookie would actually have to be in the room with me to offer any advice. I kind of wished they had a TV in here, which I'm sure was a bad thought to have, but honestly, if it got any more boring, sitting here by myself, I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

SPOV

I like the bathroom when I'm in labour. It's nice and quiet, no one is trying to make you hold a conversation, and once you're actually sitting on the toilet it's not a problem if you have to pee after every contraction.

Perfect.

Except that Betty Joe kept busting in and spoiling it. I really wanted to yell at her to fuck right off out of there, but instead I let her monitor the baby and tell me that I shouldn't stay in here too long if I felt like pushing. I assured her I was fine, all the while yelling at her in my head.

God, she was an annoying woman.

Eventually she left and I could get back to what I was doing, which was singing songs to myself in my head and trying to find a comfortable position when the contractions hit. I thought about how cats liked to lock themselves away in dark spaces to give birth, and I wondered how much in common I'd have with Bob's mother. We could probably sit and discuss our need for quiet and privacy for quite a while.

At first I'd felt a bit bad about leaving Eric out there on his own, but after a while I'd stopped worrying. It was tempting to shout through the door that I was fine, he could go home. And I was. I was fine. As long as everyone left me alone to just get through it.

I had a little cry. Just a few tears. I kind of wanted to go home about now. It didn't help much so I gave up and went back to singing in my head.

Betty Joe came back. I bit back my greeting of "I'm fine, piss off" and didn't say anything.

"How are you going?" she asked.

"Great" I said through gritted teeth, as a contraction hit and I struggled to stay seated on the toilet.

"Hmmm, you look a bit pushy" she said. "Do you feel kind of pushy?"

No, you're bloody pushy I thought. "No, I don't feel like pushing" I said.

"I think maybe you'd better come out and we'll get Russell."

"In a bit" I said, as another contraction hit. I really wished she had some other patients.

"I think it had better be now" Betty Joe said.

"Fine! Alright then!" I said. A tiny bit of my brain thought that sounded awfully like Amelia, but I think maybe I'd been listening to Eric too much on that subject.

I realised there was no getting out of it now, so I stood up, and waved away Betty Joe's arm, before shuffling out of the bathroom and back towards the bed.

EPOV

When Sookie finally came out of the bathroom she wasn't looking great, she was pale and sweaty and there was a distinct trail of blood running down both of her legs. I tried not to look at that.

I stood up so I could help her onto the bed, and she took my arm but she only made brief eye contact as she hauled herself up. "You OK?" I asked her, as she lay back against the raised back of the bed.

"Yep" she said, tersely, and then she grimaced and kind of lifted her hips.

"Another one?" the nurse asked.

"Yeah" Sookie said, through gritted teeth. I looked from Sookie, to the nurse, and back again, wondering what would happen next.

"I think I'll get Russell" the nurse said, as she left the room.

I took Sookie's hand and gave it a squeeze. She turned her head and gave me a weak smile, and then she closed her eyes and squeezed my hand back. Hard.

"It's OK" I said, hoping that was the right thing to say.

Sookie's eyes opened. "I want to go home!" she wailed. "I don't want to be here, and I want to go home!"

OK, this wasn't in the notes either. "Sssh, its OK" I tried, pushing some sweaty tendrils of hair off her face.

"I don't…" Sookie started to say, but she stopped, and didn't say anything else. And then Russell and the nurse arrived back in.

"OK, what have we got" Russell said, sounding incredibly cheerful. I just hoped he was going to do something for Sookie, she looked dreadful.

"I think she's nearly there" the nurse said.

Russell started pulling some gloves on and I wondered if he'd do the whole gown thing, but all he did was put on a plastic apron. I wondered if they were going to offer me one, but no one did.

"I want to go home" Sookie said again, and Russell chuckled to himself. Sookie gave him a look which suggested what she thought of that, and I was fucking glad it wasn't me she was glaring at.

Russell peered in between Sookie's legs, and the nurse stood behind him looking as well. "About…9 ½ centimetres" he said, and then the pair of them went to confer in the corner.

Sookie looked dreadful, her eyes were closed and her teeth were gritted. "Gas" she whispered.

"What?" I said, not sure what she was saying.

"I want some of the gas" she said, very slowly and very deliberately.

"Oh. OK." I turned around to where Russell was standing. "She wants gas" I said.

Russell nodded and the nurse came around to the other side of the bed and pulled the mask down to hand it to Sookie. She switched the machine on and Sookie held the mask over her face. It kind of made her look like an alien or something. And I guessed she wasn't talking to me anymore now.

"The helicopter's back" the nurse said, looking out the window.

"It's been in a few times tonight" I said, watching Sookie's face.

"Probably a car crash" Russell said.

SPOV

That Betty Joe was the most annoying person in the world. Possibly she was the most annoying person in the room too, although they were all annoying. Every single one of them. They were all talking about the helicopters and the weather and where Russell was going on holiday. If Eric asked any more questions about Fiji I was going to slap him, I really was.

I wanted to tell them all to shut up, I really did, but I couldn't form any words. Not a single one. I was stuck listening to them all twitter on about nothing while I had to put up with contraction after contraction.

The gas helped a bit. I liked the gas. And I was even managing to keep the mask on the whole time. The first time I'd used it, with Amelia, the mask had made me feel a bit claustrophobic so I'd taken it off on the breaths out. Bill had complained bitterly that I was breathing so much gas all over him that he was likely to get high.

Which was pretty funny when you thought about what happened when I had Felicia.

Eric kept stroking my hair and I really didn't like it. What I most wanted was for him to go and get a clean cloth and wipe all the sweat away once and for all. But I couldn't tell him that. I'd just…I'd lost the ability to talk and it was awful.

But the pain wasn't awful anymore. I'd given up on the gas and somewhere along the way Russell hand ended up standing between my legs. And I was pushing. On each contraction I'd hold my breath and I'd push for all I was worth. And I'd think about flowers blooming. It seemed like an appropriate image. I was convinced if I just thought about flowers opening to the sun it would all be easier.

Eric kept telling me I was doing a great job. I wanted to punch Eric. Eric needed to just shut the hell up about now and remove himself from my personal space. I did not need any help. I just wanted to get it over with.

I felt the head coming down. Wow, that was kind of a big head. I heard Russell saying something about crowning and breathing through the next contraction, so I stopped pushing for a bit. And then he was asking me to sit up. I tried to, but it hurt. My back wasn't supported and it hurt so much. "It's not comfortable" I said to him.

"Sit up, Sookie" he said again.

"I can't, it's not comfortable" I said, I was getting a bit worried. I wanted to do what he was asking, but I just couldn't.

"OK, let's get her over" he said, grabbing my leg.

"Oh, fuck it" I muttered, kind of resigned to what was going on.

EPOV

It was fucking scary watching Sookie just disappear like that. She lay there with her eyes closed and the gas mask on and just…disappeared. She didn't talk and she barely moved at all. She'd gone somewhere and wherever it was, I couldn't follow her. It was fucking horrible.

I was starting to worry that something was going wrong. Every time I glanced down there was a lot of blood. Maybe Sookie had passed out?

But Russell and the nurse seemed totally unconcerned. I didn't know if that was a good sign or not. Possibly they were careless? Shit, I wasn't sure any of this had been covered in the stuff I'd read.

So I sat there and Russell talked about his holiday to Fiji, which sounded fucking exotic, but was apparently only a two and a half hour flight from here. I forgot sometimes we were living at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

I kept pushing Sookie's hair off her face, and I told her she was doing well. There wasn't anything else I could do. It was fucking horrible.

After a while Sookie made a kind of strangled noise. "OK" Russell said, "We're going to have a baby now."

I wondered how the hell he knew that from one noise. Did they teach that at medical school, diagnosis via moans? Shit, should I have checked out his qualifications at some point. I guessed he'd delivered Amelia and Felicia OK, so Sookie trusted him, but now I was worried. Sookie wasn't talking and I didn't know if she was OK. She didn't look OK.

Fuck. What if she wasn't?

"OK Sookie, start pushing with the contractions" Russell said, as he stood looking between Sookie's legs. I didn't think I wanted to look down that end. I looked at the bump instead. The bump that wouldn't be there much longer.

I could see a kind of ripple, making its way down the muscles of her abdomen. Oh. I hadn't really ever thought about the point of contractions before now, but it was obvious. Her body was actually trying to push Sam out. That was fucking fascinating. I watched for a while, holding Sookie's hand while she grunted quietly.

She didn't open her eyes though. I wished she'd open her eyes.

"Head" she whispered, and I wondered what the fuck she was talking about until I heard Russell say "The head's coming through." Oh. Sam's head. That was…really fucking weird to think about.

He told her to stop pushing for a contraction as the baby was crowning, and she just lay there with her eyes closed, panting.

"I think the shoulders are going to be a squeeze" Russell said. "Can you sit up, Sookie?"

Sookie started to struggle into a sitting position and I put my hand behind her back to help her, but she looked a bit wild-eyed and started yelling that it wasn't comfortable.

"OK, we'll get her over" Russell said, starting to roll her towards me. "Eric, can you get her top leg?" I grabbed her leg at the same time as Sookie roared "Fuck off!" I wasn't sure who she was yelling at, but it didn't seem to bother Russell as he just chuckled. I guessed he'd heard that kind of thing before.

And probably it was him she was yelling at anyway.

"OK, we're there" Russell said, and I didn't realise what he meant for a moment as I was too busy watching her face, but her eyes flew open at the moment there was a kind of quiet mewling noise in the room.

I turned my head and saw that Russell was holding something rather disgusting and bloody which he'd thrown a cloth around. I let go of Sookie's leg and she rolled back onto her back as Russell plopped the bundle unceremoniously on her chest.

"Hi" she said to the bundle. To Sam.

I peered down. There was a tiny little face there, under all the blood and…other substances. He was just staring at Sookie, who was smiling at him. "You were amazing" I said, kissing her head, and stroking Sam's back. Fuck, he was tiny.

"I was, wasn't I?" Sookie said. "What's the time?"

"Um…ten past eight" I said, looking at the clock on the wall.

"So…that was…wow, less than two hours. That's my best time yet!" she looked at me, grinning broadly. "I knew I could do it quickly."

"Yeah…" I said. I hadn't realised this was a competition.

"And you wanted to use the gel!" Sookie said to Russell, who was still doing stuff I didn't want to know about.

Russell didn't say anything, but he handed me something that looked a bit like scissors. Oh, yeah. The cord. He'd put a couple of clamps on it and instructed me to cut in between them. It was a lot thicker than I thought it would be. And it was really hard to cut.

"They could at least give me something sharp to use" I grumbled.

Russell chuckled. "They're not the best, are they?" he agreed. Eventually I got there, and I handed them back to Russell. I wasn't sure I'd really helped by cutting the cord, but at least I'd done something.

"His nose is a bit squished" Sookie commented. "Sorry I squished your nose" she said to him.

"He's so tiny" I said, taking another look at him. There was a pair of tiny feet poking out from under the cloth they'd wrapped him in. I touched one with a finger. How could you even get feet that small and call them feet?

"Oh, he is not!" Sookie scoffed. "He's enormous. He came out of me, and look how big he is! E-nor-mous!" I laughed. "Don't laugh. I'm right!" Sookie said. "I had to fit all of that…", she waved a hand down the length of Sam's back, "In me. So he's huge."

"OK, here's the placenta" Russell said, pulling on the cord, with a fair amount of force. I figured that had to hurt, but Sookie didn't even flinch.

I wasn't going to look as it came out, but curiosity got the better of me. "That seems, quite big?" I said, looking at it.

"Yeah, it's a nice healthy one" Russell said, examining it closely. "OK, yeah. We got it all" he took it off to weigh it.

"The placenta looked good" I said to Sookie.

"Oh, good" she said. We sat there for a couple of moments until Russell came back. It seemed kind of odd when you thought about Sookie still stuck there, with her legs spread wide, but I guess she'd kind of got past any modesty in this situation.

Russell pulled the bottom half of the bed away, and put Sookie's feet in stirrups, before sitting on a stool to have a better look at her. "Small second degree tear" he muttered.

"Yeah, it didn't feel too bad" Sookie said, quite conversationally despite what was going on. "I'm hoping I'll be OK fairly quickly."

"How was the blood loss?" the nurse called out from where she was filling in forms.

"Um, about 300 mls" Russell called back, still stitching Sookie up. I wished I could picture what mills were, and whether that was a lot or not much. It had looked like a lot. It still looked like a lot if you looked at some of the bloody linen that had been discarded along with the bottom of the bed.

I was quite proud of myself for coping with it all. Somewhere along the way I'd become a bit desensitised to it all.

"Can you take him?" Sookie said to me. "I'm getting the shakes."

"Shakes?" I asked. What were shakes? That wasn't good, surely. I looked at Russell, but he didn't look up from Sookie's…yeah, best not to think. I looked at the nurse and she just said "Happens when they come out quickly sometimes."

Sookie was still looking at me expectantly. Oh yeah, I was supposed to take Sam.

I put a hand under the bundle and kind of scooped as best I could. I was worried I was going to hurt him. He was, despite Sookie's protestations, so fucking tiny.

I managed to get him flipped over so I could cradle him. OK, that wasn't so bad. I sort of felt like I should get some praise for it, but Sookie was now chatting to Russell about something. Fuck, she'd been gone for so long and she was back with a vengeance. "I've always wanted to go to Fiji" she said. "My friend Tara went there and said it's the best place with kids because all the resorts have those kid's clubs." She was shaking a bit, but it didn't seem to bother her too much, and no one else seemed to think it was a bad sign.

I looked down at Sam to find he was just staring back at me. I hadn't thought that newborns opened their eyes this early.

"Hey Sam" I said. "Welcome to the world."

Sam just blinked at me. He didn't seem too unhappy to be here. He still looked a bit disgusting but I kissed his forehead anyway. He was pretty perfect.

Sookie was still chatting to Russell and the nurse, as they finished up. Then Russell stood up and said "OK, let's take a look at him" and he beckoned me over to a kind of mini bed with a strong light above it along one wall. I very carefully laid Sam down and Russell unwrapped him and started checking him over. Fuck, I hadn't even really thought. Was he OK?

Sam got kind of poked and prodded, but he didn't seem to mind. Russell cut off the rest of the cord that was still attached to him, leaving only a tiny bit attached to a small clamp. "That'll come off in a week or so" he said.

"Oh, OK" I said.

"What's the weight?" Sookie called out.

Russell put him on the scales. "4.2 kg" Russell said, which meant fuck all to me. "That's…about 10 pounds 2" he added. That made more sense.

Next Russell measured Sam. "And he's 57 centimetres" he said.

"Well that's long" Sookie said from the bed. I guess I'd have to take her word for it.

"OK, so 9 for the first Apgar score, 10 for the second, he's OK" Russell said, wrapping him back up and handing him back to me. It occurred to me that Sam hadn't really cried yet, apart from the first whimpers. Mostly he just seemed to be taking it all in.

"I'll dress him if you like. Where's his clothes?" the nurse asked.

"Oh" Sookie said. "Top of the bag, in a Ziploc bag marked 'Transfer to Birthcare'." I handed Sam to the nurse and then went to look in Sookie's bag. Sure enough there was the plastic bag filled with tiny scraps of fabric and labelled as she'd said. I took it over to where she'd laid Sam down to put a diaper on him.

"You're organised" the nurse commented.

"Well, he is number 3" Sookie said. "The first time they dressed Amelia while I was in the shower and they couldn't find all her stuff, so I'm prepared now. Eric, can you grab one of the blankets out too?"

I went back to the bag and took out a blanket and handed that over. I watched what the nurse was doing. Fuck, yeah. He was all kind of floppy, but yet really fucking hard to control. Putting his arm in a sleeve looked like trying to shove spaghetti through the eye of a needle. Maybe I wouldn't be trying that anytime soon. Even Felicia at her most wriggly wasn't that difficult. When he was dressed in about four layers of clothing, she wrapped him tightly in the blanket and handed him back to me.

I walked back over to Sookie and she shifted over in the bed so I could sit on the edge of it. She was still smiling and happy; it was like a different person had suddenly arrived in the room.

"You were amazing" I said, leaning forward to kiss her.

"Yeah. Well I'm awesome at giving birth. High-five me!" she held her hand up and I managed to brave moving one hand away from where it was supporting Sam to oblige her. I'd known Sookie had a few skills, but I hadn't really realised that giving birth was one of them. Who knew I'd picked so well? She was pretty awesome.

Russell was sitting at the desk, filling in forms. "Have you got a name?" he asked.

"Sam" I said. "Well, Samuel."

Sookie looked at me and wrinkled her nose, and then she peered at Sam's face. "Do you think he actually looks like a Sam though?" she asked.

"Yeah" I said. "I do." Fuck, I hoped she wasn't going to fight me on this now. She'd been using the name more and more herself and surely, surely she was fucking with me on this one.

She shrugged. "OK" she said. "He's Sam."

Russell nodded and went back to writing.

I took some photos of Sookie and Sam with her sitting in the bed. She complained that she was going to hate the way she looked in them later, and didn't believe me when I told her she looked gorgeous. She did. She had a kind of glow, and not the awful green one she'd had with morning sickness. I couldn't figure out how she could go through that, through having a baby, and somehow look better at the end of it.

But she did. She looked ecstatic.

Then the nurse took some photos of all of us, and finally Sookie wanted to take some of me with Sam, so he was passed back to me and I posed for a couple before Sookie handed the camera back to me and I put it away. I was getting the hang of doing stuff while managing to balance Sam at the same time, and I thought I was doing a pretty awesome job.

I went back to sit on the bed again. "You OK?" Sookie asked me, and I nodded. I looked down at Sam, and for the first time I registered that he was Sam, he was actually here. This was the person I'd been playing with on the couch, the baby I'd worried wasn't going to be OK. This was it. He was mine.

It was such a sudden rush of so many emotions I couldn't even name them all. It was wonderful and awful all at once. For a horrible second I thought I might even cry it was so fucking…amazing. It really was. And of all the things Sookie had given me, this had to be one of the best.

"Thank-you" I said, kissing her.

"Yeah, that's OK. Although you might not thank me when he wakes us up at 4am for a feed. Speaking of which, you'd better hand him over."

I handed him to Sookie, and Russell came over and shook our hands and said he'd see Sookie in the morning. The nurse asked if Sookie wanted tea and toast and she enthusiastically said yes, and then we were all alone in the room. Sookie unbuttoned her nightgown and unclipped her bra, and then kind of shoved her nipple into Sam's mouth. It looked kind of rough from where I was sitting, but he didn't complain. She stroked his cheek. "That's to get him to suck" she said. "Sometimes they suck at sucking to start with."

He didn't suck though. He seemed to get it pretty quickly. He opened his eyes and stared at Sookie. "He's lovely, isn't he?" she whispered.

"Yeah, he is. He definitely is" I agreed.

**A/N So there you have it, Sam is there. Story isn't done yet, we'll continue on a bit to see how everyone else copes and I have promised we'll find out how they get Tray, so that'll definitely be part of this story.**

**I hope everyone has a very happy Easter! Here we get Friday and Monday off as Public Holidays. The bummer is that Monday is also ANZAC day here, which would normally be it's own public holiday, so somehow we're missing out! ANZAC day is to remember the participation of NZ's military in all the various campaigns it's been a part of. The name comes from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, formed in WW1, and they celebrate it in Aussie too. I have a feeling they actually moved their public holiday so it didn't clash with Easter. Cheaters! And for those of you in the UK, ANZAC day is when we wear our poppies, rather than in November.**

**So if anyone wants a recipe for ANZAC biscuits (cookies) because they're totally over Easter eggs, then just let me know!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	73. Chapter 73

**A/N Well I hope everyone had a great Easter and isn't too full of chocolate. The Easter Bunny visited our house and caused much excitement. We also had a visit from the Easter mousey - I still had the mousetraps under the couches from that mouse that we lost, well one of the traps ended up in a corner of the living room which I thought was odd when I first glanced at it, but it made more sense when I realised it had trapped a mouse and he'd dragged it there. Felt kind of bad, but was pleased he had decided to go for the peanut butter in the trap and not the eggs the Easter Bunny had left on our coffee table, because that might have caused a whole other kind of excitement. I have delivered appropriate lectures to the cats, but I'm not sure they were really listening to me. They were probably too busy looking past me watching the toddler do her Single Ladies dance on the coffeetable one more time...**

**On another note I had a few comments about whether or not they would have washed Sam. In the delivery room normally the baby gets a quick wipe over when they're dressed, but that's it. They don't get a bath until you end up in Birthcare, or a ward if you stay in the hospital (say, after a c-section). In the delivery room they either want them to be having skin to skin contact or to be wrapped up nice and warm ready for moving (because it's a bit of a shock after being inside all that nice warm fluid). They don't worry so much about getting every last bit of gunk off them.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It always felt so much better when you were on the other side of the birth. I felt pretty invincible at this point in time. If I hadn't been slightly tender and still leaking somewhat disgustingly, I might have been tempted to do a happy dance, but as it was I settled for staying in my spot on the bed and cuddling Sam, who was now Sam because I couldn't think of a better alternative on the spot.

And actually, when I thought about it, he seemed to have been Sam for a while. Oh well.

Luckily I'd only torn a bit, although it would have been nicer without that at all. It would have been nicer too if I hadn't got the shakes from having it all go so fast. That was kind of freaky and I was a bit worried I might drop Sam so I had to give him to Eric. Eric looked really worried he might drop Sam and seemed a bit reluctant to take him for a minute or so. He had nothing to worry about. Sam was highly unlikely to lurch himself forward at random intervals like Felicia did, and Eric hadn't dropped Felicia. Well, I didn't know about any incidences of him dropping her at any rate, so she was probably OK.

When he stopped looking so worried, Eric looked kind of smiley about the whole thing. Every time I glanced at him he was smiling down at Sam. He looked kind of goofy, but I couldn't blame him. I was kind of besotted too. He was pretty cute, even with the slightly squished nose he'd arrived with. I was fairly certain it was going to straighten out at some point, but I still felt a little bit guilty about it. Totally a dumb thought to have, I know, but I'd been a mother for a while now and I was kind of used to the guilt.

Russell finished with me and turned his attention to Sam. Eric took him the examination table so Russell could check him over. I hadn't really been thinking about anything being wrong with him, he seemed OK when he came out, and he was fine. Just large. Despite what Eric seemed to think about him being tiny. He was gigantic. I'd just pushed him out so I figured I was probably in the best position to decide.

And I felt quite proud of myself for pushing him out, and for doing it in a record time. Sure, Russell had swept away the membranes in the morning and broken my waters, but it was pretty quick all the same.

I wasn't one for hanging about in labour, that had never been part of the plan. Although I don't think Eric had believed me. No one ever takes me seriously in labour, even Russell hadn't listened when I'd said I wanted to go home.

Eventually Russell left to go and see to his other patient who hadn't even started having contractions yet, and the annoying Betty Joe buggered off to get me something to eat. I decided to have a go at feeding Sam and see what he was like at it. Felicia had taken some coaxing, and Amelia had had the idea, but it took a while for me to get any milk and she hadn't been impressed. There had been a lot of screaming while things got sorted out. Possibly from both of us.

But Sam seemed to have the idea, and Eric was kind of intrigued. After a while he said to me. "What does it feel like?"

"Um…just sucking, you know."

"Oh, OK." Eric sat and watched for a bit. Sam kind of dozed off and gave up, so I switched him over to the other side. Trying to get him to open his mouth for me was the difficult bit. I had to break out the old trick of rubbing my nipple down from his nose and over his upper lip.

"What are you doing?" Eric asked.

"Oh. Trying to get him to open his mouth for me." Mission accomplished I shoved my nipple in there before he remembered to close his mouth up again. Newborns were a bit hopeless sometimes.

"It, um, doesn't look unpleasant" Eric said.

"For me or for him?" I asked.

"For him" Eric said, grinning at me. I smiled back, but it felt a bit weird mixing up Eric and sex with breastfeeding. I guessed maybe I'd have to get used to it, or he'd back off when he realised just how goopy and unattractive I was now. And how was he going to be sharing me in that way, anyway? I didn't really know the answer to that and it worried me a little bit. It was going to be a learning curve for all of us, because I'd spent ages trying to hide this part of myself from Eric. Sometimes I wondered if I'd done Felicia a bit of a disservice when she was little because Eric had turned up and I'd tried to make that switch from mother to lover. I wasn't really sure I'd done either successfully and everything was a bit messy and complicated. Eric had appeared to take it all in his stride, and of course he'd always loved the kids, really loved them.

But he hadn't seen this before, the whole messy affair that was childbirth. Not to mention the aftermath of me sore and leaking and with a baby permanently attached to my boob. I didn't exactly feel attractive.

I looked over at Eric and he still looked great. I sighed. And then Eric leant over and kissed my forehead and said "You're amazing" and I felt a lot better.

Betty Joe burst back into the room at that point. "Oh good" she said. "You've got that under control." She came over with my cup of tea and toast, so I managed to take the cup with one hand and balance the plate on my knee. Then she left again saying she might get her own cuppa. I took a sip of tea. It was delicious. Somehow you always got the best stuff after childbirth. I was kind of famished.

Sam seemed to have given up feeding, so Eric and I did a bit of juggling with the cup and the baby, so he ended up with Sam and I could drink my tea without worrying about scalding the newborn.

"You can have a piece if you like" I said to Eric, gesturing to the toast I was now eating with relish.

"No, it's OK. You have it."

I picked up another piece and bit into it. "I think that's the first time you've ever turned down food in my presence" I said to Eric, and he shrugged. "We're officially ducks."

"Ducks?" Eric asked.

"Yeah. Years ago, when I was little, a pair of ducks landed in the front garden. So I took them out a piece of bread I ripped in two, and I threw one piece in front of each duck, but the male duck just stood there and let the female one eat both pieces. I always thought that was a nice gesture. So yeah, ducks." I took another bite of my toast.

"And?" Eric asked.

"And what?"

"And where do the various cats or Jason appear in this story?"

"Ha ha. You know, not all of my stories have Jason or cats."

"No, just most of them. But don't worry, Sam. You'll get used to Mommy's stories about her childhood with Uncle Jason and a supporting cast of idiot cats."

"I think you've got Jason mixed up with some of the cats" I said, between bites. "They were usually quite smart. And what's this mommy business, anyway? I'm still Mummy."

"I know you are" Eric said, "Although it'd be nice if we let him be partly American. Just sometimes."

"Maybe he can have crackers with his soup." Although I couldn't see how that could be better than the nice buttery toast I was currently wolfing down.

"We could dress him for Halloween?" Eric suggested.

"He'd be about a month old. I think that would count as mean. Plus, despite the number of fairy dresses we own, I'm not sure I have one that small."

"Yeah…maybe this kid could be something _other_ than a fairy."

"Well, you can try, but Felicia hasn't managed it successfully more than about once, so good luck to you. You know Amelia keeps a pretty tight rein on who's dressed as what."

"Mmm" Eric said thoughtfully.

I finished my toast and then I got Eric to get out my cellphone so I could send a few texts to say Sam was here, but I got a bit stuck on the name.

"Did we, um…what's his middle name?" I asked. I realised we'd never got past the first name. Crap.

Eric looked up from where he was staring at Sam's face. "Um…didn't you like James?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it for a middle name, I was thinking more like Jamie. I suppose it's OK…"

"Yeah…" Eric agreed. "It's alright."

"Or…" I said, "Or we could use your name?" I looked at Eric and he was back looking at Sam. I think possibly Sam was completely asleep now, but Eric seemed to find him pretty fascinating all the same.

"I don't know…" Eric said in the end. He shrugged. "You decide."

"No, you get a say too" I protested.

"Yeah, either is fine with me though" Eric said. "I picked Sam, you…you can pick the middle name."

I sat and stared at my phone. Well that really wasn't helpful, was it? I wasn't sure whether Eric was being overly modest because one of the suggestions was his own name, or whether he really didn't care, or whether he was trying to be nice to me. Either way I was a bit freaked out with the responsibility.

"Oh, God. I don't know!" I moaned, hoping Eric would just pick one.

"Well, what's on your list?" Eric asked.

"I never got around to making the list" I mumbled.

"Hang on, so the whole time you were telling me that Sam was only one name on the list, there was never actually a list?"

I sighed. "Not a paper list…just kind of in my head…although it changed a bit, but anyway, that doesn't help us now. It's middle name time, so what do you want?"

Eric shrugged again, which made the urge to punch him return somewhat. I couldn't understand why he could be so adamant about a first name and so nonchalant about a middle name.

And then I thought of something. "Or do you not want him to have one?" Eric didn't have a middle name, after all. He kind of had a theory that his parents had only cared long enough to give him one name and had lost interest after that. I'd never met his parents of course, but I kind of suspected he might have been right.

"No, I think we should give him one. So he can be like his sisters."

"Well, in that case I'm sticking Stackhouse in there too, because they've got that."

"OK."

"Yeah, OK. You're really not going to help me out?"

"It's your decision. Sam won't mind what you pick."

"OK then." I thought for a bit, typed something on the screen and thought a bit more. Changed it. Changed it back. And then finally I pressed send to let everyone know he was here.

"So do you want to know?" I asked Eric.

"Go on then" he said.

"Samuel Eric Stackhouse Northman" I said to him.

"Perfect" Eric said, looking at Sam, not me.

"Of course we can still change it" I said. "You know, that was just a text to our friends and family, it's not like we've registered the birth or anything…so, you know, if you hate it…or whatever…we can always say the phone was playing up and predictive text went screwy or something…" I trailed off, aware I was rambling a wee bit.

"It's perfect" Eric reiterated. My phone beeped to say I'd received a message.

"Tara says that she can't believe I got through it so quickly and she's coming to see us tomorrow and she wants to check me out to see if I'm actually human and not a baby-machine."

"OK" Eric said, as though he wasn't really listening. He was still mostly looking at Sam. It was kind of cute. They were both kind of cute, really.

"Jason says 'Choice' and asks why we didn't name the baby after him" I said, after my phone beeped again. "But he says, 'never mind, maybe the next one'. Think I'll text 'not bloody likely' in reply to that."

"Uh-huh" Eric said. Yeah, he and Sam were off in their own little world and I half-expected foot-poking to commence at any minute.

I was feeling a bit redundant so I wasn't unhappy when Betty Joe reappeared and offered to help me into the shower. I managed to get Eric to give up Sam for a moment or two so he could find my bag of toiletries and the clean clothes I'd put aside to wear to Birthcare from my bag. "Huh" Eric said. "Your outfit isn't in a labelled plastic bag."

"Very funny" I replied. He might make fun of me, but he had no idea how bad it got if you weren't organised.

Getting to the shower was OK as long as I didn't go too quickly, but the shower was the best. I always felt a bit sorry for those women who had surgery and ended up stuck to monitors and drips and couldn't get clean. I know Tara had felt pretty grotty after her first 24 hour labour with Charlotte, but the resulting emergency caesarean meant no shower for her at all for a while. I would have hated that. I loved getting clean under all the hospital's hot water. And despite Betty Joe pointing it out to me, no way was I sitting on that stupid plastic garden chair they had in there. I hadn't fainted yet and I had no intention of doing so now.

In fact generally, I was feeling pretty pleased with everything about now. I got myself dried and dressed, kind of slowly I have to admit, but it was OK. I twisted my wet hair up in a knot and waddled back out into the delivery room.

"Well" I said to Eric. "I guess you have to go and get the car."

"OK" he said, not moving.

"I'll take Sam" I said to him, and he reluctantly handed him over, before walking out of the room. "Check if the gate's up before you go to the machine" I called after him, "Because if it is then you don't have to pay." Eric gave me a look like he thought I was some kind of carparking thief, but the prices were pretty exorbitant, so if we could avoid paying then I thought that was OK. I needed to save my money for my horribly expensive renovations, after all.

He must have sprinted down through the hospital to the carpark because 15 minutes later he was back, carrying the capsule for Sam, which he put on the bed.

"You want to strap him in?" I asked, as I laid Sam down on the bed to unwrap him from the blanket.

"Um…" Eric said. "No. No, you can do that." Yeah, no one wants to strap the baby with the floppy neck in, ever.

Once Sam was strapped in and had a blanket tucked around him and another blanket draped over the capsule to keep any cool air off his face, we were good to go. Betty Joe handed me his Well Child book, my discharge papers and his, and brought in a wheelchair for me. I always thought it seemed kind of redundant, but there was no getting around it. And so I got pushed out to the front entrance with my pillow on my knee by Betty Joe, while Eric carried Sam.

Eric seemed a bit more confident actually getting the whole capsule strapped into the car, and Betty Joe helped me into my seat. At least she didn't say what the midwife who'd helped deliver Amelia had said to me at this point, which was 'see you in 18 months to two years'. Yeah, that wasn't happening. Three kids seemed like a lot. Especially now when you saw my car was home to a capsule, a carseat and a booster seat.

Eric got in and turned us around so we could drive to Birthcare. It always seemed a bit of a hassle transferring during the night like this, and I was kind of jealous of women who lived on the North Shore who could just stay put in hospital.

"I kind of can't believe it's all over" I said, as we drove through the dark streets at the back of Parnell.

"No. It was, um, really quick, but I guess not…painless?" Eric said, as he concentrated on the road. This was about the slowest I'd ever seen him drive.

"No. But ask me again in two weeks' time. I probably will have forgotten all about it by then."

"Yeah, sure" Eric snorted.

"No, I'm serious. It…well, it kind of all becomes a blur in your memory. You really don't remember your pain. I mean, have you ever been injured or anything?"

"I broke my hand once."

That was interesting, and I kind of wanted to know how that happened. Or maybe I didn't. So I carried on with my point instead. "So you know then? You kind of forget what it was like."

"No, I pretty much remember how much that fucking hurt."

"Oh. Well maybe it's just the hormones then. The hormones make you forget."

Eric pulled into Birthcare and spoke into the intercom, so they'd let us into their underground carpark. Betty Joe had rung them earlier so they were expecting me. Hopefully. When I'd arrived in the early hours of the morning after having Amelia we couldn't get them to answer us or open the gate and the stupid little voice in my head said I was fine and we should just go home.

Thank God Bill went and tried the intercom at the front door, because I'm not sure that would have been such a great idea. Sometimes the hormones are great, but sometimes they lead you down paths you really don't want to go.

Eric swung into a parking space. "You seem to, uh…well have a lot of these hormones, don't you Sookie" he said.

"Yeah, but these are _really_ good ones. Trust me. They should sell them."

As I was getting out of the car, a nurse came over to us "Do you need a wheelchair?" she asked.

"No" I said, at the same time as Eric tried to say yes. "No, I'm fine. Really I am." It was kind of a matter of pride, but I was walking in there and that was that.

Checking in was pretty standard, they had most of my paperwork already. And then the midwife doing the night shift showed me to my room. I'd paid up to guarantee a private room, as I had the last two times I'd been here, and the rooms were kind of OK. Not exactly like hotel rooms, although you paid as much as if you stayed in a hotel, but a lot better than the hospital rooms.

But I hadn't known, until now, that they had rooms with queen sized beds. The midwife shrugged when I turned to look at her. "We're not busy, so you can have a premium room if you like" she said, gazing adoringly at Eric.

Well he was definitely good for some things then, room upgrades being one of them. I made a mental note to find out if the same thing worked on airline flights too.

The midwife asked if I wanted something to eat. "Actually, yeah" I said. "If there's anything going." So she went off to find something and I had a good poke around and checked the supplies.

Eric kind of stood there, holding the capsule and looking a bit lost.

"We should probably unpack him" I said. "And then after I've eaten I might give him another feed, try to kick-start my milk production."

"You know when you say that, you sound weirdly like Jason" Eric said, staring at the capsule as though the straps might magically undo by themselves.

"And when I think about it, I feel really, really sorry for Jason's cows. Breast pumps are bad enough; imagine having to do that every day for your whole life. Ugh." I gave a little shudder and went over to unlatch Sam so I could place him into the bassinet that was sitting beside the bed. The midwife had put a label on it which read 'Baby Stackhouse'. I hoped Eric wasn't going to mind that. Bill had minded a lot. But unfortunately, they needed to link him to my name, so he was stuck being a Stackhouse for a few days.

Eric sat down on the chair and looked a bit lost. I was going to say something to him, when I realised something kind of awful. I needed to pee. Bum.

But there was nothing for it. I was going to have to go. I grabbed two of the horrible large maternity pads out of the drawer and shuffled my way out of the bathroom. Yeah, the burning was still there. Not good at all.

Eric must have noticed my face as I came back out. "You alright?" he asked.

"Yeah, just…it hurts to pee" I whispered, as I got myself settled on top of the bedcovers, and raised the back of the bed so I could sit up.

"Oh" he said. "Um…can they give you anything for it?"

"No, it'll go. It's just a side effect of the, um…tears and stuff." Yeah, didn't want to give Eric too much of a mental image of that.

It didn't seem to bother Eric too much. He came over to sit beside me on the bed, and he put his arm around me. I turned to look at him, and immediately regretted it because he was looking at me so intensely that I thought I might cry. Stupid Eric. I'd been riding a nice hormone-high and now I was going to go all teary.

"You're so brave, Sookie" he said.

"Oh" I replied, trying really, really hard not to cry. "What? Because I can pee even though it burns?" Yeah, maybe that broke the mood a bit too well, because Eric burst out laughing. "Well, that as well" he agreed. "But mostly just because…because of everything. You're pretty amazing, you know?"

I shrugged. "I did say earlier I was pretty kick-arse at childbirth."

Eric laughed again, and then kissed me on the cheek. "It's kick-ass actually" he said into my ear.

"Whatever! I'm awesome, admit it."

"Yeah, you are" he said.

The midwife arrived back, and she was carrying two plates instead of one. "I found some leftover dinners" she said.

"Oh, thanks" I said, as Eric jumped down to move the table around so I could have it in front of me. The midwife watched him again and I wondered who she'd had to bribe in the kitchen to make sure Eric got fed as well. Suddenly the fact he may have spent his teenage years roaming the neighbourhood in search of free meals kind of made a bit of sense. Of course all his friends' mums would have been feeding him.

The midwife, who reminded me her name was Theresa so I tried to make a mental note to remember that one, programmed my phone so it went straight through to her pager, and then she left again.

I pulled the tinfoil off my plate. "Its fish night" I said happily, tucking in. I was kind of starving, even though it was a bit late to be eating dinner.

"Mmpfh" Eric said, shovelling in fish as fast as he could. I guess he'd burned off those sandwiches he'd eaten earlier.

"I don't know about the veges though" I said, "I think they're a bit soggy, what do you think?" I looked over at Eric, who was scraping the last few remains off his plate. I think he might have licked it if he'd had a chance. So yeah, he wasn't worried about soggy veges.

I left mine and moved on to my dessert, which was a kind of crème caramel. If I hadn't just given birth, I might have been tempted to give it to Eric, who finished his in about two mouthfuls, but I figured I needed the energy.

After that I filled out the menu card for the next day, so Theresa could collect that with the dishes. I pulled a clean nightie out of my bag and set aside the plastic bag that had the one I'd worn earlier in there. "Um, just soak that in cold water when you get home" I said to Eric.

"Oh. OK" he said, eyeing it suspiciously. Yeah, this was when I missed my Mum, or my Gran or anyone who might have dealt with a bloody nightie without a second thought for me. I really, really missed my Mum. I walked back into the bathroom and shed a few tears while changing. I didn't cry much. I'd lived through this before, after all. But it was there all the same, that dull ache that told me there were people missing out of my life who should have been there.

But at least this baby had a dad.

I headed back into the room and tried to give Sam another feed. He wasn't really buying it. He'd had a busy night and now he wanted to go to sleep more than anything. I wondered how long it would last.

Eric still seemed fascinated by the whole breast-feeding process, and it was funny how I was becoming slightly more comfortable around him even after just a couple of times. In the end, when Sam had fallen asleep for about the fourth time, I gave up and laid him on the bed to get him swaddled nice and tightly.

Eric watched silently. "I hope you're taking notes" I said.

"Oh. What?"

"Swaddling. It's necessary when he's this little, or else he'll whack himself in the face and wake up with a start."

"What, the wrapping thing?"

"Yeah."

"OK." Eric nodded and frowned and looked like he was taking mental notes about it all. It was kind of weird to be here with someone for who all of this was so new, when I was almost an old hand at it now.

I laid Sam in the bassinet and he snuffled a bit, then sighed and kind of relaxed. "He looks a bit like you when he's asleep" I said to Eric, as I got back on the bed.

And then something occurred to me. Something I probably should have thought of earlier.

"What time is it?" I asked Eric, and he checked his watch before replying "Five past midnight."

"Happy birthday then" I said to him. "Happy 30th! Sorry your birthday will be overshadowed from here on in, but you know…blame Russell, and possibly Sam for that."

"Yeah, I don't mind" Eric said, turning from where he was standing beside the bassinet looking down at Sam to look at me. "I kind of wanted a baby for my birthday last year anyway."

"I know. I got there in the end. But don't ask for one for next year, OK?" I said.

Eric laughed. "But you don't have to call a baby Jason sometime?"

"Fuck off."

"Oh yeah" Eric said, "That was kind of funny when you said that to Russell."

"What? No I didn't."

"Yeah, you did. When we rolled you over, you told him to fuck off."

"No, I said 'fuck it' because, you know, I was kind of resigned to what was happening and that there was no going back. I didn't swear at Russell." No way would I have done that. Not even in labour.

"Yeah, sure Sookie" Eric said, like he really didn't believe me.

"I didn't! You're just getting old and deaf."

Eric laughed at that, thank goodness. For some reason he didn't mind me teasing him about being old, but he hated it if I pointed out he was younger than me.

After that we just sat at stared at Sam for a bit. "Your present…your real present, is at home. Sorry" I said.

"That's OK" Eric said. "I kind of like this one."

We looked at Sam some more. I was kind of waiting for Eric to leave, and I could feel he didn't want to. In the end I said "Do you want to stay?"

He looked at me. "Stay?" he asked.

"Yeah, well they gave me the big bed…although; I guess it won't be that big with you in it…" I just hoped he didn't want to cuddle. I wasn't quite up to cuddling, just yet.

"Oh, is it allowed?"

"Yeah. Um…" It was always difficult knowing how much to reveal, but I decided to be frank. "When I had Amelia, Bill slept on a fold out bed the whole time I was here."

"Oh. OK then" Eric said, not commenting on the Bill reference.

Theresa came back for the plates and my menu, and I requested a second breakfast for Eric. They'd charge me for it, but it would be worth it. I figured by the morning Eric's days of being a duck might be over.

One final and painful trip to the bathroom later, I climbed into bed, having left my toothbrush out so Eric could borrow it. He came back from the bathroom and stripped down to his underwear before climbing into the other side of the bed. Thankfully, he gave me a bit of space. I guess the fact that I was sleeping on a plastic incontinence mat probably didn't scream romance.

Instead I felt for his hand and held that instead. "Happy birthday, again" I said.

"Thank you…for that and for everything" Eric replied.

"Oh, you're welcome" I said, before the pull of sleep got too great for me. It had been an exhausting day.

EPOV

I was kind of glad that Sookie had asked me to stay with her. I wasn't looking forward to going home to an empty house and an empty bed. At this point in time I wasn't keen on letting either Sookie or Sam out of my sight.

I know she was a bit worried I might, well, want to grope her or something. But I could pretty much tell she was sore and tired. Burning while peeing is _not_ a good sign, and something I didn't even want to contemplate.

But she was so strong, and so brave, and so just…fucking amazing. Mostly I just wanted to take care of her. I always had really, but this was different. She'd done all _that_ for me and for Sam, and then she shrugged it off like it was nothing.

And so we lay there in the dark, holding hands under the covers. Sookie fell asleep, but I couldn't. I was still running on adrenaline from earlier in the evening. It was kind of a rush watching someone being born, and probably more so if it was your own kid.

I eventually dozed a bit, but at some time early in the morning I woke up and I wondered how you knew if the baby was still breathing. Was Sam OK in his bassinet over on Sookie's side of the bed?

So I got out and tip-toed around to look at him by the dim light that was above the bed. He was so very still that for a moment my heart stopped. What if something had gone wrong?

I didn't know what to do, should I wake Sookie? But then Sam kind of stirred, and I realised he was OK; he just didn't seem to breathe much, which was fucking weird.

I watching him wriggle around for a bit, and then he opened his eyes and blinked at me. We stared at each other for a moment or two, and then I picked him up. I didn't even register I'd done it until I realised he was in my arms. It was weird; it was such an instinctive reaction to him looking at me. I sat down in the chair with him and we looked at each other for a bit and I thought about all the things I wanted to say to him, all the things I wanted to promise him, but I wasn't sure I was going to be able to fulfil. I wanted so much to be the dad mine wasn't, but it was fucking scary. What if I screwed it all up? What if I did turn out to be a complete fuck-up? What if he hated me when he grew up?

I looked over at Sookie lying on her side in the bed and I realised one thing. Whatever else I might fuck up in the future I'd done one thing right. I'd got him the best mother I could. She'd never leave him and she'd always look out for him, and whatever my failings might turn out to be, he'd always have Sookie. He'd be OK.

"You'll be OK, Sam" I said to him, but perhaps he wasn't OK right at that moment as he opened his mouth and started making a weird wailing sound. Fuck, I wasn't sure what to do.

"Shhh" I tried, but Sookie woke up anyway. "He might be hungry" she said, as she sat up, almost as though someone had pushed her on switch and she'd whirred to life. "Bring him over and we'll try again."

So I brought him over and Sookie unbuttoned her nightie, and unclasped her bra and did that thing where she wiped her nipple over his mouth, and she managed to get Sam to open his mouth long enough to get a nipple shoved in there.

It was kind of fascinating the whole breastfeeding thing, although I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be thinking about it. I'd noticed earlier than when I'd said it didn't look like it was too bad for Sam, Sookie had looked a bit uncomfortable, so maybe her boobs were off-limits to me now.

I hoped not, I really fucking liked her boobs.

But still, it was fascinating to watch the process. Sookie had always been a mother when I'd known her, but I didn't think I'd ever seen her look so, I guess the word is maternal. It just looked kind of natural, her sitting up in bed nursing Sam. I sat beside her and just enjoyed the moment.

"So, welcome to the wonderful world of night feeds" Sookie said. "Bet that's a birthday present you could have done without."

"No" I said, kissing her hair. "This is still the best birthday ever." And it really fucking was.

**Thanks for reading!**


	74. Chapter 74

**A/N Does anyone need a new cat? She's a great mouser, just a bit confused about the process. She brought a new rodent in at 4am this morning (hubby is adamant it was actually a baby rat), and wouldn't help re-capture it. It literally ran right into her, and she didn't lift a paw, all the time just watching my hubby dart around the living room to try to catch it. I think she thinks she's training him to hunt for himself, after all, in the 9 years she's been with us we've never ever brought a mouse in all by ourselves. We're obviously a bit crap at hunting. And a bit over having rats and mice in our house!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I was awake first. Well, I was officially awake, when it was actually waking up time and not 3am, first.

I could hear Eric breathing, he was kind of loud at the best of times and he wasn't any better asleep. Sam I couldn't hear at all, so I eased myself over in the bed so I could lean into the bassinet and I stared very hard at his chest. Yeah, it was going up and down.

Next step was actually getting myself out of bed. Nothing like being sore and sticky to make you really not want to move, but I needed to pee and although I knew that wasn't going to be pleasant, there was no ignoring it.

I was a bit worried that the rustle of the plastic mat I was sleeping on was going to wake one of the other people sleeping in the room, but no, they were both fast asleep. Now. At the three o'clock wake-up one of them had decided sleep was over-rated and he got a bit fidgety, and the other one wasn't much better, but at least he had an excuse as he wasn't even 12 hours old yet, so of course everything was fascinating. The pair of them were a bad combination when you were stuck in a small room with them for the night.

Eventually Sam had dropped off again and I'd managed to persuade Eric that Sam wasn't going to randomly stop breathing while he slept and we could get settled again. Except that I only really dozed, I was still a bit keyed up from earlier.

So I pushed myself off the edge of the bed and gingerly wandered over to where my bag had been dropped the night before, and pulled out some clean clothes. I had to open the drawer next to Eric's head to get out more maternity pads, but that didn't wake him either. He really was out for the count.

I inched my way into the bathroom and faced the horror that was peeing. I knew it would get better, but it wasn't much fun at the moment, that's for sure. The shower was great though. I may have had one the night before, but I'd woken up feeling pretty yucky again and it was nice to wash it all away. I hoped the bleeding would lessen soon, it was one of the grosser bits of the birth process, the fact you bled so much afterwards. I hadn't really been prepared for it when I'd had Amelia, but a midwife had pointed out that with a normal period you're losing fluid from something the size of a lemon, after birth it's the size of a basketball, so you can kind of understand why it happens. But it's still not pleasant.

After the shower I carefully dried the stitches with the hairdryer supplied before I dressed. That was a trick I'd picked up from a midwife on a previous visit. They were full of interesting tips like that

I was just managing to get myself dressed while trying to avoid looking at my rather deflated and gross-looking stomach, when I heard Eric's shout from the other room. I pulled on my t-shirt and raced in there. Although raced might be over-stating it. Maybe it was more like inched. I was probably due some more paracetamol for the pain.

"What happened?" I asked. Eric had Sam on the pull-down change table attached to the wall and wasn't looking happy.

"He peed on me" Eric said, a bit grumpily.

"Oh. Yeah. Boys are different. You're supposed to cover them up I think. Here, stick one of the nappy liners over him."

"Well, it's a bit late now, Sookie. I've already been peed on. I think he did it on purpose."

"Uh-huh, because he's spent the first 12 hours he's alive trying to work out how to piss you off. Never mind, you'll get used to it. When I changed his nappy earlier on I got a bit of shock, I have to admit. I'm not used to seeing one of those on my children." I looked at Eric, but he still looked a bit annoyed. "You go and get cleaned up and I'll carry on. Thanks for starting him off anyway."

"Yeah, even though he peed on me" Eric said, grumbling as he walked into the bathroom. Poor Sam, he was totally oblivious to what he'd done. I grabbed a clean nappy and managed to get Sam into it before he had any ideas about peeing on me.

Just as I was finishing that Russell poked his head in the door to check on me. He didn't hang about for long when I said I was fine. Now that I wasn't going to do anything interesting like give birth he'd kind of lost interest in me.

And then I sat back on the bed and attempted another feed. Sam started off enthusiastically, but lost interest pretty quickly and thought he might have another nap.

Eric appeared from the bathroom with wet hair as I was trying to get Sam to latch onto the other side. "Going OK?" he asked, peering intently at my exposed nipple, as he sat down on the bed.

"Um…yeah" I said, feeling a bit embarrassed by the scrutiny. "Just trying to get a bit more into him."

"Oh, OK" Eric said, still watching. I had another go at getting my nipple into Sam's mouth with some success.

Just then a midwife burst into the room. "Hello" she said, "I'm just starting my shift, so I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm Nicky, so I'll just go and put my pager in your phone." She wandered over the phone and started pushing buttons. "So are you going OK with feeding? Do you want me to watch you latch or anything?"

I was about to explain that no, I was pretty sure I was going OK, when Eric said "No, I think we're good, Sookie's been using that trick."

"What trick?" Nicky asked, looking confused and obviously forgetting she actually asked me in the first place.

"You know, running her nipple over his lip to get him to open his mouth. That seems to work OK, although he's still quite sleepy" Eric explained. I couldn't decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he felt so comfortable discussing my nipples with random midwives we'd just met.

"Oh. OK. Well he will be. So, um, this isn't your first baby then?" she said, looking at me.

"No, third" Eric answered for me. Helpfully.

"Oh, I must have you mixed up with the other room I've got" Nicky said. "No wonder you're doing so well."

Deciding that I might actually join in for a bit I said "Can we get a bath in here after breakfast?"

"Oh, yes. No problem" Nicky said. "I think breakfast is on its way, and I'll bring it in after that."

"Thank you" I said.

Nicky left and I went back to trying to get Sam to stay awake for me, until breakfast arrived and then I gave up. Eric was helping himself to a piece of toast almost before the poor woman had got the tray pushed into the room. He put Sam back in the bassinet for me and moved my breakfast onto the table so I could eat it in bed.

"Technically" I said, "You should be getting breakfast in bed as it's your birthday."

Eric shrugged as his mouth was full. "I kind of am" he said, coming to sit on the bed next to me.

Breakfast was good, nothing special, just scrambled eggs and toast and fruit and cereal. But it filled me up. They brought the tea trolley around afterwards and offered us tea and coffee, and it was all very civilized. It was almost possible to forget there was a world outside this room with other people in it.

When I'd finished eating I got myself back off the bed for another rummage in my bag. "What are you looking for?" Eric asked.

"Oh, there they are" I said, having located what I needed.

"What are they?" Eric asked, as I stuffed them down my bra.

"Breast pads. These are the best ones, they're merino. Re-usable."

"Yeah…what is it with you guys and the merino wool obsession?" Eric asked.

"What obsession?" I asked. I looked at Sam. OK, he was wearing a lot of merino, but then he was a baby, and it was a good fabric for him. Although I had spent a lot of winter in a merino maternity top I'd splashed out on. Actually everyone in the house had a few merino things truth be told. Eric just raised his eyebrows. "Oh…it's just a really good fabric, is all" I muttered.

"Uh-huh" Eric said. "Sure it is." And then he settled back in the bed and started to read the paper they'd brought me. I wondered if he had any intention of going home today. As much as I didn't want him to leave, I did worry that the girls might be thinking they'd never see either of us again.

I checked my phone for more messages. "Aunty Linda says well done and she'll put something in the post. God, I hope it's not something knitted in bright yellow scratchy wool again. She's not the best knitter anyway."

"Uh-huh" Eric said his eyes still on the business section of the Herald.

"And Halleigh can't believe how big Sam is, she thinks he must be almost as big as Ruby is now. She is a pretty tiny kid though. They both are. I don't think Riley is much bigger than Felicia even now and he's five."

"Mmm-hmm." I gave up on Eric and thought I'd just tell Sam. "Aunty Judith says she barely slept a wink she was so excited and she can't wait to meet you and that your sisters were mostly well behaved although apparently she understands what I mean now when I say that Felicia's a bugger to get to bed sometimes, but at least she had some company, and did I know that the Nick Jr channel is still showing episodes of Dora at midnight? Yeah, that doesn't sound good. I hope she slept in, Sam." Sam just looked at me, and didn't say anything. "You're right, Sam" I said. "Not my problem when she loses her rag at 5pm. That'll be Daddy's problem. You remember him, the big person, sitting there reading the paper pretending to ignore me."

"I'm not really pretending, Sookie."

"Oh, look, he is really here with us."

"I'm letting you two bond" Eric said, from behind the paper.

"Of course you are, because we don't get enough of that when you're attached to my boob, do we Sam?"

"Well that worked for me, I feel quite strongly bonded to you now" Eric said, actually lowering the paper to look at me. Well, at my boobs anyway. Leering might have been a good description.

And the funny thing was it didn't feel too weird. Maybe this was going to be OK after all. I could still be Sam's mother and main source of nutrition, and Eric's…well, whatever the hell Eric thought about my boobs anyway. I laughed and Eric smugly went back to reading, somehow once again having managed to come out on top.

Nicky arrived pushing the trolley with the baby bath set up on it. "There you go" she said. "I take it you don't want me to stay." That was more of a statement than a question, and she started to head out the door.

I had other plans though. I wasn't letting Eric get off totally scot-free for deciding he was going to talk for both of us earlier. "Actually" I said, "Sam is Eric's first baby, well, first baby from birth. So could you, uh, give him a lesson? On bathing?" Yeah, Bill had been coached in bathing Amelia, but he'd never been all that into it really, and then after a while he'd been working so late, or whatever the hell he'd been doing, and he stopped being around at her bathtime very often. But Eric had done a lot of baths over the last nearly two years and I figured he'd be fine with a newborn. Once he got a lesson that is.

Eric looked at me and frowned, but didn't say anything. Nicky looked a bit taken aback. "Oh, sure" she said. "Sorry, I thought this was the third for both of you. OK, well let's get him up on the change table and we'll unwrap him. Eric is it?" Eric nodded, as he swung his legs off the bed and walked around to get Sam. "Great. Well, it's a bit nerve-wracking the first time, but don't worry, you'll be fine."

Eric shot me another look when she said 'nerve-wracking' and I decided it might be time to leave. "I'm just going out to the visitor's area to make some calls on my cellphone. There are clean clothes for Sam over on the chair" I said, as I shuffled out of the room.

EPOV

When Sookie had said she wanted to bathe Sam, I hadn't realised she was setting me up for it. Fuck. I was getting the hang of handling him, I'd even got his diaper off earlier, although he'd peed on me, like he was marking his territory or something. That made two of them now, him and Felicia. Thank God Amelia was past that stage.

But the bath looked like kind of a big deal. For one thing, I didn't want to drown him and…yeah, mostly it was the drowning thing. Sookie would be pissed for a starter. I just hoped this nurse knew what the hell she was doing. Maybe I could just watch.

"OK" she said, "So the idea is to keep him as warm as possible. He's used to being in a very warm environment, so he should like the bath, although some babies don't. Most do. But getting him undressed you need to work quickly and keep him covered as much as you can." She turned to look at me. "Do you want me to do it and show you?" she asked.

"Sure" I said, and she started unwrapping Sam from the innumerable layers that Sookie had wrapped him in. I couldn't understand how the poor kid wasn't sweltering, as it was quite warm in this room, but he seemed OK and the nurse said "I do like to see my babies wrapped up nice and warm like this."

"Well, we thought that would be best" I said.

She had him down to a singlet with a towel over him, when she undid his diaper. Inside was the most disgusting greeny-black goo I'd ever seen and I felt a bit sick. There had to be something wrong with him if he was pooping that out. Maybe his insides weren't right?

The nurse seemed non-plussed. "Oh good" she said. "There's some meconium coming through. See?"

"Uh, yeah. I do." I didn't want to, but it was kind of hard to avoid.

"So his bowels are working nicely" she said.

I would have high-fived him, but quite possibly he didn't know he had hands yet, so I figured that wasn't going to work. I settled for smiling at him. Sam stared back and moved his mouth, but didn't quite manage a smile. I wondered how long that took.

When he was stripped, the nurse kind of stepped aside. "OK, so straight into the water with him, feet first. Best way is to put your forearm behind his head and hold onto the opposite shoulder, so you've got that support."

Oh, OK. So this was my bit. I looked at Sam. He looked at me. I wondered if he was as worried as I was. Possibly not because he didn't have the benefit of knowing what was about to happen. Fuck. I guess this was all me then.

I lifted him gingerly, holding him as the nurse had suggested, and then realised he still had the towel draped over him. The nurse took pity on me and moved it and Sam looked kind of surprised as the cold air hit his skin. Although maybe it was just that he was about to shit coal tar again.

And then I lowered him into the water and he looked really fucking surprised. And then he howled. Loudly. It was the loudest noise I'd ever heard him make. I nearly dropped him, but I remembered about the water and then I worried that I was holding his shoulder too tight, and I loosened my grip a bit, but that didn't feel secure, so I tightened it again, and all the time Sam was wailing and the nurse was just standing there and I couldn't figure out why she didn't do something and I expected Sookie to come flying back into the room at any moment to find out what the hell I was doing to Sam. I just wanted him to stop making that noise.

"If you put his feet against the bottom, he might feel more secure" the nurse said, eventually. I slid him slowly down the bath, while his howls got louder and his face got redder and redder. When his feet were touching the bottom I stopped.

"And then if you take a wet washcloth and place that over his chest, he'll feel a bit warmer" the nurse added, doing just that for me. Sam had stopped howling now and was just kind of snuffling a bit, which was a fuckload better as far as I was concerned.

"There you go" the nurse said. "Now just use your other hand and start running a bit of the water over his head."

I scooped a handful of water and dripped it over Sam's head. Some of it ran down his face and he blinked a few times. I was worried the crying was going to start again, because really, if I never heard that noise again it would be too soon, but it was fine. Sam seemed to be getting the hang of the bath. Or maybe I was. At any rate this was progress.

We did OK until the nurse got out some kind of bodywash thing for us to use. That made Sam fucking slippery, and I was worried I wasn't going to be able to hold onto him. He looked a bit worried too now, at least, that's what I was interpreting that look as meaning. Or possibly he'd just peed in the bath. I couldn't fucking tell. And I fucking hoped this bath was over soon.

"Uh, I think he's clean" I said to the nurse.

"Great, let's get him out and on the towel then" she said.

He felt fucking slippery in the water, but somehow it was worse lifting him out. I was terrified he'd slip right out of my hands and hit the floor, and it was a huge relief when I got him laid on the towel on the change table. The nurse covered him with a second towel, and then stepped away again. I guessed I was in charge of drying him, which you would think would be easy given how fucking small he was, but it wasn't. He was kind of floppy and there were a lot of skin creases. The nurse helpfully pointed them all out to me. It seemed to take a long time, and I kind of missed the quick rub down you could give Felicia and the fact that mostly Amelia dried herself these days.

When he was finally dry and I'd got him back into a diaper I realised the clothes Sookie wanted him in were still on the chair and not where I was. That wasn't fucking helpful. Could he roll if I left him? I stared at the clothes, hoping that maybe they'd come a bit closer, but they didn't. In the end the nurse grabbed them and handed them to me.

I had no idea where to start. There was something that looked like a singlet, so maybe that was the first thing. Or was it the onesie? I was a bit stuck. Luckily the nurse stepped in again and picked up the singlet, expertly threading Sam's head and arms through it. Then she handed me the onesie. Despite Sookie's assertions that wrap-around ones were easier, there was nothing easy about getting his little limbs to go where they were meant to and the nurse commenting "He's a good size. That always makes it easier. It's not so bad handling the bigger babies" didn't make it any fucking easier at all.

When he was finally in that fucking onesie there was a whole other layer to go on him, which looked exactly the same but had longer arms and legs. Fuck, he wore more clothes than all of Amelia's Barbies combined.

Eventually I had that layer buttoned up and I was stuck trying to get socks on his feet, then some kind of bootees and finally his hat. I felt quite triumphant when I was done. I hadn't dropped him, or bent his arm the wrong way or done any damage that was fucking permanent.

"Do you want to re-swaddle him?" the nurse asked.

I looked at the blanket lying on the bed. "Uh, no. I think he's good to go" I said. Yeah, I had no fucking clue how that swaddling thing worked at all. Hopefully Sookie would just take care of that for me.

At that moment she came walking back into the room, and I wondered if she'd just been loitering outside waiting until we were finished. "How'd it go?" she asked.

I held Sam up. "Look, he's all clean" I said. And then there was a kind of rumbling sensation against the palm of my hand where I was supporting his bottom. "Um" I said. "I think he just filled another diaper…" I looked at Sookie.

She shrugged. "His bowels are working alright then." I looked down at Sam. I hoped there wasn't always going to be this amount of interest in what his bowels were doing. That sort of thing could get fucking intrusive after a while I would imagine.

Sookie walked past the nurse to get to where I was standing with Sam and, as she did, the nurse leaned over and said "Isn't it weird when he says diaper? I feel like I'm on TV or something!" and then she laughed.

"I know what you mean" Sookie said. "But mostly I can translate now without thinking."

They both laughed, and I tried to pretend they weren't fucking laughing at me. Translate my ass; if anyone was translating around here it was me. "Yeah, they think they're funny" I whispered into Sam's ear. "You'll understand me though, won't you Sam?" Sam made a kind of gurgling sound, that I'm pretty sure didn't have a Kiwi accent, and I handed him over to Sookie.

"Yeah, nice try, but you can't get him to go over to the dark side you know. He's half mine too" she said, looking at me.

I shrugged. "He doesn't have to sound like you though."

"Good luck with that. You can fork out for the accent coach. You know we outnumber you. And face it, you might be the loudest person in the house sometimes, but I don't think your accent is that catchy."

"What accent?" I asked. She had the accent.

"Ha ha. Now move over so I can check his nappy. Thanks Nicky!" she'd turned to say goodbye to the nurse who was now wheeling the bath out of the room.

Sookie made getting into all the layers of clothing look pretty easy, and sure enough there was disgusting black goo in the diaper again. And it was a fucking diaper, nappy just sounded…weird.

"That is disgusting looking stuff" I said.

"Yeah, but it gets better when the meconium stops coming out. Breastmilk poos aren't bad. And remember how it gets worse after that? Felicia on the duvet cover and everything?"

Oh fuck yes. I wondered when we could toilet train Sam.

When Sam was snapped back into his clothes Sookie turned to me. "Well, I guess you'd better get going" she said. I didn't want to go; I kind of wanted to stay here. "Felicia's probably climbing the walls looking for you" she said.

"Yeah, she will be." And I did kind of miss her too.

"But you can come back later on and bring them" Sookie said. "I miss them. I'm kind of lost without Amelia trying to run my life for me."

"I think you're doing OK" I said to her, putting my arm around her and looking down at Sam's little face. It was kind of weird; he managed to look really old and really new all at once.

"Yeah, 'course you do. OK, well, head off now then. I might put my feet up for a bit, and then Tara's coming along soon. She's bunking off work for the morning. It'd be nice working for family sometimes."

"Yeah, OK. Bye then." She turned her head and I kissed her. I still thought she was pretty amazing.

"Say bye to Daddy Sam! Yeah, he says bye. I'm pretty sure that's what that blink means."

"I'll take your word for it. OK, see you later on." I started to walk out the door. "Oh, Eric!" Sookie called after me. I turned around. "Yeah?" I asked.

"Um, there's a lasagne and some macaroni cheese in the big freezer, so if you get one out when you get home it will be thawed in time for dinner.

"Oh, OK. Thanks." I gave them one last wave and walked out to the elevators.

Driving home felt weird, like I'd left something behind. Something really important. And it was worse when I got home. It was cold and empty and really quiet. Well, until Bob showed up and started yelling the place down to remind me that he existed. "You had dinner last night" I reminded him. "I didn't, so don't come fucking complaining to me." I put some biscuits in his bowl and went off to grab a change of clothes.

I was reversing out of the driveway when I remembered Sookie's comments about the food. I considered driving back in but thought, fuck it; I'd just get it out later on.

I arrived at Calvin and Judith's and the first person to greet me was Judith. "Oh, congratulations!" she said, hugging me. "I'm _so_ excited! It's always so much better when it's someone else doing the actual labour. Labour sucks. Oh, I'm an aunt again, this is exciting isn't it Thomas?"

Thomas had crawled into the hallway behind Judith and didn't seem that impressed. Mostly he was just eyeing up the open door trying to see whether he could make it past his mother and I in a bid for freedom. Yeah, I'd seen that look before.

"Thanks" I said and I tried stepping inside so we could shut the door, but Judith forgot to step back and it was a bit crowded for a moment until she realised. "Oh, yeah" she said. "I'd better let you in. We've been making cards for Sookie and Sam this morning, so the kids are in the dining room."

I pulled the door closed behind me and Thomas looked at me as though I was enemy number one, before he turned around and crawled after his mother down the hall. "Hey you guys" Judith was yelling. "Your dad's here."

Amelia appeared first. "Where's my brother?" she demanded.

"With mum. We'll have to go and see her."

"Oh. But can I take him in to school?"

"Um, no. He's too little."

"Felicia goes. When mum helps" Amelia said.

"That's different, she's bigger. Where is she anyway?" I looked past Amelia and saw Felicia sitting on a chair at the table next to Jessica. There was a huge amount of stuff spread all over the table and it was obvious that some serious art work was in progress. "See my card?" Amelia said, bringing me a piece of cardboard which seemed to be mainly glitter now. "I wrote it all myself!"

"It's lovely" I said. I went over and crouched next to Felicia. "Hey, Leesh. How's yours going?"

"S'alrigh'" Felicia said, shrugging, as I gave her a hug. "I made it for Mummy and de baby." She turned to look at me and her huge blue eyes looked sad and worried, a complete contrast to Amelia's jittery excitement. "My brother's a boy, so he's like Thomas and he has a penis" she was explaining to Judith and Jessica. Yeah, I hadn't really liked it when she'd used the word willy, but I wasn't sure having her use the correct term was much better. There was only so much talk of penises any one household really needed.

Obviously Judith had heard worse because all she said was "Uh-huh". I turned my attention back to Felicia. "Are you OK, sweetheart?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said, sadly. "We go and see de baby now?"

"Yeah, we'll go and see Mummy and Sam. Come on." I helped her off the chair and Judith walked off to gather up their things.

"I gotta a baby brother" Jessica said, to no one in particular. "He's over there." I looked over to where Thomas was cruising around the chairs looking pleased with himself. Possibly because he had an uncapped felt pen in one of his chubby little fists. I reached over and took that off him, and placed it on the table, and then I shepherded my two little charges out towards the front door.

"Is Mummy's vagina sore?" Amelia asked. "I think we have to be nice to her because the baby came out of her vagina and made it sore."

"Mmm" I said, hoping that covered it.

Felicia still wasn't saying much, she was holding my hand and clutching Sockie with the other. We made our way slowly to the front door where Judith had piled their bags.

"Well, bye you two" she said. "It was lovely to have you both. And so exciting you have a baby brother!"

"Bye Aunty Jude! Bye Jessie! Bye Thomas!" Amelia said brightly.

"Bye" Felicia said, slightly sullenly.

"Thanks for having them" I said to Judith.

"Oh, no problem. You know, any time Sookie has another baby, they can always come back!"

"Yeah, I don't know if that'll be happening" I said. I was pretty sure this was it. And that was OK. Sam was pretty awesome and I was very, very lucky to have him.

"Well, maybe when you just need to have time to yourselves then. I would imagine it's going to be pretty busy with three kids."

"Yeah, I guess it will. OK, well I guess we'll see you later on then?"

"Yep, tell Sookie I'll be in this afternoon, if that suits."

"OK."

We waved a final goodbye and then I hauled two kids and their luggage back out to the car and set out for Birthcare once again.

"I can't wait to see Sam!" Amelia shouted from the back. "Do you think he'll love me already?"

"I'm sure he will" I assured her. Felicia just stayed quiet and I hoped that she'd feel a bit better when she saw her mum was OK and that she hadn't been stolen away by a baby brother in the night.

As I pulled into their parking lot Amelia started shouting "We're here!" even more loudly. She was going to burst a blood vessel if she didn't calm down. But Felicia just clutched Sockie and stared at Amelia.

"I no wan' be here" she said to Amelia. "I wan' go home."

"But we have to see Mummy. And Sam!" Amelia said.

"No Sam" Felicia said.

"Yes, come on. Let's go in" I said, and I got out of the car and helped everyone out. I just hoped Sam was as excited to meet his big sisters as they, or one of them anyway, were to meet him. God knows he'd probably hear Amelia before he could see her.

**Thanks for reading!**


	75. Chapter 75

**A/N Funnily enough no one volunteered to take my cat. Can't think why that would be!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

SPOV

About five minutes after Eric left, Tara stuck her head in the door. "Congratulations!" she said, coming over for a big hug. "I still can't believe you were so quick! That's amazing. You're a baby machine."

"Yeah, I don't feel quite so much like a machine today. More like something that got caught in it. Still, it's always better without an episiotomy."

Tara wrinkled her nose. "I wouldn't know" she said. "All my incisions were elsewhere."

"Yeah" I said, thinking that didn't sound like fun either.

"Can I hold him?" she asked. "I'll just wash my hands." She walked over to the little hand basin that was in the room and started washing.

"You don't have to worry too much" I said. "He has some germy sisters turning up at some point."

"I'd still rather not be the one to give him his first germs though" Tara said, as she dried her hands and walked over to take Sam out of my arms. "He's gorgeous!" she gushed. Sam just looked at her and blinked a few times in confusion. Yeah, he had no idea who this person was but I guess he was kind of used to the blond people who'd surrounded him most of the time since birth. Aunty Tara was an unknown quantity.

Tara didn't seem to mind; she cuddled him tight and sat down in the chair. "I love them like this" she said. "But I don't want to go back to having one of my own. I definitely don't feel bad about being done. How about you?" she looked up at me.

I shrugged. "Too soon to tell really. I'll get back to you when Sam is past the baby stage. But…well, I think this might be it. I'm thinking three kids is a lot, and I've been lucky to get three healthy babies. I don't want to tempt fate."

"Yeah, I guess. But you have them so easily; it would be a shame to stop now!" Tara smiled brightly at me, and I felt a bit, well, embarrassed. I definitely didn't want to toot my own horn about how great I was at birthing babies, it was one thing to tell Eric to high-five me in the delivery room, but another to go on and on about it at length with everyone who visited me. And I also detected an element of jealousy with Tara when she talked about it, something buried just beneath the surface of her words. But I couldn't change what had happened to her, and the fact she'd had such a terrible time having Charlotte. That was her experience of childbirth, and this was mine, and it was just the luck of the draw who got what.

So in the end I just said "Yeah…" kind of slowly, and hoped the subject would be dropped. In order to make that happen I thought I'd change the subject. "I like your boots" I said to Tara, looking at them admiringly. They were black and looked like the kind of boots you wore when riding and they looked great paired with the leggings and short tunic-style dress Tara was wearing.

"Oh these? I got them online from Ezibuy. They were really cheap."

"I can never find anything good in the Ezibuy catalogue" I complained.

Tara shrugged. "I got the dress from there too."

"Really?" I sighed, now I was jealous of Tara. I don't know why it was, but every time I ordered clothes from Ezibuy I ended up with something I didn't like. It would be cheap fabric, or fit badly, or turn out to be a weird colour or just look…wrong. I didn't know why the stuff which looked so good when they sent you the catalogue just didn't look half as good when you tried it on at home, but I sometimes suspected it depended a lot on who was modelling it at the time.

But Tara seemed to have been born with an innate sense of style, which had remained intact even during our embarrassing '80's gelled fringes and scrunched socks phase, and she could pick out the best pieces from the Ezibuy catalogue without even trying. It wasn't fair, but I couldn't do much about it.

"Of course most of the other mums at school wear designer stuff all the time, but I can't see the point" Tara continued. "They're going to look down their noses at me anyway, so why spend a fortune just to try to fit in. So what are they like at Amelia's school?"

"A bit of a mixture" I said, trying to think about it. I didn't think I'd seen much designer stuff, although to be honest I wasn't sure how you knew. They all dressed pretty fancy, but I couldn't pick what had labels and what didn't to save myself. After all, I'd been known to shop at Kmart.

"Mmm" Tara said. "Oh, I brought you a present. And sushi. It's in my bag."

"I love you" I blurted out. I kind of wanted to go and get the sushi now, but I didn't want to look greedy. I felt it though. I'd missed salmon.

"I know you do" Tara said, smiling at me. "If I'd been that way inclined I might have even married you. You could have had all our babies."

"Yeah…thanks for that."

"Just think how much easier life might have been without men? No one stomping around sulking because things aren't going his way would be nice." Tara sighed.

"Yeah, but double PMT" I pointed out. "And you're mean when you get it."

Tara laughed at that. She was mean and she knew it, and so did her kids, JB and random tradespeople and customer service operators she'd dealt with during that time of the month. "Well, do you want to go back to your mummy for a minute, so I can get the things out of my bag?" she asked Sam. Sam didn't say anything either way, so Tara handed him to me, and got a wrapped present and a brown paper bag with my package of sushi out of her enormous handbag, and then we swapped and I handed Sam back to her. To his credit, he was taking all the going backwards and forwards pretty much in his stride.

I put the sushi on the bedside cabinet and opened up the present. Tara had bought Sam a lovely little merino bodysuit and matching pants in a soft sage green, and a soft rattle which looked like a pirate. It was very cute.

"Thank you very much" I said. "And Sam says thank you Aunty Tara too."

"Yeah, 'course he does." Tara said. "He is very cute though."

And I couldn't help it, but I loved hearing her say that. After all, Tara wouldn't be biased like I was. So it was probably true. "I know!" I agreed. "He is."

After that we chatted about life in general for a while, until Tara reluctantly stood up and handed Sam back to me. "I'd better get going" she said. "I'm supposed to having lunch with McKenna and some of the other women. They give me the pip though."

"Yep, that happens" I said, thinking back to the time I'd gone to morning tea with Debbie and some of the other mothers from Amelia's class. As interesting as it had been to finally meet Chloe's mum Danielle, well, one of her mums, I'd been cornered by Debbie and would have chewed my own arm off if I'd thought it would let me get away from her.

Tara left and Sam and I had about five minutes of alone-time, while I contemplated eating my sushi before I heard a very familiar voice in the hallway. I guessed Eric was coming back with the girls then.

"Where is he?" Amelia said bursting into the room. "Oh, there. Hi Sam!" she said, coming over to stick her face close to his so he could better hear her. To his credit, he didn't burst into tears, but he looked incredibly surprised as his eyes flicked to me as though I was going to save him from Amelia.

Yeah, he'd learn. There was no stopping Amelia in full flight.

"Can I hold him?" Amelia said.

"Yeah, hang on. If you get up on the bed next to me I'll pass him over."

"Cool!" Amelia said, climbing up. I glanced over at the door and for the first time made eye contact with Eric. He looked kind of tired now, so I wondered if he was regretting his 3am decision to watch Sam sleep for a while. He was holding Felicia who didn't look particularly impressed. "Hi, Felicia sweetheart" I called out, but she didn't really acknowledge me.

I managed to balance Sam on Amelia's lap and she looked down at his face. "He's a bit funny-looking" Amelia said. "His nose is wonky. Mummy, why is his nose wonky?"

"Um, it got a bit squished coming out of me."

"It did?" Amelia asked, looking confused. "Why'd you squish him?"

"Well…just think about it, Amelia" I said to her. "It's not easy getting a baby out."

"Oh. Ohhh" Amelia's eyes went wide with understanding. "Was that when he came out of your vagina?"

"Yes."

"And now it's sore?"

"Well…yeah…"

"I don't think I ever want to have a baby."

"That's OK, you don't have to."

That settled, Amelia turned her attention back to Sam. "Has he done poos?"

"Probably not."

"Oh. Well, OK, do you want to hear a story, Sam? Because once upon a time…"

"Um, hang on love" I interrupted. "Felicia, do you want to come over here and see Sam."

Felicia kind of shrugged, and just rested her head against Eric's shoulder. I guess she was kind of tired having been up watching midnight episodes of Dora. Eric carried her over to the bed and put her down next to Amelia, and then sat at the bottom himself. Felicia glanced briefly at Sam and then crawled down the bed and sat in Eric's lap. The pair of them looked really tired.

Amelia was chattering away about what they'd done at Aunty Judith's. "I left my card in the car though!" she said. "I'll have to give it to you later. Leesh did one too, but she doesn't have as much writing on hers. She can't really write. Aunty Jude said my writing is really great now, so that's good! Oh! Look! He looked at me! Mum, he looked at me!" Probably because you're practically screaming next to his face, I thought, but all I said was "I know."

Amelia's head swivelled to the side. "Oh, sushi. Mum, can I have some sushi?" she looked at me pleadingly. Aware that I was soon getting a perfectly good cooked lunch courtesy of the Birthcare kitchens I relented. "Yeah, you can" I said. Eric frowned, but he didn't say anything. I guess there are daddy ducks and then there are mother ducks, and God knows, that impulse to feed your children was pretty strong.

Amelia seemed keen to offload Sam so she could get to the sushi. "Daddy can take him" I said, and Eric leaned forward to scoop him up from me, after I lifted him off Amelia. Felicia got a bit bent over in the process and looked really grumpy. "Ow!" she said.

"You're fine Leesh" Eric told her.

"No!" Felicia said, forcefully, sliding off Eric's lap. I turned to help Amelia get into the pack of sushi that she'd grabbed off the cabinet and was hopeful of maybe getting one or two pieces to share with Felicia.

"You're OK, Leesh" Eric said, his eyes on Sam. "Hi Sam, I'm back" he said.

"No!" Felicia wailed. "No, no, no!" She jabbed a small finger into Sam's side and then pointed at me. "Your Mummy! _My_ Daddy!" she shouted, and then a big fat tear rolled down her cheek.

Oh. Right. Yeah. Amelia took a bite out of the sushi and looked at me to see what I'd say. Eric was looking at me too. I felt like saying 'if you're her daddy, you sort it out then', but that seemed uncharitable.

I tried to remember what I'd done with Amelia. She'd been older when Felicia arrived, but only by a few months. She'd also just had a dad walk out on her, so you'd think she might have been less inclined to share the one parent left, but I didn't remember so many outward displays of being unhappy, it was more sly pinches and commands to put the baby to bed, _now_, every time she wanted to play with me. While I had no doubt that was to come from Felicia, we had to address this problem now.

"He's my Daddy!" Felicia wailed again. Eric put an arm around her shoulders and said "Shhh, it's OK", but didn't say anything else.

"Of course he is" I tried. "And I'm still your Mummy" I added, although my allegiances hadn't been called into question.

"And I'm the big sister" Amelia said, between bites, as though we were handing out roles.

"So, see? Nothing's changed" I continued. "Everyone still loves you very much…"

"And me!" Amelia piped up, although it was kind of muffled by the large amount of food stuffed in her mouth.

"Yes, we love both of you, just as we always have…it's like…" what the hell was it like? I looked over at Eric, hoping he could pull out the right description.

"We don't have to take away from the love we have for you and Amelia" he said, "because we could make more love for Sam. So there's enough to go around." I nodded, thinking that sounded pretty damn good. It might have been a bit philosophical for Felicia though because she still looked upset.

"I no want a brother!" she said. "I jus'want my Daddy!"

I sighed. "Does the new love come from the special cuddle like the baby does?" Amelia asked, but I decided to ignore her and her need to know every single thing in the universe, and concentrate on my other daughter for the moment.

I crawled down the bed so I was sitting on the other side of Felicia and tried putting my arm around her as well. She squirmed a bit closer to Eric, noticed that he was still holding Sam, let out a wail of frustration and then flung herself forward and off the bed. "I no like it!" she said, and I guessed in her mind 'it' encompassed everything from Sam himself to the situation she was now in.

I briefly contemplated phoning Jason and seeing if he had any advice for the older sibling who gets a new baby, but I remembered the torments he'd put me through and decided that might not work all that well at all.

"Felicia" I tried again. "Can I have a cuddle?"

"No!" she said, plonking herself down on the floor. "Cuddle dat baby."

"But I'd like a cuddle from you" I said, at the same time as Amelia said "I'll cuddle you!"

"How about a cuddle from both of you?" I asked. I held out my arms to Felicia as Amelia put down her sushi and attached herself enthusiastically to my side. Felicia eyed me suspiciously, and then her eyes flicked to Eric. "Want to cuddle Daddy" she said.

I could see Eric itching to let her have her way, and he started to automatically move Sam towards me, but I was reluctant to let Felicia get what she wanted completely. If we gave in today then she'd be more impossible about sharing Eric tomorrow and he might not get to cuddle Sam again until Sam was big enough to climb up himself. So I said "How about a family cuddle?"

"That sounds good" Eric agreed, so at least he was backing me up.

"Felicia you get up next to Daddy" I suggested, and she reluctantly climbed back on the bed. Eric put one arm around her, and with the other he sort of held Sam so he was in front of both of us, and I ended up with one arm around Eric, patting Felicia's shoulder, and the other arm around Amelia, who was still attached like a limpet to my side, and with that hand I could just reach Sam's head. It was kind of awkward, but I hoped it worked for inclusiveness.

Felicia got fed up first though, and broke off to roam around the small room and take a couple of pieces of sushi from Amelia. The pair of them were dropping rice left, right and centre and I would have to remember to give the bed a good brush down with my hands before I went to sleep that night.

Felicia was still eyeing Sam and Eric with suspicion, and I wasn't naïve enough to think that she was completely cured of her jealousy just yet. At least Amelia seemed to be taking it in her stride, but then she had been through this before. Plus she had a pretty full life which didn't revolve quite so much around her parents these days.

"Did you guys wish Daddy a happy birthday?" I asked them.

"No. Why would we do that?" Amelia asked.

"Because it's his birthday. Today."

"Oh. Oh I would have made another card! I didn't know! Mum, you didn't say!" Amelia looked at me accusingly.

"Well, I wasn't around. Why don't we sing Happy Birthday to him now?" So the three of us sang, Amelia was loud, Felicia was half-hearted and I was, according to Amelia, not very good, but at least it got the message across.

"Thank-you" Eric said, as he lent forward to kiss each of us on the cheek. Felicia kind of patted his shirt with a hand that was covered in rice and possibly soy sauce and wasabi too. I wondered how much washing I was going to come back to when I got home.

My lunch got delivered about then and they all hung about while I ate, and the kids pinched more of my food. Eric put Sam down in the bassinet and wandered down to the coffee area with Felicia in tow, after I gave him directions, and they came back with a coffee for him and a plate of biscuits for everyone to share. Amelia tried to push the bassinet out of the room when I wasn't looking, under the idea that she wanted to take her brother for a walk. I think she was hoping to run into a few people she could talk to out there, and tell all about the new arrival in the family. Felicia got bored and kept disappearing into the bathroom to do God knows what and Eric had to keep retrieving her.

Sam started to grizzle so I lifted him out of the bassinet and had another go at feeding. Amelia was fascinated by that, commenting on the size of my nipples and how she didn't think it could possibly fit in Sam's mouth, and then he was really surprised when it did. Felicia just looked at me a couple of times and then muttered "Daddy doesn' feed 'im" to herself, before trying to climb from the bed into the bassinet herself and having to be hauled out by Eric while being scolded by Amelia that she was too big to get in there.

Eventually it was time for Sam to try to have a proper sleep and I had to admit, I was pretty tired myself. I guessed Eric was too, but sadly he had to take his charges home and entertain them. I was going to be lucky enough to maybe get a short nap in before Judith and co. arrived.

So we said goodbye reluctantly and I put Sam back in his bassinet and l swept out most of the sushi rice and lay down on the bed and just tried to relax as best I could.

EPOV

It hadn't been great seeing Felicia react that way to Sam. I'd thought she was tired and grumpy, and upset about a change in routine, but it became fucking clear pretty quickly that she was jealous.

And I wasn't sure there was a damn thing we could do about that.

I felt awful. She'd always been…well, mine. Ever since she could walk and talk she'd followed me around and just hung out with me. I loved that. I'd never had anyone just want to be with me, because I was me. Well, maybe Sookie, but that was kind of different. Felicia was just happy to sit and watch me dress or shave or anything.

And I was pretty sure that what I said about making more love for Sam was true. I loved him like nothing else. But I still loved Felicia just as much.

I felt a bit like a traitor, though. And I was pretty sure that's how she saw me.

Over Sookie's lunch, after the kids had stolen her sushi, I tried to ask Sookie what it had been like with Amelia. She'd just shrugged and said "Different." I guess it was. From what I knew, there was no Bill around for a start; it was just the three of them.

And now it was the five of us. And Felicia was starting to feel a bit pushed out.

But she'd have to suck it up, I guessed. I didn't really know, it wasn't something I'd gone through. I'd often wished for a younger brother, someone I could hang out with when things with Dad were rough, or when we had a particularly difficult woman living with us, but I'd never had one. I'd never even been allowed a dog. So this whole fitting into a family thing, I was completely clueless about it.

We left Sookie preparing to take a nap while Sam did. I was kind of jealous. I hadn't slept all that much the night before and it was taking its toll on me now. However I had two kids and the afternoon stretched in front of me.

I took them to Burger King for a quick lunch, and then we stopped at a park on the way home, to try to burn off some energy. Felicia seemed in high spirits; as long as I kept pushing her higher on the swings she was great. I lifted her up so she could swing along the monkey bars and heard Amelia talking to someone else's mother who was there. "My mummy had a baby last night" she said. "From her vagina. He's called Sam. I'm his big sister. He loves me!"

Yeah, must remember to tell Sookie to have a chat about the vagina thing with Amelia again. In the meantime, I just pretended I was deaf.

We got home and Amelia immediately said "It's cold in here! Why is it so cold?"

"Well no one's been here to put heaters on" I pointed out. "Not since yesterday,"

"Poor Bob" Amelia said, bending down to pat Bob who was stationed near the door despite the fact I'd fed him earlier. "He's been sooo cold!"

"Bob has fur Ames."

"He'll still be cold" she grumbled.

I hoped that maybe the kids would be content watching some TV and we could all just sit down for a bit. But Amelia had other ideas. "We need to make you a birthday cake" she said, as she walked into the living room carrying a mixing bowl. "Come on."

"Um…it's your mum who knows how to bake" I pointed out. "I don't…"

"I know how!" Amelia said, looking at me like I was an idiot.

"Oh. Um, you really want to do that?"

"Yes! We'll put sprinkles on it. Come on, you can watch me. I need you to get the cookbook down, so I can read the recipe. Well, most of it. You might have to tell me what spoons to use."

"Spoons?"

"Yeah, like the teaspoon, or the tablespoon or whatever. Are there other spoons?"

I shrugged, I didn't know. "Which cookbook?" I asked, looking at the shelf above the fridge which was full of them.

"Um, the cake one" Amelia said.

"Which one has the cakes?"

"The one Mum uses when we make cakes" Amelia said, like I was an idiot.

"What does it look like?" I tried.

"Like the cookbook!" Amelia said.

"So…this one?" I tried, pulling one out that I was sure Sookie had used.

"No, smaller."

"This one."

"No, it has curly bits on the edge."

I pulled out a small book with a spiral binding. "This one?"

"Yeah!"

Amelia flicked through, until she found a sticky page that looked promising. "See that one!" she said. "We'll do that one."

It was a one egg chocolate cake. It looked pretty simple.

It took us a while to make though. Most of the time was spent trying to find the necessary ingredients in the pantry, because Sookie had some sort of weird arrangement where none of the stuff you needed for making a cake was actually put in the same place. And Amelia's enthusiasm maybe didn't match her skill. I wasn't sure what she did and didn't do when she and Sookie baked together, so I was inclined to believe her when she said stuff like she could break eggs. I was just going to have to live with a cake that had eggshell in it, obviously. At least there was only one egg.

Felicia came to watch, so I had one on each side of me standing on stools. The main point of baking seemed to be to lick the bowl when it was finished and the pair of them took to that enthusiastically when the cake when was in the oven.

I was feeling fucking exhausted now, but Felicia was bored so we played roll the ball for a bit until it was time to take the cake out.

"Now we ice it!" Amelia declared, watching me get it out.

"Um, shouldn't it be cooler?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It'll be OK. So now you make some icing."

"OK, let's find the recipe" I said flicking through the cookbook.

"You don't need a _recipe_" Amelia said disdainfully. "Mum just does it."

"Yeah…I might though" I said. Thankfully there did seem to be a recipe in there and we mixed that up and Amelia set about slopping it on. It was very sloppy, and I was pretty sure the cake should have been cooler, but she didn't look upset to see icing running down the sides.

The amount of brightly coloured sprinkles that then got put on all over the cake kind of hid the places where the icing had run right off anyway. Amelia was pretty pleased with her handiwork, and Felicia was pleased when there was another bowl to be licked.

"We can have it after dinner" Amelia announced, as I tried to wipe some of the icing off of Felicia's face with a wash-cloth. "What is for dinner anyway?"

Oh, fuck. I was supposed to get that out. I walked out to the freezer in the shed and located the stuff Sookie was talking back, but it seemed pretty frozen solid and possibly in dishes that were too large to fit into the microwave. Fuck.

I grabbed the lasagne anyway and set that on the ground behind me, thinking it might do for the next night. I rummaged around looking for something quick to make, but there was so much fucking stuff in here it was hard to work out what we had. If I was Sookie I would have had a list in my head of course, but I didn't.

I guessed that at some point chicken breasts had been on sale as we had a fuckload of them, so I pulled one out. That I could defrost and I could maybe make stir-fry, I thought. I didn't think it would be that hard.

I hadn't factored on having Amelia's constant presence in the kitchen though. She was watching me chop up the vegetables and kept commenting on how I did it differently to Sookie. "Mum does carrot sticks" she said. "Not round bits of carrot. Can I have some carrot?"

"Yeah, sure" I said, handing her a piece.

"I wan' carro' too!" Felicia said, so I gave her some. And then they wanted more. Almost as soon as I cut any, it disappeared into the kids, making the whole process take twice as long as it should. I eventually got all the vegetables cut up, but only after I'd been mugged for some pepper and spring onion too and Amelia and I had had an argument over whether I was adding zucchinis or not. She had some weird name for them that she insisted was right.

And then she ate most of the broccoli I'd cut up when I wasn't looking.

Trying to carry the chicken from the microwave to the kitchen counter so I could cut that up, Bob almost tripped me up. Yeah, he would have been fucking ecstatic if a whole chicken breast had landed on his head. Luckily I didn't drop it, and he scampered off, although he must have found Amelia because she came back into the kitchen and announced that he was hungry.

"Yeah, I'll get to him in a minute" I said. I was cutting up the chicken and it was kind of unpleasant.

Once I had everything prepared I got out the wok, added some oil, and put the chicken in. When that was brown I added the vegetables and some soy sauce and garlic and some spice mix I found in the pantry. This wasn't too bad.

I served it up and called everyone to the table. Amelia took her seat first. She peered at her bowl. "Where's the rice?" she asked.

"What?" I said.

"The rice…or the noodles. We're supposed to have something with it."

"Oh. Well it's a carb-free night" I said, looking at my plate. Yeah, there did seem to be something missing.

"A what?" Amelia asked.

"Never mind. Just eat it. It has um; well it would have had lots of broccoli in it. You like broccoli."

It did get eaten, well some of it did. They were both a bit fixated on the cake that coming afterwards. Amelia led another round of Happy Birthday when I brought it over to serve and I cut three slices.

Amelia took a mouthful and looked puzzled. "It doesn't taste right" she said. "You must have done something" she said, looking at me accusingly.

It was kind of weird tasting. The icing seemed OK though, what there was of it, under the sprinkles. Felicia was just licking her icing now. "Um" I said. "Maybe the flour was old or something?"

"Maybe you left something out?" Amelia asked. I shrugged. I'd had no clue what Golden Syrup was, but I'd figured maybe the Maple one we kept for pancakes would have been OK. And admittedly I hadn't been able to find any baking powder so we'd used baking soda, but I had a feeling that they were the same thing under different names. Amelia had disagreed half-heartedly, but I'd won her over.

Maybe they weren't the same thing after all. "Well it's the thought that counts. Thanks for my cake."

"That's OK" Amelia said.

I got the kids bathed and into bed and checked the list of stuff I had to do. I made Amelia's lunch and tried to make a mental note about the mufti day she had the next day. I was pretty sure that meant no uniform. Amelia would know anyway.

I rang Sookie and got an update on Sam. She said she was a bit lonely, and I knew I was. I wished I could go back to Birthcare, but I couldn't leave the kids. Still, we'd have Sam home soon. This would mean no more sleeping in the bassinet for Bob.

And then I realised I hadn't seen Bob in a while and he hadn't had dinner. I went into the kitchen and put some food down for him. I also remembered the lasagne I'd taken out had never made it into the house.

I went out to the shed. In my rush I must've left the door partially open and it was now fully open. The lasagne was defrosting nicely, and a large part of it had been eaten away. Fucking Bob. He was always the best fed of any of us.

I took out the macaroni cheese that was also in the freezer and carried that and the lasagne dish into the kitchen putting one in the sink and one in the fridge, away from feline intruders.

If Sookie asked, I was going to tell her we'd really enjoyed that lasagne.

I got into bed and it felt big and lonely on my own. It was the first time I'd ever slept here without Sookie and it felt totally wrong. She was almost a part of this house and I wondered if it was going to be the same in the new house. I thought that maybe it was.

I wasn't alone for long though. After a while I felt a movement on the bed and looked up to see Bob's silhouette sitting on Sookie's pillow, staring at me accusingly.

"You are a fucking menace" I whispered to him. "But don't worry; I haven't done anything with her. She'll be back soon. Although you won't like who she's bringing with her."

Bob and I stared each other down for a minute or two, and then he jumped off. No doubt to see if there was any abandoned food still going.

A little while later Felicia appeared and climbed over me. "My Daddy" she said, touching my face. "Snuggles." I lifted the covers so she could get in, and she made herself comfortable, lying completely on my arm. I was probably going to regret that when I had no feeling in it in a little while.

Just before dawn Amelia arrived. "You're all in here" she whispered, loudly. "I'm getting in too." So she got in beside Felicia, and there was a bit of poking and shuffling while they both got settled in, and eventually they were both breathing heavily, almost in unison.

I lay awake for a bit listening to them, glad to not be alone, and then I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep myself.

**A/N So when Sookie says '80's gelled fringes, she means hair,i.e. bangs. Those heady days when we used to slap hairgel in there and scrunch it all up. I just pretend it isn't me in the photos!**

**And Ezibuy is pretty ubiquitous here. It's the one catalogue we really had, and they still send them out, although most ordering is of course online.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	76. Chapter 76

**A/N Well my baby is pretty much officially a toddler now, as she's given up crawling. Of course when she gets up speed, she walks like a drunken chimp, and tends to get a bit of a lean and some speed-wobbles going around corners, but she's getting around. Fast at times. I just wish she'd give up climbing on the coffee-table. I can't decide if it's better or worse that she yells 'ta-da!' and throws her arms up every time she does it, which alerts me to what's going on. **

**Disclaimer: Still not mine.**

SPOV

My room at Birthcare got really, really quiet when Eric and the girls cleared out. I hoped Felicia was going to be OK; she really didn't seem to take to this whole big sister thing. I took the opportunity to lie down and have a bit of a rest. I couldn't really sleep, I could only doze. It's always a bit frustrating the way your body sort of goes into high alert in case the baby needs you, when you should be resting up.

And after a couple of hours of sort of dozing on and off, Sam was still pretty out to it, but I was feeling a bit restless. They brought around the tea trolley and I got myself some afternoon tea. I switched on the TV and was pleased that 60 Minute Makeover was on, I figured Sam wouldn't complain about me watching it, and sure enough, he didn't wake up or feel the need to pass comment on the fact that it was a stupid show, and despite the fact it was all done in an hour, it was still an hour basically spent watching paint dry.

So he didn't take that much after Eric, then.

But watching TV was a little bit boring, even when I got to be in sole charge of the remote, so I was actually kind of glad when there was a knock at the door. I called out for whoever it was to come in, and Judith stuck her head in. "Only us" she said, pushing Jessica in the door and carrying Thomas into the room.

Judith sort of dumped Thomas unceremoniously on the floor and hustled over to the bassinet to peer in. "Ohhh, look" she said. "He's so cute." And while I knew that you weren't supposed to be competitive about your kids, I was never going to get tired of other people saying that to me.

"He is" I agreed.

Jessica came over to the bed. "Where's Meela and Leesha?" she asked.

"Oh, they're at home" I said to her.

"Huh" Jessica said, looking from me to Judith as if she couldn't decide who was to blame for that oversight.

I picked up the remote control and switched channels to find some kids' TV. "Why don't you watch that?" I asked her. She shrugged, and sat down on the bottom of the bed.

Judith was still hovering over the bassinet. "I want him to wake up so I can have a cuddle" she moaned.

"I think he might soon" I said, glancing at the clock. I didn't really know. He wasn't very old after all; it was entirely possible that he'd sleep for the rest of the afternoon.

"Hmmm" Judith said. "Wake up so I can cuddle you!" Sam didn't respond, so she sat down in the chair. "So how are you feeling?"

"Well…you know how it goes" I said, and I went into a few details of the night before, and Judith told me I was lucky I didn't have to labour for ages like she did. This was the problem with sharing birth stories, it was probably like sharing war stories and mine were always kind of the equivalent of 'I spent the war working in a stately old home and occasionally I had to shelter from a few bombs', I wasn't exactly comfortable, but I wasn't exactly doing too badly either.

Judith handed over a large present, wrapped in lots of pale blue paper and a card. I opened them up and thanked her for the gift. They'd given us some more lovely clothes, a specially shaped wrap, and a teddy bear. "Sam will love them" I said.

"And this is from Mum" Judith said, pulling out a second package which was wrapped in some pale yellow tissue paper and handing it over.

"Oh" I said. I unwrapped it and found a little pile of knitted clothes, a hat, a jumper and a cardigan all in pale blue and white stripes. There was also some kind of knitted toy, it was black and white. It might have been a dog, but I wasn't entirely sure. There was a small gift card which just read 'Congratulations, Lorena Compton'. I really wasn't sure what to make of it all.

"Mum said she had the wool left over from the stuff she knitted for Thomas" Judith said, glancing over to where Thomas was cruising around the room, stopping occasionally to have a good poke at the uncovered wall sockets. "Plus I think she just gets bored in the evening and it gives her something to do. Thomas, don't pull that cord. Thomas!"

"Oh, well thank her for me, won't you?" I said, although I'd have to send her a proper thank-you card as well.

"Yeah, no worries" Judith said, pulling a plastic bag of biscuits out of her handbag and handing one to Thomas, in the hope it would occupy him. "I want a biscuit!" Jessica demanded.

"How do you ask?" Judith said.

"I want a biscuit, please?"

"Close enough." Judith gave one to Jessica as well.

We chatted for a bit longer about what was going on, and work. Judith really seemed to be enjoying running the Jumping Beans sessions and a part of me worried that they wouldn't really need me when I wanted to start working again.

Judith kept glancing at the bassinet, and I could see she was dying to pick Sam up. Her kids were getting tired and scratchy and she kept saying she needed to get home, and then not going. In the end I said "I'm going to have to feed him soon anyway, so you might as well pick him up."

"Yay!" Judith said, standing up and scooping Sam up in one fluid movement. Jessica glanced away from the TV to look at her mum, but obviously couldn't muster the energy to be interested or jealous, and Thomas, who'd just been hauled out of the bathroom where he'd been trying to work out how the nappy disposal bin worked, was now busy emptying the contents of Judith's handbag onto the floor and didn't really notice that his mum was cuddling someone else.

Sam didn't really wake up at all, so possibly Judith could have been cuddling him for a while. "Oh, he's so cute. I love them at this age. It's just a good thing Cal isn't here, or he'd be trying to get me to have a third one. He's worse than me!" She gazed some more at Sam.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah, he loves kids, he wants loads."

"I think three is enough, though. Don't you?" I asked.

"I think so. But then…I didn't mind being one of five."

"You didn't? Even though you were last?" I couldn't imagine what that would be like.

"No, not really. I mean, yeah I never really got anything new, but then…there was always someone around to hang out with or look after me or whatever. It wasn't bad really."

"Oh." I always thought of growing up in that family as a lesson in survival, but maybe it was different if you were one of them.

Judith continued to coo to Sam, and Jessica and Thomas continued to get more and more bored by the visit. Eventually it all got too much for Sam and he woke with a start and started sobbing.

"OK, well time to go" Judith said, handing him back to me, and trying to haul Thomas out from under the bed where he'd disappeared to. Jessica started whinging about how she wanted to have dinner now, and I wasn't feeling too envious of Judith when she dragged the pair of them out to drive home and sort out some dinner.

I set up for another feed and Sam seemed to be getting the hang of it a bit more. He was relatively alert, so after I'd changed his nappy I lay him out on the bed in front of me so he could stretch and we could have a little chat.

"So, what do you think of your first day, Sam?" I asked. "Are you over strange women all wanting to cuddle you yet, or is just preparing you for a lifetime spent chasing women? Actually, maybe you won't have to chase them. Maybe they'll all just chase you. Although your sisters might frighten them off. They frighten me sometimes and I gave birth to them. I think they like you. Felicia just hides it well. And is kind of attached to Daddy. Amelia…well, she means well. She's just a bit bossy sometimes. Unfortunately, we all have to live with that."

Sam looked at me, and blinked and tried moving his head. He waved a hand and hit his cheek, which didn't make him cry, but did make him look a bit startled. I guess he had bigger problems at the moment than trying to figure out how his sisters were going to affect his life. Mostly he probably just wanted to stop that thing which kept hitting him in the cheek.

The rest of the evening was uneventful. Dinner came. I tried another feed. I watched some TV. I spoke to Eric on the phone and found out how they were getting on. I tried a last feed before bed and then I got myself changed into a nightie and I climbed into bed for the night trying hard not to feel too lonely.

EPOV

The bed was too small the number of occupants that it currently had. That was my first thought on waking.

I lifted my head and realised that Amelia had the most room of all of us. She'd spread out and managed to push Felicia further into me. Or maybe she'd just taken up the room Felicia didn't want to use. Either way, she was happily sprawled out and I had Felicia lying across my arm and her tiny bottom jammed up against my stomach, which had obviously meant that at some point during the night I'd moved away from her and I was almost over the edge of the bed. Again.

Bob had taken up the part of the bed the girls weren't using and I lay there listening to three sets of heavy breathing. Or snoring in Bob's case. I hadn't realised that cats snored before I'd met Bob. It was fucking weird.

I tried to extricate myself quietly, but it was no use. Felicia stirred, and Amelia sat up and went "Is it up-time? Can I have breakfast? Can we watch TV? Am I going to school today?"

"Um…yes, what do you want, if you're good and yes" I replied, but Amelia just looked confused. She might have been asking a lot of questions, but I didn't think her brain was all that actively engaged in what she was pouring out.

"I need wees" she said in the end, and she got out and skittered off to the bathroom. Felicia was now sitting up in bed too, and jiggling about from side to side.

"Do you need the bathroom too?" I asked her.

"Nuh" she said, still jiggling and just looking at me.

"I think you do. Come on." I got out of bed and lifted her out. Amelia came back out of the ensuite. "Did you flush?" I asked her, and she turned on her heel and went back in and we heard the toilet flush before she re-appeared.

"I no need wees" Felicia said as I tried to get her to go past Amelia and into the bathroom.

"Yeah, you do" I said. "You do need wees."

She sighed noisily and just stood there. "Go on, just try for me, Leesh" I said, leading her in there, and helping her up onto the toilet.

She made it pretty clear she was just humouring me, although it was entirely possible it was a surprise that she needed to go. She certainly sounded surprised when she started to go and she said "I do need wees Daddy!"

"Yeah. Well-done." I helped her off again, and she high-fived me before running off to see what Amelia was up to.

By the time I got to the kitchen Amelia, Felicia and Bob had formed a kind of queue waiting for breakfast, and I realised that I possibly should have thrown the lasagne in the trash the night before as it looked as though more of it had been eaten.

"What's that?" Amelia said, pointing to the dish, as I picked it up to get rid of it.

"Just…nothing" I said, tipping it into the trash.

"It looks like lasagne. Is it lasagne? Who had lasagne?"

"Bob."

"Phfft. Cats don't eat lasagne, Daddy. You're being silly."

"Yeah, very silly. OK, who wants what for breakfast?" I was busy for a while making various combinations of toast as no one seemed to be able to have just one topping, and then I fed Bob, although he really probably didn't need it now that he'd spent most of the night snacking on the lasagne.

I checked the list from Sookie. Mufti day today, so Amelia was out of uniform. "Amelia, do you know what you're wearing today?"

"Uh-huh" she said, between bites.

I took a quick shower while the kids were in front of TV and then came back out to try to shepherd them into getting ready. Amelia reluctantly trudged off to her room, and came back wearing something that was really fucking weird, but would probably do. Felicia didn't want to wear shoes, but eventually I got them on her feet. "Big mousey's over there" she said, as I was jamming a sneaker on her foot. I looked and she was pointing at the TV. I looked at the TV, and Mickey Mouse was on.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"What's in my lunchbox?" Amelia called from the kitchen.

"Food" I yelled back.

"What food?"

"Food you like" I yelled again.

There was a pause. "How do you know?" Amelia said, as she walked into the room with the open lunchbox in one hand, while she poked its contents suspiciously with the other hand.

"I just do" I said.

"Big mousey" Felicia said, nodding at the TV again. "He eat the besaynah?"

"I'm not sure what Mickey Mouse eats, Leesh" I said, "But Amelia's going to eat everything in her lunchbox today."

Amelia looked at me sceptically, and then wandered off muttering. I think she may have said something about wondering what Maisie was getting for lunch. "And put it in your bag or you won't have anything to eat" I called after her, but I didn't get a response.

"Ameelya goin' t'school?" Felicia asked.

"Yep, and you are going next door to hang out with Halleigh and Ruby." That had been on Sookie's list, and I was kind of glad because I had a meeting with the architect at my office, which had been planned before we knew Sam was coming this week. I hadn't thought to postpone it and I didn't really want to, the guy was hard enough to pin down as it was. And being in the office would give me a chance to check my email and my messages in peace anyway. And after that, I could get back to Birthcare and maybe have a bit of time with just Sookie and Sam.

Felicia had other ideas. "No, I no goin' dere" she said. "I wan'stay wif you."

"Um…I have to go into work Leesh."

She shrugged. "I go dere den. Not next door. Next door's borin'!" She rolled her eyes and did a perfect imitation of Amelia, who at that moment called out "Do you know where my jacket is?"

"No" I called back.

"Does Mum know?"

"Your mum's not here."

"Well that's no good. Where's my jacket?" Amelia said, walking back into the living room.

"Where did you leave it?"

Amelia shrugged. "Dunno" she said. "Mum always knows, though."

"Well, she's not here, as we already established, so if you don't go and find it soon you're going to be late for school."

"You're grumpy" Amelia said.

"Just a little bit" I agreed. I'd noticed that Felicia had taken my exchange with Amelia as an excuse to slip out of the room. Fuck knows where she'd be hiding now.

I led Amelia on a tour of the house, asking her to try to remember what had happened to the jacket the last time she'd seen it. Eventually we found it stuffed into her schoolbag and she could put it on.

I still needed to find Felicia though, and eventually, with about two minutes to go until we had to leave, I found her hiding in our closet. "I not goin' play wif Ruby. Ruby's a baby and I no' have to play wif babies. Babies is poos!"

"Fine" I said, holding out my hand to her. "You can come with me but you have to be good."

"I's bein' good!" Felicia said indignantly.

Eventually I had everyone in the car and we could set off for school. Parking was an issue, not just because I was still driving around in Sookie's enormous fucking vehicle, but also because it appears every other fucking parent was trying to drop their kid off just before the bell rang.

So we had to park a way away from the gate, and then I had to try to get the pair of them to move at a reasonable pace so we could get there before class started. I ended up carrying Felicia, who didn't want to be carried, and Amelia's bag while Amelia trailed behind. "Come on, Ames" I said to her, as we were just about at the classroom.

"I'm doing my best" she huffed.

We got there and kids were still filing in. I put Amelia's bag away and helped her get her jacket off. One down and only one to deal with for the morning.

"Dad, have you got my coin?" Amelia asked.

"What?"

"I'm supposed to have a gold coin. Because it's mufti day. I have to pay."

"Oh. Right." I put Felicia down and she immediately disappeared into the classroom. I pulled out my wallet and searched through it. "How much do you need?"

"I need a gold coin" Amelia said, slowly so I'd get it.

I didn't have a $1 or a $2 coin, so I pulled out a $5 note. "There you go" I said.

Amelia stared at it like it might explode. "That's not a coin" she said.

"No, it's five bucks. That'll be fine."

"No, because I'm supposed to hand over a coin. I don't want _this_." She waved the money back at me.

"It's worth more Ames."

"It's not a coin."

"I haven't got any gold coins. So you'll have to have that."

Felicia wandered back out of the classroom. "Dere's no Bessian" she said. "Oh, DERE'S BESSIAN!" She pointed to Sebastian who was being hustled in ahead of Debbie and looked pretty miserable about being at school. "Hi Bessian!" Felicia yelled at him.

Sebastian gave a sort-of half-shrug, half-wave in Felicia's direction and then turned back to his mother who was fussing over where he was going to put his bag and whether he needed his sweatshirt on. But I had an idea.

"Debbie?" I said going over to them.

"What?" she said, looking up from where she was re-tying Sebastian's shoes. "Oh, hello Eric. Sebastian, just stand still please."

"Hi. Can you make change for a five?"

"What?" She was still mainly concentrating on Sebastian and trying to unzip his sweatshirt.

"Change. I haven't got a coin. Can you change a $5 note for me so Amelia has a coin to take in today?"

"Oh. I left my handbag in the car. Sorry" Debbie said. She didn't sound very sorry.

"Never mind. Thanks anyway." I turned back to Amelia. "Sorry, Ames, it's the $5 or nothing."

"It's not a coin" Amelia said, going to stating the fucking obvious again.

The bell rang, and I hoped that I could just make Amelia take the money and leave with Felicia, but she was stubbornly refusing to do it. Debbie had left by now and I'd lost sight of Felicia who was still, I guessed, following Sebastian around. I felt a bit sorry for poor Sebastian, who probably had enough fucking problems without being hero-worshipped by a two year-old girl. However, my biggest problem was Amelia.

"Amelia, everyone else has gone in. You need to go in too."

"Chloe hasn't."

Sure enough, Chloe was running up to the classroom with her bag on her back, she started to go in, remembered her bag, doubled back and started struggling to take it off.

"Chloe's going in though" I said to Amelia.

"Chloe's wearing her uniform, it doesn't matter if she doesn't have a coin" Amelia pointed out, and she was right. Poor fucking Chloe. Hopefully she wouldn't notice. And burst into tears. While she was still standing out here, with me. Fuck.

Luckily she passed right by us and went in, came out to stuff her sweater into her bag, and went back in again.

"Take the money Amelia" I tried one more time.

"No. I want a coin. Mum always has coins!" Yeah, she was right. Sookie did have a stash of them for occasions such as this. Possibly there had been something in the note about where that stash was. But that note was fucking long and really detailed and I'd been skimming it for the salient points, so it wasn't going to help me now.

I could hear the teacher starting to call the class to order. "You have to go in now" I said, "with or without the money."

Amelia sighed and looked at the door, obviously feeling the pull of the classroom. "It's not the same" she muttered, but she held out her hand for the money. At that moment though Felicia came skipping back out. "Missus Garfiel' said I hadda go. And Bessian said Ameelya can have his spare coin." She held out a $2 coin for Amelia.

"Cool" Amelia said. "I can go in now." She turned to me with a triumphant grin.

"Bye Amelia. Make sure you say thank-you to Sebastian."

"Uh-huh. Bye!" and with that Amelia skipped into the classroom.

"I like Bessian" Felicia said to me.

"Well, that's nice, Leesh" I said, taking her hand so we could walk back to the car.

"An' I like you" she said, skipping along beside me.

"I like you to."

"I like Ameelya…but I no like Sam."

"Yes, you do."

"No I don'. He looks funny. I no like him."

"You'll, um…you'll like him more when he comes home." Fuck, I hoped she would.

"No, we no bring him home. He can stay dere."

"Um, he has to come home, Leesh. When your mum comes home."

Felicia was quiet for a bit, I guessed she was processing it all. "Mum wan's t'keep him?"

"Yeah. We both do."

Felicia didn't say anything to that, but she shot me a rather dark look, which had traitor written all over it. However, we'd reached the car and it was on to the next destination.

She was pretty quiet on the drive into the office, but as soon as we got there, she started talking again. And I regretted leaving so quickly that we hadn't packed her anything to do. "Just sit there for a minute, Leesh" I said, pointing to the spare chair.

"I's bored" she said. I refrained from telling her that this was all her choice and instead made a quick phone call to Halleigh to tell her about the change in plan for today. Felicia started making a game out of jumping off the chair and any minute now was about to land on the desk rather than the floor. I finished the phone call and started up the laptop.

"Leesh! No jumping in here!" I said.

"Is no fun" she complained.

"No, that's why they call it work."

"Can I draw?"

"Yeah, if you want" I said, pushing some paper and a pen over to her side of the desk.

"I wan' a betta pen. You got felts?"

"No. That's it."

Felicia sighed. "I wanna watch TV."

"There's no TV."

"Dere's de laptop" she said, pointing to the monitor.

"Yes, but I'm using that. For my work." I just wanted to check my email before the architect arrived.

Felicia jumped off the chair again.

"Leesha! I said, no jumping!"

"Or wha'?"

"Or something really bad will happen."

"Like wha'?" Fuck, I really missed Sam about then. I also hoped he never, ever learned to talk.

"Like…you'll have to sit in the corner over there."

"Dats borin'"

"Very."

I opened up my email and Felicia drifted around to my side of the desk, and climbed up onto my lap. "Is jus' stories" she said pointing to the screen. "No pickchas."

"Nope." I was trying to read through what Clancy had sent me, but it was hard with the squirmy little person who was trying to rummage through the desk drawers in the hope of finding something to eat. "I's 'ungry" she said.

"I haven't got anything to eat" I said, wishing again I'd put more preparation into taking Felicia out today. Or that Sookie had. Or someone.

"Look" I said, trying to placate her, "How about if we do this?" I said, opening up the Sesame Street website and putting on a clip in a window in the corner of the screen for Felicia. That kept her occupied for long enough for me to check a few emails, and send a reply to Clancy telling him not to go off on a fucking tangent. I may have also sent an email to Indira. Just to let her know that Sam was here.

Felicia was starting to get annoyed and bored again, but I didn't have time to think of anything else to occupy her with as the architect arrived for our appointment and I had to lift her off my lap to stand up and greet him.

I'd had no idea where to start in finding an architect, but Andy had recommended his cousin Terry and he seemed OK. A bit flaky sometimes, and maybe too keen to spend time looking at ecologically sound building practices when really I just wanted him to draw me a plan. A plan in which our house didn't have two kitchens or dead rats, I didn't think it would be that fucking complicated.

It seemed to be however, and the plans that Terry brought in to show me just opened up a whole bunch of new questions and ideas. So although it was a productive meeting, well, as productive as it could be with a two year old who kept tugging at my shirt and going "Daddy, I's bored!" or "Daddy, I's 'ungry!", we still didn't have finalised plans. And as much as I wanted to just get the plans fucking finished so we could lodge them with the council, I also wanted them to be the right fucking plans, and that meant making sure there was enough room for the freezer in the laundry room, and that the kitchen was a decent size, so I wasn't tripping over everyone all the fucking time and that we had a deck. With a screen.

I'd never been involved in anything like this before and it was fucking fascinating. There were so many possibilities, and that was without pulling down much of the external structure. Sookie had been fairly hands-off about the whole thing so far, mainly because she had other things to think about, and while that made the responsibility a bit fucking overwhelming, if I really thought about it, it also made it more fucking exciting to have the opportunity to actually create something for the family.

Well, Calvin was going to be creating it really. Calvin and a team of contractors. I was more…part of the design process. But I figured that was probably a better use of my talents. I'd pulled down one wall, and that was probably one wall too many.

So it wasn't until I was actually saying goodbye to Terry that I realised that Felicia had been absent for a while, and that the door of the office was open. Fuck. I said a hurried goodbye and stepped out the door. locking it behind me. I looked around at the other buildings in the complex, and couldn't see any sign of her. Fuck, I hoped she hadn't wandered back out to the road.

I followed the pathway that led between the buildings the offices were housed in, and tried to think about where Felicia would go. She was bored, she was hungry…and then I spied the little café, and it's basket of brightly coloured toys. I stuck my head in the door and sure enough, Felicia was sitting beside the toybox, pushing a truck around and making a suitable noise for it.

"Leesha" I said, crouching down next to her. "You can't wander off like that."

"Wha'?"

"You can't just walk out; I didn't know where you were."

She looked around. "Yes, you did. You found me. I want a fluffy."

"Yeah, OK. Let's get coffee."

"And a muffin?"

"And a muffin. But just…don't walk off again. It makes me very sad if I think you're lost."

"I wasn't lost."

"You were to me." I tried to think of what she might understand. "It was like Nemo. I was sad like Nemo's daddy."

"'Cos I comed here?"

"Yeah, and I didn't know you had left the office."

Felicia shrugged, and stood up. We walked over to the counter and placed our order, and then sat down at a table to wait. "Nemo's daddy's vewy sad" Felicia said.

"Yeah, he is. But he finds Nemo, the same way I found you."

"You's good at findin'" Felicia said, looking at me.

"But it's better if I don't have to find you. It's better if I know where you are. Then I'm not sad."

"No…sad's no good."

"No, sad's no good."

We had our drinks and ate some muffins, and then we walked back to the office to collect up my things. "So are you ready to go and see your Mum and Sam?" I said to Felicia.

"Oh…OK" she said. And she didn't say it, but it was written all over her face. Sad. Poor sad Felicia.

"I love you, Leesh" I said to her.

"Like Nemo's daddy?"

"Yeah…and more, probably. Nemo didn't get a fluffy and a muffin."

"No. But he no have a baby."

"No he didn't. But he might have wanted one. You're kind of lucky you know."

Felicia frowned. "Why?"

"I always wanted a little brother. I never got one. My dad…well, I wasn't allowed anything like that. Not even a dog."

Felicia looked thoughtful. "So…brother's is good?"

"I think so. But I never got one, like I said. You'll have to tell me what it's like."

"Oh…OK." Felicia didn't say anything else so we walked to the car. "D'ya think Mum'll have soosee again?"

"I don't know, Leesh. Maybe we should stop and get her some. She'd like that."

"Me too."

"And me as well." I strapped Felicia into the car and we set off.

**Thanks for reading!**


	77. Chapter 77

**A/N Lots of you thought the whole 'ta-da!' on the coffeetable sounded cute, so I'm wondering if I should have offered my toddler up for a new home, rather than my cat. But I would miss her, and be seriously less entertained if she wasn't around. So maybe I'll keep her. **

**So, for information the normal stay in Birthcare is three nights. You get three nights either free (in a shared room) or subsidised (in a single or premium room). So if you arrive late in the evening, like Sookie did, that counts as your first night, but if you arrive, at, say, 2am, that doesn't count.**

**Disclaimer: Still not mine, although I've had them for a while now.**

SPOV

I was trying not to find it too lonely, sitting in Birthcare, but the problem was that…well, it was. Sam slept a lot and didn't make a lot of conversation when he was awake. I guess it's hard to talk with a nipple shoved in your mouth, but he wasn't exactly making an effort either.

I did get a midwife turning up at 3am when I was changing Sam's nappy after a feed. She was a bit bored I think and looking for someone to chat to. "I like second-time mums" she said. "They're pretty self-sufficient."

"Yeah" I said, trying to make sure that the top of the nappy wasn't rubbing against the stump of the cord on Sam's tummy. "This is actually my third baby."

"Oh. Well you don't need me at all then, really."

"Um…I'm pretty much OK" I said, lifting Sam off the changetable and holding him against my chest. The midwife just kind of hovered, but then her beeper went off and she had to go to someone else's room, and it was just Sam and I again.

Over breakfast I'd tried to initiate a discussion with Sam about the news they were showing on breakfast TV, but he wasn't really into it.

So I didn't have much to do but read the paper and hang around until Eric showed up. He and Felicia appeared just before lunchtime, with Eric carrying a shopping bag with what looked like sushi in there.

I noticed Felicia was lagging behind Eric and still looked a bit put out by the whole experience, and unfortunately Eric was keen to get to the other side of the room and peer at Sam, who wasn't doing anything other than just sleeping and occasionally snuffling in his sleep. He looked cute, but that was about it.

"Hi Felicia!" I said. "What have you been doing this morning?"

Felicia stood there and watched where Eric was going, ignoring my attempts to be her friend totally.

"I missed you guys" I said to Felicia. "It's been really quiet in here. No one asked me any questions or anything."

Felicia finally turned to me. "Ameelya los'her jacket. S'OK, though. Daddy found it. He's good at findin'"

"He is" I said, glancing over to where Eric was still standing by the bassinet.

"How's Sam been?" Eric asked.

"Good. He slept pretty well…I was only up, um, twice I think. And he's been feeding OK, lots of wet nappies. We did the heel-prick test this morning. That was pretty traumatic for both of us."

"Heel-prick?"

"Yeah, they take blood from his foot and send it off for testing for things like cystic fibrosis. If we never hear anything about it, then it's all OK."

"Oh. OK, yeah…that doesn't sound like fun." Eric looked a bit uncomfortable at the thought of taking blood from Sam's poor little foot. I'd made sure we'd done that when he wasn't around because it was something that was just better to get done before you thought too much about it, and then just cuddle your baby afterwards.

"I's been to work" Felicia announced, coming a bit closer to me on the bed.

"So you didn't go to see Halleigh and Ruby then?" I asked her.

"Nah, they's borin'. Like Sam."

"Well, Sam's just little" I said, noticing that Eric had cracked and picked Sam up even though he was technically asleep. He was still asleep, but Eric was lucky he hadn't decided to wake up and scream.

"He's very little. It's so weird picking him up" Eric said, sitting down on the bed. Felicia climbed up and tried to push her way onto Eric's lap. "Watch out, Leesh" Eric said, as Sam got a bit jostled. Felicia just glared at both Sam and Eric.

"Have you guys had any lunch?" I asked.

"We's got soosee" Felicia said, having managed to wiggle her way to where she wanted to be. If she could just get Sam to go somewhere else then things would be a lot better all round.

"Yay, sushi!" I said, as Eric reached over and handed me the plastic bag with the food in it. I moved the table over so it was across the bed and Felicia and I could sit on either side of it, and then I opened up Felicia's and mine and took a bite of a piece.

Oh yeah, that sushi was good.

I opened up Eric's and he managed to eat one-handed while still cradling a sleeping Sam. He'd actually been asleep for a while now, probably exhausted after the crying he did when a mean midwife stuck him in the foot with a large sharp thing earlier on.

Felicia was quiet still, but at least there was a reason for it now, as she was shovelling in sushi as fast as she could. It wasn't a pretty sight, as she'd sort of break each piece open and then try to put handfuls of rice and filling in her mouth, all doused in a large amount of soy sauce. It was a messy operation, but she seemed to be enjoying herself.

Eric had bought bottles of water for Felicia and himself, so I handed Felicia hers when she demanded a drink. All that soy sauce will do that to you.

We got through lunch without Sam having woken up, and had just cleaned up when my actual lunch arrived. I didn't really want the toasted sandwich that was today's offering, but Eric had half of it. Just because it was sitting there, I think.

Felicia was looking a bit bored now. "We's goin'?" she asked Eric.

"No, not yet" he said. "We'll just wait until…um, until Sam wakes up maybe…"

"Dat's borin'!" Felicia said, loudly. That still didn't wake Sam up. I was all in favour of Sam waking up soon, because I really needed to feed him soon. I was bloody uncomfortable.

Actually more than uncomfortable, I was sore. When Felicia climbed over my legs so she could get to the other side of the room, I tried to move a bit out of her way and realised how sore I was. Eric heard my intake of breath and turned to Felicia. "Be careful with mummy."

Felicia ignored him, and climbed off the bed.

"Is it still bad?" Eric asked me, frowning.

"Well it's not good."

"Still burning?"

"What? Oh no, no that's fixing itself. No, my boobs are really bloody sore. My milks come in and they're like concrete."

Eric's eyes immediately dropped from my face to my cleavage, possibly before I'd even finished speaking. It might have been an automatic reaction to hearing the word boobs.

"Oh" he said, looking at them. Then he cocked his head to one side and looked some more. I was feeling nothing if not self-conscious under all this scrutiny, but I just hoped his gaze stopped at the bust. Please don't let him look at the terrible deflated tummy I thought.

"Like concrete?" Eric said after a while. "Can I…um, feel?"

"Oh. Well go on, but just…well, they're sore. So no hard squeezing."

"OK." Eric reached out a hand and gingerly cupped my breast, and then he gave it a tiny squeeze, frowned, and squeezed again, before rather reluctantly pulling his hand back. "It's…really hard" he said. "Like an implant gone wrong or something, is that OK?"

I didn't like to ask how he knew about implants that had gone wrong, so decided to just focus on addressing his concerns. "Its fine, it's just sore, because there's like…pressure. Until I feed him. We might have to wake him up."

"Oh. I thought you said we weren't allowed to wake him up."

"There's a time and a place for everything. Start unwrapping him. A few less layers might make him a bit more alert."

Eric looked at me like I was being especially mean and slowly unwrapped Sam from his swaddling. Sam didn't wake up at all.

I checked on Felicia and she seemed to be busy destroying the newspaper. No doubt she was now covered in newsprint, but I'd deal with that later. I reached over and pulled Sam's hat off. Still nothing.

"Poor Sam" I commented. "He's got so little hair." He didn't have a lot, and what he did have was so wispy and fine and pale that it might as well not be there at all.

"There's nothing wrong with his hair" Eric said indignantly. I looked at the pair of them. Not for the first time I wished we had some of Eric's baby pictures around so we could do a comparison. That was always fun. Amelia had kind of looked like Bill's baby pictures and Felicia more like mine. But I'd never quite know with Sam. I had my suspicions though.

I waited for another minute or two, and still nothing happened. "We'll have to take off a layer of clothing, maybe change his nappy."

"Your mother has a cruel streak" Eric whispered to Sam, as he carried him over to the changetable.

"Felicia, can you pass Daddy this nappy" I said to her, handing her one from the pack under the bassinet. She sighed, but did as I asked, sending only a cursory glance in Sam's direction.

"Don't let him pee on you this time" I said to Eric.

"Oh, um. Yeah." Eric said, looking around. I handed a cloth nappy I'd brought from home to Felicia who automatically passed it to Eric and went back to her newspaper game.

There was a wail of indignation from the changetable. "He's awake" Eric said, kind of redundantly. "I guess having someone fiddling around down there will do that to you." He walked back over to the bed, carrying a now-sobbing Sam with him.

"Well, you would know" I said to Eric, taking Sam and trying to push up my top and unhook my bra. The trick was going to be getting him to latch on. The trouble with being this full of milk was that it flattened your nipple right out and made it harder to shove in tiny little mouths. If I was at home with my breast-pump, I could have expressed a bit first, but there was no way I wanted to use the one here. For one thing, I didn't think my need was that bad, for another I'd used it to try to bring my milk in when I'd had Amelia and it was a scary contraption, it really did make me feel like one of Jason's poor cows.

I tried to get Sam latched, but it didn't really happen and to be honest, Eric's scrutiny of the whole procedure I could have done without right at that point in time. I got that it was interesting to him, all new and exciting, but honestly, faced with a crying baby and overflowing boobs I didn't need someone watching every move I was making. At least he wasn't offering me breast-feeding advice, I supposed. That had been a Bill thing to do, because obviously, it was one of his specialist subjects, but I couldn't help but feel that he was wondering why I couldn't just get on with it and stop Sam crying already.

In the meantime, I'd started to drip milk and would probably progress to full on shooting streams any minute. "Look, can you just take him for a moment" I said to Eric, pushing Sam back towards him. I pulled up my bra and swung my legs over the side of the bed. "I'm just going into the bathroom to express a bit and then try again."

"Express?" Eric said, sounding puzzled and looking down at the crying baby he'd now been lumbered with.

"Yeah, you know. Like milking a cow. Not pleasant. I'll be back." I went into the bathroom and leaned over the hand basin and expressed a bit of milk from each breast manually. While I was doing it I let a few tears fall, which was terribly self-indulgent, but I just didn't care. I felt like a huge, fat, milking-machine and could bet that Eric would never want to come near me again. He might just ship me off to live with Jason.

After a few minutes, I pulled my bra up again, wiped my eyes and went to try again. Sam was still crying, probably feeling like I'd abandoned him and Eric was no doubt thinking I was a crap mother to boot.

I sat back on the bed and held out my arms for Sam. "You OK?" Eric asked.

"I'm fine" I replied, maybe a little too sharply. But I was. I was fine. I'd done this all before so I had nothing to complain about, even if I did wonder if maybe this was the time I was going to be stuck with this sized stomach forever.

Thankfully Sam latched. Well, he opened his mouth to have a really good wail, and I managed to wedge my nipple in there, which made him look a bit surprised, but he started suckling and it was nice not to have the wailing noise in the small room anymore.

However, I then looked around and noticed something else that wasn't in the room. Or rather someone else.

"Where's Felicia?" I asked Eric.

"Um…" he looked around as well. And then we both spied the fact that the door was open. "Shit" Eric said. "Hang on." He walked out of the room and I could see him look down the hall one way and then the other, before he disappeared from view.

I hoped he found her. Quickly. And without alerting attention to us. I already felt a bit like a useless mum today, I didn't need the midwives all knowing that I'd lost my two year old as well.

Sam at least seemed content enough now, although when one of the stupid tears that leaked out of my eye fell on him, he blinked a few times and looked confused. Yeah, poor Sam. Stuck with the weird, sad mother.

Eric returned with Felicia, just after I'd swapped Sam to the other side. "She was down in the visitor's area" he said. "So we've been for a walk to get tea and coffee." Eric was holding two mugs and a rather grumpy looking Felicia was carrying a plate of biscuits, one of which slid off onto the floor, before she stopped and picked it back up, putting it carefully back on her little plate.

"Felicia, you can't run off like that" I said to her. "We didn't know where you were."

Felicia sighed. "I's Nemo" she said, kind of cryptically.

"Yeah, but Leesh the point is that you shouldn't run off like Nemo did, not that you should" Eric said, putting the cups down and taking the plate off her, before handing her back one of the chocolate chip biscuits that were on there.

Felicia shrugged and took a bite, before crawling into the chair. "I's Nemo. Nemo has a daddy. His mummy's dead." She was bit muffled due to the amount of biscuit in her mouth.

Yeah, sometimes it worried me that neither of the kids seemed that upset about that particular part of the movie.

"But Nemo makes his Daddy very sad" Eric said, sitting on the bed, with his coffee in one hand and a biscuit in the other. "Please don't make me sad like that."

Felicia shrugged again. "You's good at findin'" she said, and then she glared in my direction and carried on eating.

Sam, however, seemed to have finished. "Do you want to try burping him?" I said to Eric.

"What?" he asked, with his mouth full. Yeah, no hope for the kids then.

"Burping him. Here, I'll show you." I demonstrated the best method I'd found, which was sit baby up, put hand on chest, remove hand from baby's back and balance baby's chest on your hand while stretching out their body.

"Um…" Eric said.

"You'll be fine. You've got big enough hands" I said, pushing Sam towards him. As you ended up balancing the baby on one hand, the more strength you had in your hand, the easier it was. Eric should be fine.

"I feel like it's wrong to fold him in half" he said.

"Just make sure you support his neck at the front with your fingers" I told him.

Eric still looked worried, but he did his best to copy me. When he finally got Sam stretched out he was rewarded with a loud burp that you'd swear couldn't come out of something that little.

"Huh, I did it. Well done Sam" Eric said, trying to figure out how to get him back out of that position.

"Sam did a burp!" Felicia yelled, laughing and just about falling off the chair. "BURP! BURP!"

"Yeah, he did Leesh" Eric agreed, as he finally got Sam lying flat again.

"Dat's funny" Felicia said, which says a lot about the humour requirements of two year olds. At least she seemed a bit happier now.

I took Sam back off Eric and started re-swaddling him. "Well" Eric said "I guess we'd better think about going. We'll have to get Amelia soon."

"Oh…yeah" I said. I missed Amelia.

Eric stood up. "Come on, Leesh. Let's get going."

"Where's we goin'?"

"I've got to do something, and then we'll get Ames."

"And see Bessian?"

"Maybe."

Eric turned back around to give me a goodbye hug, but stopped after he'd come in part-way. "Oh, Sookie" he said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing" I said, as the tears fell down my cheeks. I took a deep breath, but it sounded more like a sob.

"BURP!" Felicia yelled, so at least she hadn't noticed my melt-down.

"Um…something's wrong" Eric said. I was pretty sure he was trying to back out towards the door as he said it though. I couldn't blame him. I was a mess. I was all over the place today, my body didn't feel like my own and neither did my emotions. It was horrible. I'd run away from me if I could. Poor Eric. Poor Felicia. Poor Sam. They were all stuck here with me.

I sniffed. "I'm fine" I said, as though random crying was the norm.

"Yeah…I don't think you are" Eric said. Yep, he was definitely backing away now. Only by virtue of the fact that he had freakishly long arms was he able to reach out and rub my upper arm.

"I just…I'm just a bit sad" I said, daring to look up at him. "And I want to go home." Yeah, I realised that was a mistake as soon as I said it. Who wants to take the crying, emotional mess with the sore, leaky boobs who can only shuffle about home? Probably not Eric. He might even pay Birthcare to keep me in for longer.

"OK then" Eric said. "Let's get you packed up."

"But I should stay!" I wailed. "Otherwise it's mean."

"How?"

"I won't bond with Sam. But I miss the rest of you. I'm a terrible person who's being selfish." And I sat on the bed and cried in earnest.

"Mummy's cryin'" Felicia said from the corner. "I don' think she liked the burpin'. Bad Sam!"

"That's not it, Leesh" Eric said, sitting next to me and putting his arms around me. "She's just a bit emotional."

"I think" he said to me, "That Sam'll bond better with a mother who isn't upset that she's not at home. Plus, you know, you guys will have all that boob-time for bonding."

I giggled a bit. "Boob-time?"

Eric shrugged. "Well, that's kind of how it looks from where I sit. Sam seems to be enjoying himself, and it's hard to blame him."

"I'm not sure if that's weird or not…" I said, temporarily forgetting to cry.

"I'm sure it's not. So anyway, let's get you packed up."

"I don't know. Plus of course, we'll still have to pay for tonight as I've missed check-out time."

"Doesn't matter. If we get out of here soon then we can pick up Amelia on the way home."

So Eric and I packed everything up in a hurry, and we bundled Sam into his capsule. I sent Eric off to settle up my bill at the front desk as I did one last sweep around the room for things I might have left behind.

"You's comin' home?" Felicia asked.

"I am. Me and Sam" I said. "We'll get to show him where he lives."

"He no' stayin' here?"

"Nope. He lives with us now." Felicia didn't say anything to that, she just looked at Sam and sighed.

Eric came back in and said he'd carry everything down to the car in two trips, despite the fact I said I could carry my bag. So he dashed off and was back about 5 minutes later to get Felicia, Sam and I.

We got the capsule fitted into the back of my car and Felicia kept glaring at it. "Tha's no' right" she said.

"What's not?" I asked.

"He's goin' backwards."

"Yeah, he has to, Leesh" Eric said. "He's a baby."

"Babies is stupid." Eric and I exchanged a look and decided not to respond to that.

At school Eric and Felicia went to collect Amelia at her classroom and I stayed in the car with Sam, although I got into the back so I could see him. He was fast asleep so I wondered if he was going to be one of those babies who slept in the car. Amelia had been, Felicia never had. There was always too much going on for her and she was too excited at being out of the house.

"Is Sam here?" I heard Amelia ask, a bit before I could see here. "But I want to show him to everyone and they've gone home now!"

"Maybe next week" I said, opening up the car door and taking in Amelia's outfit. I guessed maybe Eric hadn't read the bit in my note about making sure she wore what I'd left out for her. The dress she was wearing was what I had picked. Its style could best be described as '70's granny-dress, as it had a gathered waist, long sleeves and a frill at the bottom. It was a floral print in shades of purple, with the occasional orange accent. Amelia had therefore added tights in apricot and raspberry stripes and bright red mary-janes, which kind of gave her a Wicked Witch of the East effect going on. Add on her bright blue puffer jacket with the fake fur trim around the hood, and her headband, which was pink sequins, and she was kind of hard to miss.

And I had missed her, very much. I gave her a big hug, which she looked a bit surprised at, and then she pushed past me to get in the car and peer at Sam. "He's so cute!" she said, before taking her seat. Felicia gave Amelia a dirty look, and Eric got the kids strapped in so we could set off for home.

EPOV

Sookie had been a bit weird emotionally when we'd gone to see her today. She kept crying and I didn't know why. It was fucking awful seeing her like that. And so when she started crying that she wanted to go home, I just packed her and brought her home. Her and Sam.

However, when we got home I had a mild moment of panic as Sookie lifted Sam from the capsule and placed him in the bassinet in our room. Fuck. There were no more midwives or doctors or anyone else around to take care of him. It was just us, and I was probably no fucking use at all, so it was just Sookie and she was a bit emotionally fragile.

Fuck.

I gave the kids some snacks and tried to help Sookie unpack her bag so she wasn't doing too much. Felicia appeared in the bedroom. "The big mousey ate my raisins" she said, holding a box of raisins and trying to get the last ones out of the bottom.

"Um…OK" I said, wondering what to do with the bag that held Sookie's cosmetics and shampoo.

"What?" Sookie asked, moving away from the closet.

"I think Mickey Mouse must be on again" I said to her.

"Oh" Sookie said. "I thought they were watching something else."

I shrugged, I had no clue. Felicia wandered off again and we carried on sorting Sookie's things out.

Later on Sookie got the macaroni cheese out of the fridge to finish thawing. "So glad I made this" she said. "How was the lasagne?"

"Ummm, great" I said, looking over to where Bob was waiting for dinner. Thank fuck he couldn't talk. Felicia came back in though, to see what was happening. "I no eat besaynah" she said. "Big mousey eat besaynah. He's a good climber."

"I thought you liked lasagne?" Sookie asked her.

Felicia shrugged. "Do" she said, and she wandered off.

"What's with the new obsession with Mickey Mouse?" Sookie asked me.

"I don't know" I said, but they latched onto different shows all the time. It wasn't that long ago it had been Dora they'd wanted to watch all the time.

It was fucking nice having Sookie back, even if she have to nurse Sam through dinner. Felicia kept asking when he was going to burp again, and Amelia tried to give a running commentary about what Sookie was doing.

Trying to change the subject I asked Amelia if she'd remembered to thank Sebastian for the money he'd given her, which meant I had to explain the story to Sookie. I could see she was itching to tell me where the stash of coins was, and to probably even point out that its location was described in detail on her list, complete with fucking treasure map, but she refrained.

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Um…think so" she said. "But Sebastian doesn't care."

"I think he does, Ames. You have to be polite to people who help you out."

She gave me a sceptical look and carried on eating.

After dinner I put the bigger kids to bed and was looking forward to spending some time just watching TV with Sookie afterwards, because, even though it was only one night, I'd fucking missed her. We sat on the couch with her tea and my coffee and I put my arm around her shoulders and she relaxed into me. This felt nice. "Shame they don't have Masterchef on a Friday night anymore" Sookie said.

"Yeah. Shame" I said, with as much sincerity as I could muster, which obviously wasn't a lot because Sookie swatted me in the stomach and said "Once more with feeling, maybe?"

I was going to reply, but there was a wail from the bedroom. Sookie stood up. "I'll go and bring him in here for a feed" she said. "That way he can hang with us."

"OK" I said, and she left the room and I sat back and flipped through some channels looking for something to watch. However it was the movement beside the TV that caught my eye. Something brown just darted behind it.

And suddenly all the big mousey stuff made sense. Rat. Fuck, fuck, fucking Bob.

It was tempting to just sit there and pretend I hadn't seen it. But what would it do? Would it fucking sneak out and go after Sam? He was kind of defenceless. Fuck.

It would have been really great if I could have just told Sookie and let her catch it. She was awesome at catching them. But possibly she wouldn't want to, given she'd just given birth 48 hours earlier. Probably she shouldn't be catching a rat.

I sighed. It would have to be me. I fucking hated rats, and, at that moment, I fucking hated Bob too.

I wondered if this was my recompense for the lasagne.

I went to the kitchen and got the flashlight and peered behind the TV cabinet. I couldn't see anything for a moment and I thought he'd run somewhere else, but then there was a small twitch and I saw him. Now I just had to get my hand in there. As I went to push my arm into the gap I had a moment's worry about being bitten, but I realised it was either me or someone else in the household who got bitten and it was probably better that it was me. Although I really hoped it didn't fucking bite.

It realised I was coming though and shot out the other side of the cabinet and took off across the living room floor and I launched myself after it, diving across the carpet and managing to grab…something. There was a horrific scream and I picked it up to see that I'd grabbed one of its back legs and it was trying desperately to curl around so it could bite me. Fuck.

At that moment, Sookie arrived carrying Sam. "What the hell…" she started to say, then she spied my prisoner. "Rat" she said, moving out of my way as I ran to the front door. I pulled my arm back and just threw the rat out into the night. Hopefully it would land on fucking Bob.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck" I said, as I closed the door. I walked to the bathroom and washed my hands, trying to get off any leftover rat germs, and then I went back to the living room to find Sookie sitting calmly nursing Sam.

"Fucking Bob" I said. "I think he brought it in last night, as a thank-you for the lasagne."

"Did he have leftovers?" Sookie asked. Fuck.

"Yeah" I said. "But that'll be Felicia's big mousey then."

"Yep, it will" Sookie said. I sat down on the couch next to her and threw my head back. "I hate fucking rats" I said.

"But you're good at catching them" Sookie said.

"Yeah, I dunno. Think I was just lucky."

"No. You're good. I can tell. Thank-you for catching it for us. Sam would say thank-you but he's got his mouth full. Never mind. One day we can tell him the story of how daddy caught a rat for him his first night home."

"Yeah…no problem. How long until he can catch them himself though?"

"A while" Sookie said. I went back to flipping channels.

"Hey, look. That restaurant show. Let's watch that" Sookie said excitedly.

I looked at her. "You really want…" but the question died away. Fuck it; I'd already caught a rat tonight. What was one crappy reality show? "Fine" I said. "Let's watch that."

"Yay, Sam likes it too."

"'Course he does."

"And he thinks his daddy's very brave for catching that rat."

"Well…there are not many people I'd catch a rat for" I said. "And he's on the list."

"Yeah, he is" Sookie agreed. We both fell silent and the only sound, apart from the TV, were the sucking noises Sam was making as he fed. I reached over and stroked his cheek. Yep, rat or no fucking rat, it was good to have everybody home.

**Thanks for reading!**


	78. Chapter 78

**A/N Phew! Got through this. We've gone down to one day nap, so my writing schedule is all up the wazoo now and I've had to turn a blind-eye to the CD rack being emptied this afternoon.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but they've been around for so long, I'm starting to think they must really like New Zealand!**

SPOV

I was kind of glad to get home from Birthcare, even though I still felt shaky emotionally. I knew it came with the territory, that surge of hormones you get with the milk coming in, but it's still no fun when you have to live through it.

Although it's probably better than catching a rat. Thank God Eric got it, because I had no desire to run around after a rat. If I could actually run. Which I seriously doubted. Between the stitches and the boobs which were about to explode, I was kind of a mess. A big, goopy, drippy, crying mess.

Luckily Sam still liked me. He liked me so much he decided he could barely stand to be away from me, and he kept waking up, or not sleeping or whichever way you wanted to look at it. The result was that every time I put him down to sleep in the bassinet he lasted only briefly, before he cried again.

Eric just looked confused about it all. He'd obviously never shared a room with a newborn before and he couldn't figure out why Sam didn't just want to lie down and go to sleep like a normal person.

"Is he still hungry?" Eric asked, when I was getting up for the third, or maybe fourth time.

"I don't really know" I said, which was the truth. He'd fallen asleep during the last feed so it was possible he hadn't got enough in him. But it was also possible he was just lonely over there in the bassinet.

Eric looked at me as though my answer couldn't possibly be right. Obviously I was supposed to know these things and fix the problem, immediately. "I might try feeding him again" I said. I seemed to have the milk there, so now we were awake it was probably a plan. It was a standard strategy for newborns after all, if in doubt try giving them more food.

Sam fed and Eric watched, and then he gave up watching and dozed off. So did I for a bit, I think. I woke up with my head lolling forward and a very stiff neck. Sam seemed to have given up at that point too, so I picked him up to burp him. That woke him up and he not only burped, but he spat up. Right onto Eric.

"Wha' happened?" Eric said, wiping his hand over his face.

"That was Sam" I said. Possibly it was bad to blame the baby, but it was true. "He spat up."

"Spat up?" Eric was just lying there, frowning, and looking confused.

"Yeah. I think he ate too much. He's fine though."

"I got spat up on?"

"Yeah, I think he's got in for you. From both ends."

Eric sat himself up and just looked at me for a few seconds, before he wandered off to the bathroom to clean up. I gave the bed a cursory glance, but Sam seemed to have missed the bedding and only hit Eric. But of course the whole spitting up thing had made him kind of wide-awake.

I decided I might try Sam with the other side and was attempting to get him latched on when Eric wandered back in.

"It smelt kind of milky" he said. I waited for the punchline, but he just got back into bed and I decided to let him off. It was 3am. Obviously his brain was elsewhere, because I have no clue as what else he thought Sam was going to spit back up again.

Eric lay down and closed his eyes and I felt instantly jealous. I wondered if I could get Sam to spit up on him again, but that seemed a bit mean, and Sam was unlikely to be that accurate anyway. It was more than likely I'd just end up having to change the bedding instead.

So I re-swaddled Sam, nice and tightly, and then tried putting him back to sleep, sitting on the side of the bed and rocking the bassinet gently, and then a bit less gently. He seemed to settle, so I switched off the light and got back into bed and enjoyed the feeling of just lying there, and slowly unwinding.

It lasted about fifteen minutes. And then there was crying. Again.

"Is that Sam?" Eric asked, his voice kind of muffled by the pillow. "Yeah" I replied, wondering what Eric thought the options were for the origin of the crying baby noise. Most likely it was the baby; I didn't think Bob could do that great an imitation of him.

"Shhh" I said, sitting on the edge of the bed again to rock the bassinet. Sam didn't shhh though, he kept on crying. Then he stopped for a bit. Then he started again. He was a pain in the bum.

So I sat and I rocked, and I wondered why on earth Eric's snores weren't putting him to sleep because surely that counted as white noise, and I wondered if I should drag the dehumidifier into our room and turn it on, because that would definitely be white noise, and I hoped he wasn't always going to be like this, and I thought that this was really a dumb idea because I'd had two babies and wasn't I over the sleepless nights thing yet? It was dark, it was cold and everyone else in the world was sleeping.

Well, everyone else in New Zealand anyway.

And then I wondered if it was possible to give birth to someone in this time zone who was actually set for another time zone. Maybe that was the problem. He'd been born in the wrong hemisphere. It was probably set in his DNA. That would make all of this Eric's fault.

Eric, who was currently snoring up a storm on the other side of the room.

I wondered how Sam would feel if his parents split up before he was a week old.

Sam had dialled it down to the odd snuffly grizzle though, so I slowly retracted my hand from the edge of the bassinet. It was quiet for a minute or two, but then Sam started crying again and so did I.

"What's happenin'?" Eric asked, sitting up in bed.

"Sam won't sleep, I've tried everything." I reached for a tissue and blew my nose, loudly. "I think he's in the wrong time zone."

"What?" Eric asked.

"Time zone. You know. Like he's set for someplace else, like if you fly over from the States and don't change your watch."

"Um…OK. So you don't think he's hungry then?"

"I've been feeding him!" I hissed out whirling around to face Eric. Even with only my dim beside light on, I must have looked a bit scary because Eric sort of backed away. I took a deep breath. "So what's your plan?" I said.

"Plan?" Eric looked confused, and maybe still a little bit scared.

"To get him to sleep. Do you have a plan? You are Sam's father, after all." Eric looked thoughtful, and I could almost see him forming the plan that consisted of Sam's mother sorting it all out through the miracle of breastfeeding, and then discarding it because currently Sam's mother looked a bit like a crazed lunatic with mad hair, mad eyes and enormous boobs that might explode and take us all with them.

"Um…" Eric said, "Maybe I could Google something…" he reached for his phone. "No!" I said quickly. If he started looking through the screeds of parenting advice on the internet we'd be here until the following night and he'd still be none the wiser, having read about twelve hundred contradictory bits of advice.

"No?" Eric asked, sounding confused just like Felicia did when you told her it was time to go to sleep now. "But it might help?"

"It won't help…just, I don't know. Try something. Or don't. I'll try again. I'm just going to the loo first." I eased myself off the bed and shuffled to the bathroom, Eric's eyes watching me go. Sam was starting to build up to a nice big wail. Terrific, I thought. God knows, sleep's over-rated anyway.

EPOV

You don't realise just how nice sleep is until you can't. Well, I could kind of sleep, but it wasn't good sleep. I was aware of Sookie moving around and Sam making noise and the bed moving, and Sookie sighing, and then something hit me in the face and it was kind of wet and milky and I couldn't really figure out what the hell had happened, and then everyone else in the room was crying and the night was really fucking bizarre and I kind of missed being asleep.

Sleep is good. I didn't get why Sam didn't understand that. I felt like maybe I'd never complain about Felicia getting up in the middle of the night again because, mostly, she was pretty quiet when she did it and just contented herself with running around and climbing over me. I could sometimes even pretend I hadn't noticed her.

But Sam was hard to ignore. He was loud. How the fuck could he be that loud? He'd even scared Bob off earlier, which was probably no less than the fucker deserved for that rat stunt, but if Bob was more willing to stare down a rat that was almost half his size than he was to spend time in the same room as Sam at full volume, then it was pretty fucking obvious that the noise Sam was making was distressing. And not just to Bob.

I didn't fucking like it either.

I was at a bit of a loss because I would have thought it was a hunger thing and that I could understand, he was hungry, so he cried. He couldn't talk or walk himself to the pantry, or even come and stick a large paw on my face to tell me the catfood bowl was empty again, so crying was the obvious choice. He cried, and Sookie would feed him and he'd stop crying. Seemed a simple enough equation, and most of the time that was what happened.

Not in the middle of the night though. No, in the middle of the night he decided he wasn't hungry he was just pissed off and we were all going to suffer along with him.

Now Sookie was upset and I was alone in the room with the crying baby who I, apparently, had to make stop crying before something bad happened. At least, that was the message I'd got from Sookie. I wasn't sure what the bad thing was, but she'd looked a little bit wild-eyed before and there'd definitely been stomping, so I thought maybe the bad thing was yelling, and possibly finger-pointing.

I wasn't sure who she was going to yell at. The obvious choice seemed to be Sam, as this was mostly his fault, but my gut-feeling was that it was going to be me as Sam's proxy. How that worked, I didn't fucking know.

I got out of bed and walked over the bassinet. Sam had managed to get his arms free of the wrap-thing that Sookie kept trying to bind him up in and he was waving them around and getting quite red in the face.

"You know" I said to him. "Sleep is actually quite good, if you give it a chance." He didn't appear to hear me though, and just went on with his original plan to scream the house down. I turned to look at the bathroom door. I wondered how long she was going to be. I wished she'd come back, but she had…things going on. Things which seemed to involve a lot of blood and clean-up and fucking enormous sanitary pads and stuff I didn't want to know.

I just maybe hadn't realised all the stuff that happens after the baby gets here. I Googled a fair bit of information of course, but I obviously hadn't found the really useful stuff. Maybe, I thought, I should have another try now, while Sookie isn't here?

Sam was really getting worked up though, so I picked him up and held him against my chest. I'd hoped that maybe that would stop him crying but it didn't. Holding him closer to my ear made him a lot louder though.

I walked around to my side of the bed, turned, and walked back again. Maybe walking would help.

It didn't help and I was dead on my feet and didn't want to walk anymore anyway, so I sat on the bed and propped some pillows behind my back and picked up my phone. I kind of patted Sam's back with one hand and tried Googling crying babies with the other hand, but it wasn't easy to do, and when the results showed up I realised you probably had to be more specific, and probably not holding a baby at the time. I gave up on Google.

I wondered if Sookie was ever coming out of the bathroom.

I wondered at what point Sam would go hoarse.

I tried to remember when Felicia cried as a baby and could only come up with teething. How early did teething start anyway?

I wondered if I should look that up on Google.

I wondered if babies got brain-cancer from being too close to an iPhone. Maybe it wasn't a particularly good thing that Felicia used to chew mine all the time.

I thought again about the teeth. How early did they come? And could you tell if they were coming in?

I shuffled Sam down so he was lying in my arms rather than on my chest. His little face was screwed up and his mouth was open. I thought maybe I could just check, so I stuck my little finger in his mouth gingerly and tried feeling his gums. I couldn't feel anything that felt like teeth.

However, it seemed to stop Sam crying as he was now sucking on my finger. Oh. Well that…was OK. I guessed. It was quieter, which was a fucking relief.

I looked down at Sam and his eyes were closed and he looked quite peaceful now. Hard to believe he was the one yelling the place down minutes before.

Sookie stepped out of the bathroom and looked around, probably wondering where I'd stashed Sam. "Oh" she said, when she saw was going on, and I wondered if that was going to be a good 'oh' or a bad 'oh'. "You figured it out" she said, walking around to get back into her side of the bed.

"Yeah" I said. "We did, didn't we Sam?" Sam didn't say anything, but just sucked vigorously. He actually had quite a lot of suction. I wondered what that felt like on a nipple. I thought about asking Sookie, but when I glanced over at her, she'd fallen asleep.

So instead I sat there with Sam sucking on my finger until eventually, he wasn't sucking quite so hard and his eyelids were fluttering and I gingerly withdrew my finger and just waited for a moment.

Nothing happened.

So I swung my legs out of bed and walked around to the bassinet and very, very gently placed him in there. I stood up and just held my breath.

Still nothing happened.

I tip-toed back to bed and got in and there was still no sound from Sam, so I finally let out the breath I'd been holding and lay down. "Good work" Sookie mumbled, as she reached around to hold my hand. And then I lay there for a while, listening to the sounds of Sookie and Sam breathing.

SPOV

A newborn is really a baptism by fire. Even when you've done it all before. They're just so irrational. It makes you realise that actually the two year-old makes a lot of sense at times.

And we should really listen to her when she starts talking about very large mice.

Thankfully none of Sam's night escapades woke up his sisters, but he woke Eric and me up. A lot. He was good during the day, probably because he soon got used to the fact that I might be trying to feed him while helping Amelia with her reading, or rolling a ball to Felicia and maybe all that noise and activity was something he liked more than just lying around in a quiet room.

I liked lying around in a quiet room, of course. But everyone, including babies, know that mum's needs come second.

Eric seemed to be getting the hang of it after a few nights and after discovering that if all else failed he could stick his finger in Sam's mouth and either he'd comfort-suck himself to sleep or eventually I'd take pity on him and rescue him and maybe feed Sam. Eric was still completely convinced of course, that my boobs were like a magical panacea which would cure all Sam's ills and complaints, but I think a lot of dads were like that.

Or maybe it was just Eric.

At any rate, we made it work. Amelia basically wanted to smother Sam to death with her love most of the time. She just thought he was like one of her baby dolls and she was quite fond of picking him out of his bassinet when he was trying to have a sleep and bringing him to me if she thought he'd woken up and needed a feed.

Yeah, everyone worked on the principal I needed a baby attached to me at all times.

Felicia wasn't so keen on him at all still. I'd catch her glancing at him with total disdain and occasionally she'd poke him and when he yelled she'd announce "Sam's cryin'" and walk off, like she had nothing to do with the situation. And if Eric dared to hold Sam then Felicia somehow had a sixth sense about it and would appear out of nowhere to immediately assert her preferential rights to Eric's lap and get in there first.

Occasionally though he did provide her with a source of amusement when he burped or filled his nappy particularly noisily. Loud bodily functions as entertainment obviously surpassed any sibling rivalry and Felicia would giggle away and shout "Sam did a farty!" as though it was the funniest thing ever, and if Amelia was around it would set her off too.

And he was loud sometimes. Eric had never been around a fully breast-fed baby before and witnessed how it just kind of, well, bubbles out of them. The first time he really experienced it Sam was laying on the bed and Eric was talking to him and he obviously just let go because all I heard from the bathroom was Eric saying "What the fuck was that?"

And the contents of the nappy weren't much better. Eric now understood why Jason and I referred to a particular shade of light brown as 'Karitane mustard'.

The time the nappy didn't hold the contents and it spilled out onto Eric's jeans was particularly entertaining. The best bit of the evening for Eric was when the big kids were in bed and he could finally get some time with Sam without Felicia trying to butt in or Amelia trying to supervise in case he did wrong. He was fond of sitting on the couch with his feet on the coffeetable and his knees up, so that he could lay Sam along his thighs and they could kind of look at each other and talk. I have no idea exactly what they talked about, of course, I usually left them to it and used that time to make Amelia's lunch and Felicia's morning tea, or to get something ready to put into the crockpot for the next night's dinner, or catch up on my washing.

Five people make a truck-load of washing.

But Sam and Eric seemed to like their time together, despite the occasional nappy failure which left me with more washing to soak and a slightly grumpy Eric to placate. "The peeing is one thing" he muttered, as he stripped off his jeans while I opened Sam's all in one and tried to work out where to begin with cleaning him up. "But the poop is something else entirely. Those diapers aren't cheap, why are they so fucking defective?"

I shrugged. "I think maybe he needs to go up a size." He was growing pretty quickly, having never actually lost all that much weight after birth at all. Eric really liked it when the midwife came for a visit and brought her scales and pronounced Sam a nice big, healthy baby. Eric would stand around proudly, like he'd done it all himself. He'd helped though; he was pretty good at bringing me chocolate biscuits while I breast-fed. I had a terrible sweet-tooth and couldn't quite get enough of sugary things. I'd do night feeds with my stomach rumbling, and had to start stashing dried apricots in the drawer of my bedside table to get me through the night.

But despite what the Hollywood actresses say, it wasn't shrinking my stomach as fast as I'd like it to. Maybe it was just that the chocolate biscuit fixation was countering it nicely, but I was still wearing big tops and my maternity jeans and I felt a bit like a blob. Eric didn't say anything, but I figured he probably wasn't impressed. God knows, he could have stayed in the States and probably married one of those Victoria's Secret models who just bounce back in two weeks and start modelling lingerie again.

I wasn't even walking through the bedroom in my underwear if Eric was there, quite frankly.

So when Sam was just over two weeks old, we took him on his first real family outing. It was a lovely Spring day so I made a spiced apple cake and some chocolate chip biscuits with Amelia and we went to Cornwall Park for a picnic. Amelia and Felicia took their scooters and practiced riding them around while I pushed Sam in the pram, and he slept through the experience, and then we took an expedition off to see the lambs.

I could really sympathise with the ewes when they'd get almost tripped up by their babies who were trying to latch on and feed. Thank God Sam couldn't walk yet.

We set out the picnic rug and I proved my mettle as a third-time mum by managing to breast-feed while simultaneously handing out food and drinks to my older children. It's amazing how you get used to doing everything one-armed when you have to.

I'd thrown a blanket over myself while I was feeding, not so much because you could see my boob, between Sam's head and my top there wasn't a lot to see, but pulling my top up exposed my stomach and I hated showing anyone that. It was lumpy and bumpy and saggy and gross. Amelia had poked it and questioned me at length as to whether I had another baby in there and why, if I didn't, was it still big like that?

I realised though, that I had run out of wipes and was going to need the new packet from the car, judging by the state of Felicia's rather sticky hands and face, so I sent Eric back to grab them for me.

EPOV

I liked having Sam around, I really did. Despite the fact he was fond of making the most fucking awful noises in the middle of the night and of shitting so much crap it shot out the side of his diaper, he was…fucking amazing really.

I still couldn't quite believe he was mine.

I liked the conversations we'd have in the evenings, when I'd put him on my legs and we'd just…talk. Well, I talked. He listened. I think he did, anyway. He'd stare at me intently with his dark, dark blue eyes like he was trying to memorise what I looked like. Or work out who the hell I was and why there wasn't one of those nice breast things being pressed into his face again.

I loved him so very fucking much.

And I think I loved Sookie more for giving him to me. Because I could kind of understand now why she said no when I first brought the subject up. I'd thought I had it all figured out because I'd turned up when Felicia was still small and pretty much coped.

But I had no fucking clue at all.

And it wasn't just the birth she'd had to go through, although that was bad enough, despite all of Sookie's protestations that she was one of the lucky ones who didn't have it too rough. It was everything afterwards, it was the way she winced when she walked, or the way she bit her lip when her boobs were so full of milk they hurt, or the way they'd randomly leak milk on her. Sometimes that actually sprayed milk if Sam didn't latch on properly. That was fucking weird to see.

It was the way she'd look down at her body and I could see how much she hated it, just fucking hated it, because it didn't look like it did before. It looked like she'd had a baby. And I think she forgot sometimes just what a fucking miracle that was.

On the day we went to Cornwall Park, because, I think, Sookie wanted to see those fucking sheep and their babies again, I realised just how much I loved my family. Really fucking loved them. And I'd do anything for them, even catch fucking rats with my bare hands if I had to.

And more, definitely more. I wasn't sure where the limits were, I just hoped I never had to find out.

When we sat down to eat, Sookie sent me back to the car for more wipes as Felicia was managing to simultaneously wear and eat her cake at the same time, despite Amelia's disapproval of it all. I think she simply egged Felicia on.

Poor fucking Felicia. As much as I loved Sam, and wouldn't give him up for anything, I still felt fucking awful about the change to her world. She'd been incredibly clingy since we brought him home and I wasn't sure she'd get over it anytime soon, despite Sookie's assurances that tons of kids go through it and none of them are damaged forever.

I just told her I loved her, and how lucky she was to have a baby brother, and how when Sam got bigger we'd be able to play with him and that'd be great. While inside I realised that it was quite possible the best outcome of Sam getting bigger was that he'd be better able to defend himself from Felicia. And Amelia, who was going to smother him with kindness if we weren't careful.

As I walked back from the car to the picnic rug though I had a good look at the four of them, sitting there in the sun. Sookie was feeding Sam and laughing at something Amelia had said. She looked…fucking amazing. Not just beautiful, with the sun behind her and a smile on her face, but she looked content and capable and…well the best word was probably maternal. But if I told her that she'd hate it and tell me that it was fucking true that she was just a leaky blob.

That was so not how I thought of her though. And I realised something as I watched her. This was probably how I'd always remember her, sitting on a picnic rug in the sun, looking happy and feeding our kids.

I sat down next to her and handed over the packet of wipes. "Can you clean sticky-features over there?" she said, gesturing to Felicia.

I pulled one out and reached over to wipe Felicia's face. "Did any make it in your mouth?" I asked her.

"I's tried!" she said indignantly.

"You should eat nicely" Amelia lectured. "You're a big sister now and big sisters have to show the babies what to do, just like I do with you." That earned her a glare from Felicia, but Amelia was oblivious.

Sookie finished with Sam and handed him to me so I could burp him, before helping herself to a piece of the cake. Sam obliged with a rather satisfied belch and Felicia started giggling so much she fell over backwards. "Sam burped!" she exclaimed. Amelia joined in and snickered as well. "He's so loud!" she said. "Like Daddy!" That set Felicia off again and even Sookie was smirking.

I decided to show Sam something interesting, so I stood up and walked over to where some of the trees were, their branches covered in new leaves. "Look, Sam" I said. "Tree." Sam stared at the slight movement of the leaves from the breeze, his eyes following the movement.

I looked back at Sookie and she smiled at me. Felicia was still saying "BURP!" loudly, and Amelia was giggling at her. Yep, this was a day I'd always fucking remember.

**A/N So after you go home you get visits from a midwife for the first 5-6 weeks, usually about 6 visits in all. She checks the baby and just checks you're OK. If you had a midwife deliver your baby, it would be the same one, but in Sookie's case, it'll be whoever Russell arranged.**

**After that you're handed over to Plunket, which is an organisation who basically look after the welfare of all children in NZ. They're partially government funded, but rely a lot on fundraising. The Plunket nurse visits you twice at home, then you visit them at their clinic at regular intervals, which gradually get further apart, and the last visit is just before your child starts school. Plunket is great. Karitane nurses work for Plunket, they specialise in babycare and are named after the Karitane hospitals which used to be around the place and were started in the town of Karitane (Carry-tar-knee), but the same person who started Plunket. So that's the reason for that special shade of early baby-poo yellowy brown being known as Karitane mustard.**

**And you also have a 6 week check with your GP (general practitioner) who checks the baby over, usually in conjunction with the first immunisations. It's all recorded in the child's WellChild book you're given at birth, so you have a record of all these checks and visits and what they weighed and how they were doing.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	79. Chapter 79

**A/N Yeah, it's hard writing during the toddler's only nap when she completely refuses to have even that nap, which means my afternoon was spent cuddling her in front of TV, and hoping she lasted through dinner. But I got there! So thanks for reading this, because that's what keeps me plugging me away at it.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

As much as it's nothing but hard work sometimes with newborns, the time seems to fly by pretty quickly too. Before you know it they're a month old and they're no longer a newborn, but an infant, or, at least, that's what Tara told me. But Tara told me a lot of stuff when I had Amelia and I had to block some of it out because it was too traumatic to contemplate.

Maybe though, I thought, as I changed Sam's nappy, I should have paid more attention to her lectures on the joys of toilet training boys. She'd probably do a repeat performance of it though, before I needed it in a couple of years' time.

We eventually got into a kind of routine with Sam, as much as you could when he was completely unpredictable. Well, he was predictable in that he'd be pretty good during the day and then at night all bets were off and he'd either be really good or really, really bad.

Eric was still a bit confused by the really bad nights. He'd sit there at midnight, or 1am or 2am and look bewildered and say "But we had a talk about sleeping all night." Poor Eric, he might be able to tell a three year old Amelia that she loves steak, or a two year old Felicia not to run off, but he wasn't having any luck at persuading a four week old Sam to sleep all night because daddy wasn't so keen at wandering around in the early hours of the morning.

Eric was pretty supportive though, well, he'd mastered the art of managing to lie there, with his eyes closed, while he patted Sam's back with one hand as he fed. Sometimes I was the only one out of the three of us fully awake during the feed, as Sam and Eric would both doze off and on.

And sometimes, of course, I dozed off as well.

But the daytime was a lot better, and Eric had been trying to have some time at home with us, especially on the days when Amelia was at school and Felicia at pre-school. I could see he still felt guilty about how jealous Felicia was, but really, she'd learn to cope. She was two, and who really remembers being two? If I thought exceptionally hard I had a very vague memory of hugging and kissing a very large German shepherd chained up outside a park, while my mum yelled at me to come back because she was worried it might eat me, but other than that I could not remember my third year in this world at all.

So Felicia would be fine, and in the meantime Eric sometimes stayed home and hung out with Sam and me. We'd sit on the couch and I'd feed Sam, and then I'd either let him sleep on me while I watched morning television and Eric made me cups of decaf coffee and brought me chocolate biscuits, or I'd hand him over and he could sleep on Eric while I made ham sandwiches for lunch. I loved the ham sandwiches, Eric was less than enthused about the morning TV with its weird infomercial breaks and over-enthusiastic TV presenters, and Sam just liked having someone to sleep on.

I'd never been this relaxed with a newborn before. I gave up worrying about routines and whether he should be learning to self-settle in his own bed, and just cuddled him. A lot. I think because I was pretty sure this was my last baby I was going to make the most of having a tiny baby to cuddle.

He was pretty cute. And he did like the cuddles. As did Eric, who occasionally could be found with his head thrown back against the back of the couch, and Sam asleep on his chest. It was full-steam ahead on the house front and Eric was trying to deal with that, as well as work, and I could kind of understand his desire to sleep at night, instead of deal with a slightly stroppy newborn.

But we'd use the time when it was just us and Sam at home to try to discuss how the plans were going. I was kind of useless at blueprints though, and would nod a lot and try to look like I knew what I was talking about when Eric was showing them to me, but honestly, I found it hard to visualise. I really needed to see the rooms finished to figure out how it was all going to work. I was looking forward to the interesting bit, with the wallpaper and the paint. I had some great ideas about wallpaper and what designs I liked. But every time I tried to initiate a discussion with Eric about wallpaper he'd point out that we needed walls first.

In an effort to get me up to speed on what room was going where, we all took a trip to the new place one Saturday morning after Felicia's soccer. Eric put Sam in the front-pack I'd given him as a much delayed birthday present, figuring that he was so hopeless to buy for, I might as well buy him something practical. And I got him a baby anyway, so I felt a bit like I'd done my bit for marking the occasion of Eric turning 30.

Eric was trying to explain the plans to me as we waited for Calvin. I wasn't really getting it. "But what's happening with the other front door?" I asked, for what felt like the umpteenth time.

"It's going" Eric said, over the top of Sam's head. He was sounding somewhat exasperated with me. I was trying to understand it all, I really was.

"But what's going to be there?" I asked.

"Bedroom."

"But…so…where's the office going?" I looked around, trying to picture it my head and failing miserably.

"There!" Eric said, pointing to the plan.

"Where's there?" I asked, looking around as though it would suddenly materialise. What did appear was Felicia. "I's bored!" she said, looking up at Eric.

"I thought you were with Amelia?" Eric asked.

"She's bein' bossy." Felicia sighed and looked at the blueprints. "Can I draw?" she asked plaintively.

"Not on these, Leesh" Eric said, and she sighed again, and decided that she'd make a grab for Sam's foot, but I managed to swipe her hand away before she got a good grip and tugged on it. Sam was oblivious to the whole thing, and I think Eric was turning a blind-eye too, but Felicia shot me a rather filthy look and left to go and find someone else to annoy.

"So the office is next to the fourth bedroom?" I asked, trying again to work out the plans, I made some gestures with my hands in the air in the hope that would help Eric understand what I was talking about.

"No, there's a bathroom in between" Eric said. "See…here."

"Oh. Isn't that just a toilet?"

"Well, yeah. Backing onto the laundry."

"Which is off the kitchen?"

"Off the hall from the family room."

"I'm confused" I admitted.

"I know" Eric said, trying, and failing, to keep the sigh out of his voice.

"My brain doesn't do well with blueprints. I nearly failed tech drawing in the third form."

"What the hell is tech drawing Sookie?"

"Well, it's that" I said, pointing to the blueprints. "Kind-of, anyway. You had to do it for a term in third form and I sucked totally at it. I couldn't get it at all. All my angles were wonky and I couldn't figure out how you made anything look like it should. And Jason was really good at it. So was Tara, so I used to copy off her. But luckily the teacher, Mr Sturm, had been there since Mum was at school and I don't think he thought it was a suitable subject for girls, so he kind of let me off and I scraped by, purely, I think, on the fact I was nice and polite and didn't try to stab anyone with a compass."

"Um…OK. So were there many stabbings at your school?"

I shrugged. "Only attempted ones really, but the boys were pretty rowdy. In fact I think Mr Sturm felt sorry for me because he was teaching Jason as well. And God knows Jason could be a handful at the best of times."

I stopped talking and shrugged again. My failure at tech drawing really didn't help the problem at hand, which was my failure to understand the plans of the house I was supposed to be living in shortly. I leaned over and had another look at them.

"So this is the front door, which is currently the front door we came in?" I asked Eric.

"Yes."

"And then the hallway is going to be the same?"

"A bit wider."

"And that's the living room?" I pointed to the current front room with the nice bay window.

"Yeah."

"And then that's our bedroom?"

"No. That's the biggest bedroom after ours. Ours is back here, in the corner. With the ensuite."

"Oh. I thought that was a bedroom. Is it bigger than that bedroom?" I pointed to one of the other bedrooms on the plan. Eric shrugged. "You wanted a double sink" he said.

"Mmm, but not if it's going to steal room from somewhere else…"

"It's fine Sookie."

Just then Amelia rocked up. "My tooth is still really wiggly" she announced, but she was a bit muffled, due to the fact she was currently wiggling one of her front teeth. "I think it might come out soon. And then the Tooth Fairy will come! Won't she Mum?"

"Yep" I agreed.

"What will she be wearing?" Amelia asked.

"Oh. Um, fairy clothes I guess…" I said, still half-gazing at the plan and trying to work out that if the room I thought was the spare bedroom was the ensuite, then where the hell had the spare room gone?

"But what colour?" Amelia asked. "And how much money will she bring me?" She looked up at Eric, while still wiggling her tooth.

"Enough" Eric said decisively.

"But…what's enough?" Amelia asked.

"Enough Amelia. You just have to…wait and see." Eric was a bit exasperated with all of us at that point.

"Fine!" Amelia huffed, and she walked off, still wiggling her tooth.

"Hey" Calvin called, as he came in through the door. He'd said he would stop by and go over the plans with us. This was the final draft, hopefully. And if we said OK, then it was all go and they were going to be submitted to the council for planning permission and resource consent all the other things you had to get these days.

Calvin walked over to where we had the plans laid out on one of the kitchen counters. "Oh, OK" he said, after studying them for a minute or so. "You changed that?" he pointed to a small blue square.

"Yeah, it seemed to work better if we put the main bathroom between those bedrooms, and then you've got access from that part of the hall, plus the plumbing isn't so bad as the existing bathroom, such as it is, is basically there."

"Yep, good call" Calvin said, still concentrating on the plans. He and Eric discussed a few more things and I zoned out a bit and watched Sam for signs that he was waking up, but, crushed up against Eric like that, I guess he was pretty content, if not in fact so warm from the combined body heat that he was likely to stay asleep for a while.

I felt a bit useless really. Certainly I was completely superfluous to the current discussions on the plans, Sam didn't need me at the moment, and Amelia and Felicia…were somewhere else. I tried to muster the enthusiasm to go and locate them, but I figured they were big enough to come and get me if they wanted me.

"So, Sookie, what do you think?" Calvin asked me.

"Oh, um. Well it's fine" I said. It was. Probably.

"Sookie's confused" Eric told Calvin. "She can't really picture it all yet."

"Oh, well, let's walk it through then, OK?" Calvin said, picking up the plans and walking back to the front door. I followed Calvin, and Eric and Sam followed me. "So that's the living room" Calvin said, gesturing to one side of the hall, "And that's a bedroom, then another bedroom…" And so we walked through the place with Calvin explaining where things were going to be and how big they were. He got out his tape measure and showed me how much space I'd get in the new kitchen, and he also showed me that the ensuite was going to be as huge as I'd feared. Eric just shrugged at that one. "The current one is too small" he said.

After Calvin had finished his tour I felt a bit better about it all. "See" I said to Eric, "I just needed to see it in real life…or something." Eric rolled his eyes.

"I'm probably easier to understand than he is, anyway" Calvin said, gesturing to Eric and laughing.

"Yeah, he does talk funny" I agreed.

"Really?" Eric asked. "You're all going to stick together now?" I nodded. "It's a colonial thing" I said. "You guys wouldn't understand."

"Oh, for fuck's sake" Eric muttered, as Calvin kept sniggering.

"At least you've got Sam though!" I said. "I think he understands you, although if I have to spend his childhood correcting his pronunciation so the other kids can understand him, it's going to be hard work."

"What would you have to correct?" Eric asked. "I don't have an accent, I'm from California."

I was trying to think of a way to break the news to him, while giving Calvin a look meant to tell him to stop laughing, because really, he sounded pretty funny too, when Sam suddenly woke up and I decided to deal with him first instead. "OK, feeding time!" I said.

EPOV

It was definitely starting to feel like something was actually going to happen with the house now that the plans were finished, although, given how long I'd been told the whole planning permission thing could take, I just hoped it happened before Sam started college.

Sookie seemed to be more interested in the colour the rooms were going to be rather than what rooms we were having. Well, mostly that was the case. She did show quite a bit of interest in the kitchen, and checked repeatedly that there was going to be enough room to fit the freezer inside the house, but other than that she mostly looked confused whenever I tried to show her the blueprints. And then she'd squint at them, and look a bit more confused, ask a couple of questions, maybe point to some imaginary walls in the air, frown, nod and eventually say "Oh. Yeah. OK." Yeah, she still didn't get it.

Mostly she wanted to 'get to the good stuff' which was, apparently, wallpaper. I thought maybe she could deal with that bit and I'd worry about the plans.

And in the meantime we were both dealing with Sam's need to be nocturnal. He really didn't like the whole sleeping at night thing. I could kind of understand where he was coming from, because the advantage to waking up was that he got to spend more time cuddled up to Sookie with her boob in his mouth.

Really, he didn't have a fucking bad life.

But every time I mentioned how nice it looked to me, Sookie got kind of a weird look on her face. She'd laugh and say something like 'of course _you'd_ see it that way', but just before she said that, it was there, the weird look. The one that said she was uncomfortable with my interest in it.

Well, I wasn't about to fight Sam for access to her boobs, if that's what she thought. But…well, they were still her boobs. I knew she was using them for something else, but I was still interested in them. Still thought they were exciting and erotic and just…fucking wonderful. I didn't mind sharing them. With Sam, anyway. But Sookie…well, she didn't want me to share. That's what it felt like anyway. She was happy with cuddles and hand-holding and kisses, but after that, there was a line I couldn't cross.

Part of it was, I guessed, the bleeding. The bleeding had been a bit of a shock to me. I hadn't known it would last for so long. Six weeks it said in the stuff I read on-line. Six weeks for her uterus to shrink back to the size it normally was and stop losing all that…lining, or whatever it was that she'd built up when she'd been carrying Sam.

So Sookie was, as she put it "up on blocks in a major way." But I couldn't help feeling there was more to it than that.

She was embarrassed by the fact her boobs leaked at random times to start with, and she was alternately too full of milk or worried that he wasn't getting enough, even though he certainly seemed to be putting out a fair amount of output in his diapers.

Fuck, some of those diapers were horrific.

But all of it added up to one thing, I was kind of surplus to requirements. Except when Sam needed burping, or had a shitty diaper again. Those things I could do, but the rest, that was Sookie, and that took priority, and I got that, I really did. I got it. But it still didn't feel great.

I loved Sookie, and I loved Sam and I loved that that they had that special bond, but I kind of missed Sookie all the same.

And so I was doomed to spending a lot of time gazing at the bit of Sookie's boob I could see over the top of Sam's head. And I was right; it did look nice to be him, nestled in there with one of his tiny hands gently resting on the swell of her breast. And I'd look at Sookie's face sometimes, when she nursed him. Especially late at night when she was in that kind of dream-like state that comes with being woken in the early hours of the morning. I'd watch her place him on there, and then…then she'd get this kind of blissful expression as he started suckling and I could tell that she was kind of enjoying it too. That it was their own special time, and that was…well I was just there, outside the bounds of the little world Sookie and Sam were currently occupying.

And it was kind of lonely where I was, sometimes.

SPOV

I hoped that lodging the plans with the council was going to take a bit of the stress away from Eric. As we'd spent the last week or so going backwards and forwards with the architect he'd got increasingly tense about the whole thing, so I was hoping, really hoping, that once they were submitted he'd relax, just a little bit.

And he did, a bit anyway. I think knowing that we'd done what we could and it was in the hands of the people in the planning office now helped a lot.

But I couldn't help but feel that what might really help Eric was sex.

It was never anything he said, and it was barely anything he did either, but I could kind of feel his longing. Especially when I was feeding Sam. And that made it very, very complicated.

Eric had always been interested in my breasts, that was just Eric. But breastfeeding of course means they're on display a lot more, and all of sudden they were getting a lot of Eric's attention.

They were also getting a fair amount of attention from Amelia, but I turned a blind-eye to her lifting up her top to feed her Baby Alive doll and just decided she'd work through that particular bit of acting out adult behaviour on her own. As it was, she kind of lost interest when the Tooth Fairy turned up for her first lost tooth and left her actual money. Felicia was terribly jealous and kept trying to tell me her teeth were wiggly too.

But I didn't think what Eric wanted was a $1 coin under his pillow. He wanted me, and I was more than aware of that fact every time he commented on how nice Sam's life was while he watched me feed him. It wasn't like I could oblige Eric with sex anyway, I wasn't quite there yet, but I felt pulled in different directions, and kind of guilty.

I tried to work out how I'd dealt with this before, trying to manage two different sets of needs. I could barely remember what it had been like after Amelia. I think Bill and I had been so shocked by suddenly being the parents of a newborn baby, and I struggled with feeding at first, so really, anything between us was on the backburner for a long time. And then, of course, it had just been me after Felicia and the only pull I felt was my own grief threatening to pull me under.

But this time everything was going OK, I had the feeding thing down pat. And, if I was brutally honest, I kind of enjoyed it. Sitting there, feeding Sam, watching his cheeks as he sucked, and his eyelashes as they fluttered, I felt peaceful, I felt relaxed, and it felt nice. Which made my feelings about it all the more complicated. I had a feeling it was the same hormones, after all, breastfeeding and sex. Not exactly the same maybe, although you did hear those stories about women who had orgasms while feeding their babies, in the same way there were supposedly women who had orgasms while giving birth.

I didn't fit into either of those categories, but I still liked feeding Sam. It was almost blissful when that let-down occurred. And that just complicated matters really. As I'd feed Sam and Eric would watch me feed Sam, I couldn't help but feel, just a little bit, disloyal to Eric.

Again, I couldn't remember if I'd ever really enjoyed feeding Amelia. I think I'd just done it. And I'd given her a fair amount of formula as well because of the problems at the start of the process. With Felicia, I did it, until she got to about seven months old and started biting me, and we had to come to an understanding. She got introduced to a bottle and I thought I might try to find something that would get me out of my rut. Maybe some work.

And that decision had brought me pretty much full-circle.

I didn't have a lot of time, though, to ponder all of this in between everything else that was going on, the routine stuff with the washing, the cleaning, feeding the rest of the family, and the not so routine stuff like remembering to hide coins under Amelia's pillow.

Good thing she's a very heavy sleeper.

So mostly I just carried on and hoped it would all work itself out in the end. That Eric wouldn't decide I was a dead-loss because I was more interested in Sam than him, and that we'd eventually get back to normal, get to sleep through the night again, resume our sex-life and just...well, if we weren't having any more kids I didn't have to think about it too much, I decided.

A little over five weeks after Sam was born, I finally stopped bleeding. That was a relief. And it left the way clear for other things to happen.

But Eric was wary of me, I could tell. Leaky boobs are off-putting when they're your own, same goes for stitches in your private places. I could have lived my whole life without knowing about either of them, and I guessed Eric didn't want too much of an introduction either.

He wasn't sure what he could and couldn't touch, and to be honest, I wasn't sure either. This was almost like starting over again. He'd seen me at my most vulnerable, my most unattractive, my most…well, I'd guess you'd say my most maternal. I wasn't convinced it was a good look on me.

So I guessed if I wanted to bridge that gap, to get us back to where we were, then I was going to have to do something about it.

Luckily we seemed to be having a good night with Sam and he hadn't yet decided to call for room-service. We'd actually managed to watch some TV together, which was nice, and I snuggled into Eric's side and it was almost like it used to be.

Except that he kept his hands to himself during the ad-breaks.

And then we went to bed and I did my best to give Sam a dream-feed without waking him up. I lived in the hope I'd be able to fill up his little tummy enough that he'd sleep right through. Hadn't happened yet, but one day I was sure his stomach would finally be big enough to hold enough milk to last the night, and I'd hit the jackpot. One day.

I sat in the bed and fed Sam, while Eric glanced at his phone, and then put that aside to stroke Sam's head as he fed. "It can't be too bad" Eric commented. "Getting this kind of service while you're asleep."

"No, probably not. I just hope it works tonight. Or at least…one wake-up would be nice."

"Yeah, it would" Eric said, and he draped himself around me with his chin on my shoulder so he could look down at what was happening.

I finished with Sam and got him tucked back into bed. There was a nasty moment when he stretched, and grizzled slightly, and I thought the whole night might be a bust, but he settled himself back down.

"Thank fuck that didn't come to anything" Eric whispered to me.

"Yeah" I said, steeling myself for what I was going to say next. "Because I thought…well…um, do you want to have sex?"

I looked at Eric and he looked a bit puzzled. "Um. Now?" he asked.

"Oh. Well if you don't want to that's OK" I said, reaching over to switch out the light.

"Um. Do you want to then?" Eric asked me, and I stopped before I turned the light out.

"I thought we could" I said, in a small voice. "Because…well I stopped bleeding…" Oh God, I thought, I'm really not selling this.

"Oh. Did you?" Eric asked, as though we always sat in bed and discussed all my bodily functions.

"Uh-huh" I confirmed. "So you know, the coast is clear…" I realised how awful that sounded as I said it, and I just wanted to cancel the whole thing and go to sleep and pretend it never happened. Eric wasn't keen and I just felt worse now.

Eric frowned. "I thought it was supposed to be six weeks? You know, after your check-up?"

"Well, it's not a hard and fast rule. I think if you feel OK, then it's OK." Bloody Eric and the bloody internet, I thought. He knew too much sometimes.

"And you feel OK?" Eric asked, as though that couldn't possibly be true.

"I do…" I said, starting to doubt it. And then I wondered if maybe I didn't look OK, and that was the problem.

"And you want to have sex?" Eric asked.

"Yeah" I said. "I thought it would be nice." I wasn't sure why I was explaining that to Eric. If he didn't think it would be nice then there was no hope for this relationship.

But then he grinned at me, and I felt a lot better. "OK then" Eric said, reaching over to kiss me. The kiss made me feel even better again. Maybe this had been a good idea, after all. Although what I had to do next still wasn't that easy.

When Eric pulled back from the kiss, I reached over into the drawer of the bedside table for the stuff I'd stashed in there after my trip to the supermarket a couple of days earlier. "It's, um, it's not you. It's me" I said, handing Eric the box of condoms and the lubricant.

"Oh. OK. Yeah" he said, looking at what was in his hands.

"Yeah. Sorry. I just…well there's not getting round the condoms at the moment, and the lube, I just don't know if…"

"No. No it's fine. It'll be good." Eric smiled at me again. He'd probably looked up sex after birth on the internet after all. Although he was giving the condoms the evil eye. They weren't his favourite thing in the room, that's for sure.

And then I saw his eyes slide to what else was in the room, as he looked at the bassinet. And Sam.

"Oh. If you don't want to, with him…" I said. "That's OK. Or we could push him into the ensuite."

"No" Eric said, looking at me like I was a bit strange. "No, I think it'll be OK. He's asleep anyway…right?"

I sat up straighter to peer at Sam. "Yeah, he is."

"So…OK then" Eric said, which probably wasn't his most suave come-on ever. I briefly wondered if I should get him to read one of my romance books to me to set the mood, but I really didn't know how long we had until Sam woke up again. We'd just have to go for it.

And Eric did. Kind-of. He was just a bit…tentative. And it was awkward. I took off my nightie and he reached around to unhook my bra, but I shook my head. "No. It's better if…well, it stops them being sore if it stays on."

"Oh. OK. Sure" Eric said, looking really disappointed.

And when he first reached between my legs I could tell he really wasn't sure what he was going to find down there. "It's OK" I whispered.

"You're not sore?"

"Not so much. No. I'm good." I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

I moved over so I could push Eric onto his back and kissed my way down his chest, before I removed his underwear. I used my mouth on him for a while until he started pushing his hips up towards me. "OK" I said, sitting up. "Um…condom?"

Eric sighed, but rolled over and pulled one out. "I'll put it on" I said, feeling like I needed to make it a bit better for him.

"Well I guess I get to do this, then" Eric said, pushing me backwards and picking up the bottle of lubricant. It felt weird having him put it on me, and in me, first, but things…well, it was a first attempt.

And then Eric positioned himself over me. "You OK?" he asked.

"Yep" I said, and he pushed in. And stopped.

"Still OK?" he asked again.

"Definitely" I said, trying not to sound too annoyed. Really, I'd had a baby, I wasn't broken. At least I hoped I wasn't.

Eric started moving, and it was…nice. It was very nice. I liked being here, with him over me, feeling the warmth of his body. I felt safe. I even felt happy.

I maybe didn't feel so much like I was going to have an orgasm anytime soon.

I tried moving a bit as well, pushing myself up to meet Eric. That was OK too. Pretty good even. I was glad we'd done this, even if it wasn't quite like it was before, because at the end of the day I thought that at least I was doing something for Eric. He'd like it, surely. And eventually it would be like it was again. But we needed to take this first step to get there.

I got quite close. The tingle started, and I almost got there. But not quite.

Eric stopped. "Do you, um…want to try something else?" he asked me, looking down.

"Oh, um. No, I'm good like this" I said. Other positions, ones that required more agility and, above all, more exposure, weren't something I was really up to just yet. This was a first step, after all.

Eric started moving, and he laid himself right over me, and put one hand on my boob, over my bra. I felt hot again, hot and tingly and no…no, it just wasn't happening for me tonight.

Eric was close though. "Oh, Sookie" he groaned.

"Um…I think I'm done" I whispered. "So you know…um, you can…" I couldn't really finish the sentence.

"Are you sure?" Eric asked.

"Yeah" I said in a small voice.

Eric braced himself and thrust a few more times, before he shuddered and collapsed on top of me again. I stroked his back. It wasn't bad, I thought. It was quite nice really. I hoped he'd liked it.

After a few moments, Eric rolled off and walked to the bathroom to get rid of the condom. I started looking for my knickers. "So…that was OK?" he said, coming back into the bedroom.

"Yeah, that was great" I said, maybe way too brightly, because Eric gave me a funny look. "You weren't sore, or anything?" he asked.

"No. Not…no." No, I hadn't been, which I thought was a good thing.

"Oh" Eric said, and he couldn't hide the disappointment in his voice. Yeah, maybe it hadn't been so great for him. But I couldn't fake an orgasm. Not with Eric. It would be like lying to him, and he was the one person I never wanted to lie to.

"But that was just a first try" I said. "Um, next time it might be different."

"Well…I guess" Eric said, sounding unsure. And this was the point at which I really wanted to reassure him and say that I'd been fine before, childbirth hadn't killed my ability to enjoy sex any of the other times I'd done it.

But one of those times, at least, hadn't involved Eric. And there were limits to how much he really needed to know about my life with Bill. There might have been a lot of things I hadn't tried in bed before Eric showed up, but it wasn't like I'd never had an orgasm in my life. I'd had pretty good sex, really. And I knew that it had taken a few times after I'd had Amelia to get back to that pretty good sex life.

But I couldn't exactly say that to Eric. Not at this point in time.

So instead I smiled, and rubbed his arm and kissed his shoulder and said "Thank-you. For being so…understanding."

"Oh. Yeah. That's OK" Eric said, and we snuggled down under the covers and I was asleep pretty quickly.

EPOV

Normally sex makes me feel pretty sleepy. Pretty good, but pretty sleepy. But not that time, the first time we tried it after Sookie had Sam.

I just…I hadn't wanted to hurt her. And then I don't think she really enjoyed it anyway. Something was missing, and it wasn't just the fact she wouldn't take her bra off, and we needed lube and I had to wear a condom. No, her head wasn't quite there…she was off somewhere else.

It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great, and I wasn't completely convinced by her cheerful bravado afterwards.

I lay there until I heard Sam start to fuss, and I got out of bed to pick him up. "Sam" I said to him in the dark. "I think we broke Mommy."

**A/N 'Up on blocks' is slang for having a period, as in up on blocks like a car that's had its tyres removed.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	80. Chapter 80

**A/N Wow! 80 chapters, huh? That seems a lot! But thanks for sticking around and getting to this point. I still think it's kind of awesome that people read my stuff. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I had hoped that having sex would get things back to normal…well, a bit more normal anyway. The version of normal we used to have where Eric would try and grope me. A lot.

But instead if anything he backed off even more. He still seemed interested in breastfeeding, but he looked sad and not lascivious in the least.

I guess he really did think that Sam was getting all the good stuff. And after all, Sam didn't really need to worry about whether I was enjoying it or not, Sam could just get on with the important business at hand.

So a couple of nights after our first attempt to have sex, during which time Eric hadn't tried to initiate anything with me, I suggested it again. It was hard not to feel hurt by the look that briefly crossed Eric's face when he processed my suggestion. "Oh. If you're sure?" he said, as though I'd suggested we both go through a full dental check-up.

Yeah, most of my desire to have sex disappeared after that.

"Don't worry about it" I said, and then Sam started grizzling anyway, so I got out of bed to get him up and feed him.

"No…well, oh. OK." Eric said, watching me walk around the bed, and I had absolutely no idea what that particular string of words meant. Probably he was just glad he didn't have to go through with it.

I settled back in bed and got Sam latched on, and turned to look back at Eric, who was watching us. "Do you want a glass of water?" he asked.

"No, I'm good. Thanks."

"OK." Eric just lay on his side and continued to watch. "He seems quite hungry" he commented.

"Yeah, I think we're heading into the six week growth spurt, and he's eating more. I feel a bit like I've done nothing but feed him all day."

Eric frowned. "Growth spurt?"

"Yeah, they try to pack on the weight. The midwife's coming on Tuesday though, so we can see then if he's put on much.

Eric reached over and stroked Sam's head. "He probably has" he says. "He looks a lot bigger now."

"He does" I agreed. "And he's lost that kind of squished look, with all the extra skin. He's kind of chubby now."

Eric chuckled. "He is kind of chubby."

I could feel Sam switching from good feeding to just comfort sucking so I moved him away, which he protested at a bit, and then I handed him over to Eric so he could change Sam's nappy in the hope that kept him awake enough to do the other side.

As I watched Eric moving around with Sam balanced against his chest with one arm, while grabbing a nappy and the wipes off the chest of drawers, I thought about how great he was now at coping with a small baby. Although it probably helped that Sam was getting bigger and less fragile-seeming all the time, but still. I didn't see that panicked look in Eric's eyes anymore when he tried to figure out how he was going to deal with the multiple snaps that seemed to be involved in anything we dressed Sam in, and he had the nappy thing down pat. And he'd only been peed on a couple of times.

Eric was awesome, he really was. And I loved him so much. And I really wanted it back the way it was, and I knew it might take time…but I kind of wanted it now. I just didn't know what to do about it. I'd tried my best, I really had.

But it was pretty obvious he didn't really think about me that way anymore.

When Eric was finished he brought Sam back to me, and then walked off to get rid of the nappy. "Thank-you" I said to Eric's back.

"Mmm?" he said, coming back into the room.

"Oh. I just said thanks. For giving Sam clean pants. But at least there were no poos."

"Yeah, that was nice for a change. I still can't fucking believe he shits that much" Eric said, climbing back into bed beside us.

"Mmm, you're kind of proud of him for it, though, aren't you?" I asked Eric. Ever since he'd figured out that the midwife checked up on dirty nappies, Eric had decided that was something that Sam excelled at too. Sam excelled at a lot of things in Eric's eyes.

Eric shrugged. "He's kind of impressive."

"He is" I agreed.

When Sam had finished I let Eric burp him. That was another one of Sam's special skills, because he was really loud. And I just hoped it didn't wake him up too much, especially as Eric was always kind of keen on flying him around when he had Sam's chest balanced on his hand. Sam probably didn't need to be pretending to be Superman right now. Sam really needed to be going to sleep.

Sam obliged Eric with a rather loud belch and then I got him back to re-swaddle him up, in preparation for more sleep. Or any sleep. Sleep was good.

Sex was good too, I thought, but that wasn't going to be happening tonight.

I put Sam in his bed and backed away in the hope he wouldn't feel like I was abandoning him. I lay down in bed and turned off the light. Eric rolled over and kissed the back of my neck while massaging my shoulder. I wondered if this was a signal that maybe he was interested, but then he said "'Night Sookie" and I figured out he wasn't.

I tried not to feel too disappointed about it all. It was hard to blame him. And it was only a matter of time. A few more months and I'd maybe look like me again. I figured that I could aim to lose the weight by the time Sam was six months old. That seemed achievable.

And in the meantime, at least Eric was still here. Still here and still helping me and still, mostly, Eric.

EPOV

After the rather disastrous sex we'd had I'd tried looking up sex after birth on the internet. There was a lot of stuff on there. A lot of it seemed to involve the woman not wanting to, but Sookie had…hadn't she? Maybe she hadn't really. Maybe she'd just suggested it because she wanted to make me feel better? Because she thought I wanted it.

Well I did…but I wanted her to want it too. And enjoy it.

The consensus in the things I read on-line seemed to be that you had to be gentle, and I had been. I thought. Maybe I hadn't. And patient. Patience was apparently the other quality I needed to be exhibiting now. I had to be patient and helpful and just wait until she felt like she was back to being the old Sookie again. I hoped it was soon, I really did. But in the meantime, I could be patient.

So when Sookie suggested sex again a couple of nights later I just wasn't sure what to do. That wasn't covered in the stuff I read. Did I tell her it was OK, I understood if she didn't really want to? She was looking at me so hopefully though, and I tried to figure it out, tried to think it through and work out if she was offering sex when she really wanted something else from me.

But while I was doing that Sam announced that he needed Sookie anyway, and that killed that idea. So I busied myself with being as helpful as I could, offering water, changing Sam's diaper, burping him, rubbing Sookie's back. It was all I could do really.

I obviously couldn't give her an orgasm.

Sam was awake a lot during the night. Sookie had a theory that he was having a growth-spurt and therefore needed more food. I made a mental note to Google it the next day and see how long it was going to last. It was nice he was getting bigger, but I thought maybe his mother needed a break. By the last feed, sometime around 4am, she was looking pretty fucking shattered. And I was feeling that way too. I could barely keep my eyes open. I wanted to be helpful, supportive and all the other shit I was meant to be, but at that time of the morning I just failed spectacularly, and I dozed off while Sookie was feeding.

That really hadn't been my plan, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

SPOV

Sam's sleeping seemed to be getting worse, instead of better. He was hungry most of the time it seemed, apart from during the morning. Mornings were usually pretty good, and I'd get at least one decent sleep out of him.

And that was a good thing, because this Monday I was back to doing mother help. I hoped that would please Debbie, who had sighed and huffed when I'd told her I was going to stop for a while. Because, you know, I was having a baby. But I did get the impression sometimes that nothing pleased Debbie and certainly nothing I did. So I gave up and just went with what I wanted.

Felicia was excited that we were going back to Amelia's classroom. She spent all morning asking when we were leaving. "We's goin' _now_, Mummy?" she asked, for about the twelfth time.

"No" I said, moving some washing from the washing machine to the dryer. "We have to wait for Sam to wake up."

Felicia sighed and stomped off. As it was, we ran a bit late getting there, as getting Sam up, fed and organised to get out the door took longer than expected when he managed to do a poo so enormous and explosive that he needed a complete change of outfit.

"Sam's yucky" Felicia announced, as she watched me deal with it.

"Well, the poo's yucky, but Sam's OK" I said, trying to fold the clothes I'd taken off Sam without spreading poo anywhere.

"Poos go in the toilet" Felicia reminded me.

"Sam's only little" I reminded her. "You're a big girl now. You don't even wear a nappy."

"Nappy's is yucks" Felicia said.

"They are, but when you're little like Sam, there isn't a choice." Felicia gave me a look which suggested that Sam just wasn't trying hard enough and he could master his bowels if he really gave it a go, and wandered off.

The consequence of the poo-splosion and the required clean-up delaying us was that the kids at Amelia's table were already working away on their task when Felicia, Sam and I arrived.

"Finally!" Amelia said, looking up as we walked into the room. "I thought we were going to get Sebastian's mum again. She keeps calling him Sebby, though. Are you Sebby?" she asked, turning round to Sebastian. Sebastian shrugged. Amelia obviously decided not to push him and went back to what she was doing.

Apparently the kids had been doing a project on community, so each group had a large sheet of paper and were currently drawing everything that they knew of in their local area. This meant that every table was doing a slightly different version of the shops at the Mt Eden village.

"Is that your baby?" Maisie asked Amelia, pointing to the capsule which contained Sam.

"Yeah" Amelia said, kind of wearily. "That's Sam."

"He's so cute!" Maisie screamed in Sam's face, as she crouched down to peer at him.

"He does yucky poos" Felicia said, pushing a hand in front of Maisie to pat Sam, somewhat roughly. I had a bizarre flashback of Maisie being similarly interested in a tiny Felicia. I guessed she was an only child so all babies were fascinating objects from another world.

Sebastian didn't look interested though. Maybe he wasn't lining up to have a sibling. Chloe looked kind of frightened of him. "Has he pooed now?" she asked, tremulously.

"No. He's good" I assured her.

Emily gave him a cursory glance. "Leon's bigger" she said.

"Well, Leon's a bit older" I reminded her.

"Leon can roll over" Emily said, addressing that remark to Amelia. Amelia looked a bit stumped, maybe she hadn't got the memo about the baby brother competition that Emily was obviously trying to organise.

"Well…Felicia does soccer" Amelia said in the end, and that stumped Emily.

There was peace for a while as Maisie and Emily had a little chat about fluffies, Chloe stared off into space, Sebastian drew on their picture and Amelia supervised what Sebastian was doing. Felicia meanwhile, hovered near Sebastian with a felt-tip in hand in case she was asked to sub in for one of the big kids. I felt kind of sorry for her. She was big enough to think her baby brother was a bit lame, but not big enough to really join in with Amelia's world. Thank goodness for pre-school where she had her own little place that she could really enjoy.

I kind of zoned out, given how tired I was, and figured I was just there for moral support anyway. At least if they were drawing they didn't really need me to spell anything for them. I pondered the whole Eric and sex situation again and couldn't really think of a solution other than time. Time would help…probably. Or I would just get older and more tired, and slowly my boobs would sag down to my waist and Eric would take his get out of jail free card and head back to the States where he didn't have an accent.

I was snapped back to reality though by Amelia's voice. She was talking to Sebastian and said, "You know, Sebastian. Not everything has to be exactly according to your plans, all the time. You do know that, don't you?"

OK, well that was a direct quote from me. I made a mental note to look behind me the next time that Eric and I were discussing the house plans. I wondered how that line was going to work with Sebastian, but he simply shrugged and carried on colouring in what I think was meant to be one of the lion statues outside the Circus Circus café. Huh, I wondered how he'd known to use that tactic when he definitely hadn't been around to see Eric deploy it the first time this discussion had taken place. Maybe they handed out instructions with the Y chromosome?

I looked at Sam, who had dozed off in the capsule. If he started shrugging at me like that, I was leaving home and he and his father could have completely silent and non-committal conversations with each other for the rest of time.

Amelia, however, was not put off by a shrug. "We need to do some more buildings" she complained to Sebastian. "I want to do Daddy's office."

Sebastian shrugged again, and Amelia wedged herself next to him and started drawing. I didn't have the heart to point out that Eric's office wasn't next to Circus Circus and it wasn't a pink building. With purple spots. I figured this was just a representation anyway.

Chloe seemed to have joined in now and was drawing some trees in a corner. I wasn't sure what the trees were representing, but at least she was doing something. Maisie and Emily were busy with…something, I think it was a clothes shop. I didn't recall a clothes shop that looked like that in Mt Eden, the Hospice shop next to Buger Wisconsin probably wasn't what they were thinking of.

I left them to it and went back to contemplating how nice it would be if I could doze off while Sam was asleep. This whole sleep while the baby did thing only ever worked the first time. They never told you that in the parenting books.

And then my stomach rumbled and I wondered if Felicia would mind if I broke out the snacks I'd bought for her. Probably she would, I thought. She was currently kneeling on a chair, leaning on the table and gazing at the artwork. "I's bin dere" she said, pointing to Sebastian's building with the lions that were as big as the building.

Sebastian turned his head to smile at Felicia, but got jostled by Amelia, so turned back to her. "You take up a lot of room" she said, and I really couldn't tell whether she was still quoting me or just really annoyed about the allocation of space on the picture.

At that point Connor wandered over from his own table. "Your picture's lame" he said, addressing the group.

I was about to say something, probably tell him that it wasn't a nice thing to say. I doubted he really cared, but I was the token adult here and had to do something. However, Sebastian looked up at him. "So?" he said, shrugging again.

"Well…it's just lame. And so are you!" Connor said, a bit taken aback by Sebastian's response. Sebastian didn't say anything to that. Emily looked Connor up and down. "You smell like boogers!" she said forcefully, and Connor wandered off, presumably back to his own group, who I doubted were going to be thrilled by that.

I wondered if I should tell Emily that that wasn't a nice thing to say, and I decided against it. I figured it wouldn't hurt her to be able to stand up for herself, even if her insults were a bit on the confusing side. Confusing to me, anyway. Connor seemed to get the gist of it.

"See, Sebastian?" Amelia was saying, as she tried to elbow him out of the way. "You need to talk to mean people, and then they go away. You don't talk enough. Talking is good, because then people know what you want them to do."

Sebastian didn't answer that, but I could almost swear he rolled his eyes. I wondered if all these months trapped with a table of girls was actually helping him, or just putting him off them for life.

I took Felicia home, after I'd spent a suitable amount of time admiring the picture they'd created, and, particularly, Amelia's depiction of Eric's office, complete with her and Eric inside it. She said that there wasn't room to fit the rest of the family in, but there was a faint blue scribble where Felicia had added herself. Sam and I didn't rate a mention, but Amelia explained that's because I was obviously off breastfeeding him. With my breasts. So I took that as my cue to leave the kids for the day.

Felicia was a bit restless in the afternoon, and I couldn't do much about it as I was stuck with a slightly fussy Sam who suddenly decided that he was going to eat as much as he could. I maybe wouldn't have minded if I'd thought that it would mean he'd sleep all through the night, but I somehow didn't think that it would.

So everything was a bit dull and boring for Felicia. At one stage, when I was in the kitchen, I did hear her tell Sam that he smelt like boogers. Trust Felicia to pick up all the good stuff from school.

I had meant to get dinner underway, but time got away from me. And then Eric said he was going to be late and I realised I'd better feed Amelia and Felicia, so I gave them baked beans on toast, which Amelia tried to argue wasn't really a proper dinner, and started to get them ready for bed. And then I rang Eric and said that if I ordered pizza for us, could he pick it up on the way home and save the delivery fee? I was kind of starving by this stage and would have happily eaten the box the pizza came in, and that was after eating the leftover baked beans from the kids' dinner. While I'd sat and breastfed Sam. Eric said OK, but he sounded a bit distracted, which worried me. Well for the five minutes I had to spare before Sam announced his hunger again.

EPOV

I'd tried looking it up again. Sex. After childbirth. I could kind of manage sex before childbirth, and even sex during pregnancy had mostly been OK, but this, well, this I obviously sucked at.

So I read about how you're supposed to create some romance, and woo her again. Fuck knows how that was supposed to happen with three kids. I got the impression that a lot of this stuff was written for after the first kid, because they talked about having sex when the baby napped and shit like that. Well, Sam would have a nap, but there was no way I could lock the other two in their rooms for an hour in the middle of the day. Could I?

No, I couldn't. And I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to be romantic either. It was all fucking confusing, one minute you read how women had trouble switching off from being mothers, and that was OK and you were just supposed to let them get on with it, and the next you read that you were supposed to help them feel like wives and lovers again and pour on the romance.

Fuck. This was confusing. I wondered if any of Sookie's little books of porn covered this situation.

Probably not. They never dealt with babies…or anything remotely fucking useful.

In the end I had to give up worrying about it and go and visit several clients. I'd loaded up my day in the hope I could have the next day off and stay home with Sookie and Sam. Despite the difficulties that Sookie and I were having in the bedroom, I was still fucking amazed at Sam. He was so alert now, and I was sure that he was listening to me during our chats at night. And that he completely agreed with me that Clancy was a fucking moron.

So I was driving back from fuck knows where or how to pronounce it, when Sookie called me. She sounded completely flustered and said she wanted me to pick up some pizza as she'd fed the kids, but hadn't made anything for me and her.

Well maybe that's my chance I thought, for some romance. Sure, pizza at home wasn't probably that much of a fucking date, but I could make it romantic. Well, I thought I fucking could.

Turned out I fucking couldn't. When I got home Sookie was sitting on the couch feeding Sam. "He's decided to put himself on a regime of cluster feeding" she said. "So we've been doing this every hour since about 5 o'clock."

"Oh. OK. So I'll just…I'll serve this up then?" I held up the pizza.

"Please. I'm really, really hungry. Someone's sucking all my food out of me. Be nice if he helped out with the fat on my bum."

I wasn't sure how to answer that, so I didn't. I dumped the pizza in the kitchen, got changed quickly, and came back to get plates to put it on. "Do you want any wine?" I asked, sticking my head into the living room.

"Yes, but I can't. God knows what that would do to Sam. And I want him to sleep tonight." She addressed those last two words to Sam, but I'm not sure he was listening. He was crushed up against her boob and it was probably hard for him to concentrate on anything else.

"OK" I said, and I brought the pizza into the living room, put it on the coffeetable, and then went back for glasses of water for the both of us.

"Do you want me to hand you a slice?" I asked Sookie.

"Please" she said, holding out her hand. So I passed one to her and she ate it carefully so she wouldn't drop any on Sam's head. "I feel quite efficient" she said. "You know, food going in, food coming out. I'm like a machine."

"Yeah…" I said, looking at her. That hadn't been quite the mood I'd been hoping for. I wanted her to feel like…well, like Sookie again. The Sookie who wanted to fuck Eric, and who actually enjoyed it when she did. I didn't want her to feel like a milk-producing machine. Fuck, any minute now she'd start talking about Jason's cows.

"I wonder if Jason ever lets his cows graze while he milks them. It might help their production" she said, before taking another, really large, bite of pizza. Yeah, fuck. I was failing at the romance.

I looked around the living room. I felt like there should be candles, or something. I wondered if we owned candles. I would have asked Sookie, but it seemed like a lot of effort. I could try dimming the lights, I thought, but did she need to see what she was doing?

"That's good" Sookie said with her mouth full. "Can I have more, please?" I passed her another slice. She was fucking hungry tonight.

Eventually Sam seemed to slow down and Sookie took him off to bed. But Felicia appeared in the living room at that point. "You's got pizza" she said, accusingly, coming over to stand beside me.

"It's my dinner Leesh" I told her.

"I had baked beans. They's OK. I like pizza, though."

And so when Sookie came back from putting Sam down, Felicia was sitting beside me on the couch, eating one of the slices of pizza. "Where'd you come from?" Sookie asked her.

"Bed" Felicia replied, with her mouth full. Nothing like a two year old chewing noisily to really kill the mood I thought.

When the pizza had been eaten, and Felicia dispatched back to bed, I thought I might have a chance. I still kind of wished I knew about the candle situation, but I was beginning to think they might have all been in one of those cupboards that Sookie packed up before she had Sam. She'd packed up all sorts of shit for a while there, in preparation for one day moving into the new place.

Fuck, I hoped our planning permission was through soon. I was kind of on edge waiting to see if they needed any more information, because if they came back and asked for it they stopped the clock on getting that permission back to you, and I really just wanted it done so we could move on to the next stage.

But by the time I'd cleared up dinner I found that Sookie was slumped on the couch. "I feel gross now" she said. "I shouldn't have wolfed down that pizza. I'm pretty sure none of those actresses or models that lose all that weight after their babies eat half a pizza. I'm pretty sure they're eating steamed vegetables and fish. But who has time to steam vegetables? When they're cluster feeding?" Sookie looked at me and her eyes were glassy. Never a fucking good sign.

I sat down next to her on the couch. "I don't think the vegetables matter" I said, trying to hug her, but she winced, and I pulled back.

"My boobs hurt" she said sadly. "They've been kind of over-worked today. I'm just…I'm just fat and hopeless and it's all gone to shit today." And then she started crying, and I was a bit flummoxed, if I couldn't hug her, what the fuck did I do?

I settled for trying to put an arm around her shoulders. "You're not hopeless. Or fat" I said.

"I am! Sam's about to turn six weeks old and I'm still all blobby and disgusting."

"You're really not disgusting…" I tried, but she pulled a tissue out of the sleeve of her cardigan and blew her nose, noisily, cutting me off.

I figured out the romance was out for the night, and it was back to the first strategy. Be supportive. And patient. I could definitely do that. And so I held her as best I could for a bit, while she kept trying to convince me she was the most hopeless and enormous mother in the entire world, until Sam wailed again, and Sookie went into the bedroom to feed him.

I shut everything off and checked the house before going to join her. When I got there she was propped up on the bed, with her head lolling forward and she was quite obviously asleep. Sam was still suckling though, but it was hard to tell if he was actually feeding now or just comforting himself.

I wished that someone would comfort me, but then I immediately felt guilty for even thinking it. It wasn't very supportive, or patient or any of the other fucking things the on-line articles said I was supposed to be at this point in our relationship.

But I couldn't help the way I felt. I just had to suck it up.

I sat down on the bed and shook Sookie slightly. "Hey" I said.

"Mmm" she replied, without opening her eyes. "I dozed off." Her speech sounded slurred and thick.

"Yeah" I agreed. "I think Sam's finished that side. Do you want me to burp him and change him?"

"Uh-huh" she said, prising her eyes open with what looked like great effort. "I'm so tired" she said.

"I know."

She handed me Sam and we did our burping manoeuvre where I flew him through the air. I'm pretty sure he liked it. There was the beginning of a giggle there, I was sure of it. And then I changed him, while Sookie got herself changed into the pyjamas. In the bathroom. I guessed so I wouldn't look at her body or anything like that.

I really wanted to look at her body.

She fed Sam from the other side, while I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed, and then she tucked him in. "Sleep" she said, quietly. "Just sleep."

She crawled into bed and I tried moving closer to her, and laying against her back. She didn't push me away. "I love you" I said. "I just…I love you."

"I love you too" she said.

SPOV

I lay there and listened to Eric's even breathing, and felt the warmth of his body against my back. I loved the way he made me feel safe, just by being there. I hoped he knew that. I hoped he knew that I really did want to have sex again, and I couldn't help that my body wasn't quite my own at the moment and that it really didn't have all that much to do with him. It was me, it was all me. And as much as I wanted the old me back right this second, it wasn't going to happen.

Sometimes, life just really sucked.

**Thanks for reading!**


	81. Chapter 81

**A/N I had a few distractions writing this today, one was the grumpy toddler for whom nothing was going right and she spent a lot of the time sitting on the floor crying for no reason I could figure out. The other was the three shirtless guys putting a roof on the house they're building next door to me. But I ignored them to write this! I know, that's dedication, right?**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Tuesday morning dawned way, way too early for my liking. It felt like I'd only just got Sam settled, when it was time to get up and help Amelia and Felicia get ready for the day. I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom while Sam and Eric kept on snoring. They kind of looked similar when they were asleep, although Sam was less able to sprawl given he was mostly still swaddled. He'd had a decent go at getting out of it though, and I wondered how much longer I'd bother doing it, he seemed to be happier when he could shove his fist in his mouth anyway. I also wondered how much longer he'd be in the bassinet, given the rate he was growing.

Eric sighed in his sleep and rolled over and I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed with him, but I could hear the fridge door being opened and I was slightly worried that Amelia was attempting to make breakfast herself. She could do a lot of stuff these days, but still needed a tiny bit of supervision before she got carried away. She wasn't keen on the supervision of course, but I really couldn't face cleaning up large pools of spilled milk or burnt toast this morning.

After using the bathroom, I shuffled out to the kitchen to find Amelia had managed to get some Weetbix out for Felicia, but Felicia was annoyed because she wanted it warmed in the microwave. "Just eat it, Felicia!" Amelia told her.

"Nuh. I wants it warm."

Amelia sighed. "I don't know what button to push" she tried explaining to Felicia, who didn't seem to be taking the news well.

"I'll put it in the microwave" I said, picking up the bowl, which was almost over-flowing with milk, and carrying it carefully.

"I was getting breakfast" Amelia said. "Because I'm helpful. Aren't I, Mummy?"

"You are" I agreed.

"I's 'ungry" Felicia informed us.

So was Sam, apparently, because there was a wail from the bedroom. "Oh, Sam's awake" Amelia said, as she started to run out of the kitchen. "I'll go and get him."

"No, Amelia. Just let Daddy do it" I called, as I took Felicia's bowl out of the microwave.

"Humpf" Amelia said, stomping back into the kitchen. "I was being helpful."

"I know. You're very helpful" I said, bending down to kiss the top of her head.

Sam's wails dialled down a bit, which was, I hoped, a response to Eric getting him up. And sure enough they both appeared in the kitchen a few moments later and stared at me while I tried to ensure Amelia was OK getting butter and jam onto her toast and not anything else.

Before Amelia was finished, Sam decided I wasn't going to give him what he wanted and he started crying again. "Shush, it's OK" Eric said, kind of jiggling him around. That just made me feel a bit worse somehow. I was doing my best. I just didn't have enough hands. Or something.

But eventually Amelia was done and I could grab Sam off Eric and take him into the bedroom for a feed. My stomach started rumbling but I was just going to have to wait, I figured.

Eric took pity on me though, and brought me a piece of toast. "Thanks" I said, taking it off him with the free hand I had.

"No problem" he said. Eric started to sit on the bed next to me, but then Felicia yelled something, and he had to leave to see what she needed.

After what seemed like hours I finally made it out of the bedroom long enough to hand Sam to Eric so I could eat the rest of my toast and drink the lukewarm tea Eric had made for me earlier, while trying to make sure that Amelia and Felicia had the required food and other things in their bag and that they both ended up dressed appropriately. There was a nasty moment when I couldn't remember what had happened to Amelia's polar fleece jumper that was part of her uniform, but then I remembered I'd washed it the previous night and it was hanging in the hot water cupboard. I was thankful for that, because I'd been trying to tell her that she could just wear another jumper for the day and I'd write her a note, and there had been tears because 'it's a _uniform_ and it's _compulsory_.'

I was going to remember that when she was a teenager.

Then Eric took Amelia and Felicia off to school and pre-school and I had a quick shower with Sam placed in the bouncinette in the ensuite with me. I'm not sure he was that enthused about being there, and he dozed off, which was a bit of a pain as I really wanted him to sleep better later on.

Eric got back about two minutes before the midwife showed up, carrying her folder and her big set of baby-scales. Eric let her in, while I did a mad search about the place for what had happened to Sam's WellChild book. Eventually I located it in a stack of Amelia's artwork in the family room, and I could go and see the rest of the family in the living room.

"Hi" the midwife, who was called Georgie, said as I walked in the room. She scanned my wet hair and bare face and smiled. Yeah, I thought, I'd give me that sympathetic smile too.

"Hi" I said, sitting next to Eric who was already there. And looking pretty good. Luckily Georgie was used to him now, and there wasn't too much simpering.

Although, she was lovely, she really was. She had three little girls and could totally understand where I was coming from, it's just that her kids were 8, 6 and 4 and she was past this stage now.

I sometimes couldn't remember why I'd wanted to go back to it.

"So how are things going?" Georgie asked.

"Sam's having a growth-spurt" Eric said to her. "He's eating a lot." I guess growth-spurts had shown up after a Google search then, and Eric was now the expert. Terrific. I wondered if he'd feel compelled to answer the questions about how sore my boobs were and whether my stitches seemed to be healing as well.

And then I felt bad for thinking that, because really, he was just trying to be helpful.

"Well, that's to be expected at six weeks" Georgie said. "Shall we get him up and see what he's put on?"

I went over to the bouncinette and lifted Sam out. He didn't seem thrilled with that idea, and his eyes opened in alarm. He calmed down a bit when he realised it was me doing the lifting, but when I lay him on the changemat on the floor and started removing clothing, the alarmed look came back again.

I got him completely undressed and then at the last minute, whipped his nappy off and laid him on the scales. He got kind of grizzly at that point; I guessed he wasn't a fan of the cooler air suddenly hitting his skin. Hopefully he wasn't going to be removing his nappies like Felicia had.

He was still big. Still really big for his age. Georgie sounded quite impressed. Eric looked pleased, and then a bit thoughtful, as I could see him converting kilos to pounds in his head, and then he looked impressed too.

I kind of felt impressed, but mostly at the fact that my bum still seemed so bloody large when I was obviously producing a hell of a lot of milk.

Georgie wrote down all the measurements and plotted them on the growth chart in the book, under Eric's watchful gaze. I got Sam into a clean nappy and redressed him, and then Eric's phone rang and he left the room.

"So, Sookie" Georgie said, "How are you doing?"

I shrugged. "Well…I'm tired" I said. "You know." She would know.

"He's not sleeping?"

"Not so much at night…or afternoons. He's hungry, um, like Eric said. But that's normal for this stage, I guess. We'll get through it." I looked down at Sam. Sometimes I wasn't sure I would.

"You need to make sure you're looking after yourself too…" Georgie said. I may have cut her off.

"Oh, I'm good" I said. "Really I am. I mean, I'm eating. Too much probably. I've got that sweet-tooth thing. And I went for a walk, yesterday, to get Amelia from school. The fresh air was nice. So you know…"

"Mmm" Georgie said, and the she wrote something down. "So this is my last visit before I hand you over to the Plunket nurse who is…Karen for you. Have you met her before?"

I thought for a bit. "I think she did Amelia's Before-School check-up" I said.

"OK, well she'll ring and make an appointment then." She wrote something else down. "Oh, I know what I wanted to ask" she said. "Contraception, have you got that sorted?"

"Oh" I said, while thinking 'it really doesn't matter because I'm really not having sex'. "Well I think…I've got condoms…"

"I could write you a prescription for the mini-pill, if you like" she offered.

"Um, yeah that would be good. I might…switch to that in a while. When I think I can remember to take it at the same time everyday anyway." I laughed. That was the problem with those pills you could take while breastfeeding, you had such a narrow window of opportunity for taking them in if they were going to work.

Georgie wrote out the prescription and handed it to me, and then I said goodbye, and thanks for everything, and she headed out the door to her next client. I wondered where Eric had gone.

I'd settled down on the couch to give Sam another feed, thinking I might try and feed him up in the hope he'd have a really good morning sleep and that would lead on to good afternoon sleeps and then sleeping at night, because nothing was worse than if they got over-tired, when Eric arrived back looking flustered.

"I've got to head out" he said, practically turning around and walking out the door as he said it. "House stuff."

"What happened?" I asked. I could see that Eric didn't really want to stop and explain anything to me, that he really just wanted to get going and deal with whatever the problem was, but really, I wanted a bit more than just 'house stuff' as an explanation.

"They need more information. The council. Something about drainage. I'm going to see Terry and make him re-draw the stuff today so I can take it there myself before we lose any time…so, not sure when I'll be back." He looked at me for a few moments, then walked over and kissed both Sam and me, and then walked out the door. "Bye!" I called after him.

"Yeah…bye" Eric's voice sounded from the hall, and then the front door opened and closed and he was gone.

EPOV

I really didn't fucking need anything going wrong with the house. I just wanted to get the permission from the council, and get on with actually remodelling it. So we could move. Because that was the fucking plan in the first place.

My only consolation was that at least it had happened when I was at home anyway. Of course the point of being at home was that I could spend time with Sookie and Sam, and try to be helpful and supportive and all the other shit I was meant to be doing to show her that I still loved her. But I couldn't do that if I wasn't fucking there, could I?

I'd called Terry the architect as soon as the council had called me and the woman on the end of the phone had told me, rather fucking snippily, that they couldn't proceed until they had a better view of the proposed drainage for the site and she'd look forward to receiving a new plan from me. In the meantime, she'd put my submission to one side.

Terry had been his usual vague fucking self, and had said he'd take a look 'sometime this week'. I wasn't fucking paying him for 'sometime this week'; I was paying him to fucking look into it now.

But I couldn't say that to him. Not outright. So instead I told him how grateful we were for all the work he'd done for us, and how I was glad Andy had recommended him to me, and that I knew a few people who were doing similar projects and I'd be sure to recommend him to them, when they needed an architect.

Well, fuck it. Calvin was supposed to be building that ensuite on his place. He probably didn't need plans for it, but if he ever asked, I'd mention Terry's name.

In the end the promise of future clients nudged him in the direction I wanted him to go and he agreed to get onto it today. At that point I said I'd see him in his office in 45 minutes and shut down the call.

So I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon hovering around Terry while he tried to work out what the council actually wanted, and called them a few times to clarify, and then amended our plans to suit. His office was in Parnell, so I left him to it at one point and took a stroll around the shops and found a café for lunch.

By the time I got back from lunch and the girl at reception took me through to Terry's office and asked me three times whether she could get me any coffee, it appeared that Terry had finally figured out what the fuck he was doing and had almost actually completed it.

So by mid-afternoon, Terry was done and I could drive into the city and queue up at the council offices, where they wanted to spend a good thirty minutes reviewing what I'd brought them to make sure it was OK, and after that, well, all I could do was fucking hope that Terry had got it right this time.

SPOV

My day with just Sam didn't go too badly. Dropping down from having two or three kids to worry about, to just a baby, even a slightly grumpy baby, made things a little bit easier. I wanted to nap when he was sleeping after lunch, but I figured I'd be better off making a lasagne I could just throw in the oven at dinner time instead, so that everyone was getting fed. So I did that, and I managed to get some washing folded, so we weren't all just pulling clean underwear out of the washing basket every morning, and then Sam woke up and he needed another feed, and I collected the girls and brought them home and sorted out their afternoon teas, did Amelia's reading with her, told Felicia that I was completely sure she didn't need to hammer Sam's bassinet while he was in it, put the lasagne in the oven, fed Sam again. And before I knew it the day was almost over and Eric finally arrived home.

"So, what happened?" I asked, as I was taking the lasagne out to check it had heated through OK.

Eric sighed and leaned against the bench. "Drainage was wrong, or unclear or…something. So Terry's re-drawn it all. Hopefully fucking correctly this time. And I've dropped it off at the council. We've only lost a day. I fucking hope we have, anyway." He stopped and just stared at the floor with his arms crossed, looking tense. Yeah, the council promised a 20 working day turnaround, providing they didn't need more information from you. And our problem was that in about 10 working days Calvin was finishing up the job he was doing currently and started as our project manager. Full-time. And we were going to be paying his salary, planning permission or not.

"It'll be OK" I said, Eric shrugged and then bent down to look at Sam who was in the bouncinette and had been watching me cook. I'm not sure as entertainment went it was that good, but if I didn't have him where I could see him he was at the mercy of his sisters.

"How's he been?" Eric asked.

"Good. Hungry though. Still cluster feeding."

Eric turned to look at me, but didn't say anything else before he left the kitchen.

We got through dinner and a long series of questions from Felicia about why Sam wasn't eating the lasagne and then her comments about how obviously stink he was for being able to eat it. Amelia sat there and looked increasingly annoyed, because long question sessions were usually her domain and she felt like her territory was being encroached on by her sister. But Felicia was getting that much closer to three all the time and Amelia was going to have to suck it up.

Felicia was picking the story, so Eric read _Knuffle Bunny_ again. She seemed to like it because most of the action concerned a small girl, her dad and her toy bunny. Definitely no siblings in that one. And then we packed the big kids off to bed, and tried to have a nice evening, although it's a bit difficult when I seem to be constantly either feeding Sam or nodding off. Sometimes I did both.

When Sam was finally settled I decided I wanted to tackle the whole sex problem. Eric was still acting warily around me, but he was also grumpy and stressed. And surely, I figured, grumpy, stressed Eric would want something that would make him less grumpy and stressed?

But when I climbed into bed beside Eric, after putting Sam, very gingerly, in his bassinet, I kind of lost my nerve. He was sitting there, flicking through something on his phone, with an air of grumpiness around him, and I just wasn't sure how to bring it up.

I wasn't convinced that having sex with someone who maybe couldn't orgasm, even though she liked the sex itself, was really going to help his mood.

So in the end I leaned over and placed one hand on his chest, before I kissed him. "So, um…" I said. "Did you, um, I mean…how does a blow-job sound?"

EPOV

It was the usual chaos when I got home; Felicia was wandering around with her toy hammer looking for things she could bang. I hoped she wasn't going to get any fucking ideas about using it on Sam's head.

I was still feeling a bit tense about the whole house thing and the planning permission. Fuck, I hoped it went through OK. I didn't want to have to start paying Calvin to just sit around and maybe strip wallpaper or something; it seemed like a complete waste of fucking time.

I was trying really hard to relax, but it wasn't fucking easy. Even story-time turned into 20 fucking questions when I mentioned I'd been to a laundromat, just like the one in the book we read. Amelia and Felicia struggled with the concept of a place outside the home where you could do your laundry and looked at me like I was an alien from another fucking planet. "Are you sure?" Amelia asked, "That they don't have a washing machine at home?"

"No, that's why they went to the laundromat" I replied.

"But…everyone has a washing machine" Amelia said. Felicia nodded in agreement. I shrugged. "I didn't" I said. "Not before I lived here." Although I tried to remember if I'd ever actually used the one here. Maybe once. Maybe.

"So where did you do your washing?" Amelia asked.

"Basement" I said. "There were machines in the basement where I lived."

"Is dat a bay'ment?" Felicia asked, pointing to the book.

"Um…that's a laundromat."

So what should have been a fairly quick story, turned into a long drawn-out one as I tried to explain what life was like if you didn't live in a house in New Zealand, while Amelia and Felicia looked dubious.

"But…that's not for real, is it?" Amelia asked in the end.

"Yes. Yes it is." That kind of stumped her and she shut up for a while after that.

And after they were in bed, Sookie was kind of busy with Sam and all I could do was sit and worry about the house some more. Because even when we got the permission through there was still a fucking list of things we had to figure out yet, and Sookie knowing that she wanted a yellow kitchen again didn't exactly help plan what that kitchen was going to have in it.

So by the time it was officially sleeping time, or that's what we hoped it was, anyway, because we needed Sam to be on board with that one for it to actually work, I was feeling a bit fucking over it all. I just wanted something nice to happen, I just wanted to fucking relax. I would have been really happy with just more than three hour's uninterrupted sleep, but that probably wasn't going to happen.

And I knew that I'd fucking failed at supportive and helpful today, but I couldn't really help that. I had to deal with the house as well.

So when Sookie offered me a blow-job I wasn't sure what to do and I wasn't sure why she was doing it in the first place. Was it just that sex had been so shit the last time we'd tried it she never wanted me to touch her again, but she felt guilty? Did she think I was upset we weren't having sex?

I felt like I should say no, I really did. It didn't feel fucking supportive at all to have your wife go down on you in between nursing the baby. I felt like she had enough on her plate without having to worry about me as well.

But as my brain was thinking about all of this, I heard myself saying "Yeah. I'd like that" and the matter was settled.

It felt so fucking nice to have Sookie touch me, it really did. I'd missed her. A lot. And she was really good at this. I kind of wondered if she was enjoying this too and if maybe she'd stop so we could have sex again, but when I told her I was really, really close she just gave me a thumbs-up so I figured that was my answer. And I came.

And when Sookie came back up to lie beside me I just felt guilty. "Thank-you" I said, leaning over to kiss her.

"No problem" she said smiling at me, and I tried to gauge whether it was one of those too-bright smiles she'd use when she was trying to put on a show of it all being OK.

"Feeling less stressed?" she asked me.

"Yeah. Definitely." I had done, briefly. Now I just felt stressed about whether I'd be stuck having rather one-sided sex with Sookie for the foreseeable future.

"Good" she said, patting my chest, before climbing under the covers to go to sleep.

SPOV

I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with the whole blow-job plan, because surely that would break the ice? If Eric knew that I was actually into sex, even if I wasn't having orgasms, then maybe he'd want more. I thought that even if I couldn't show him I was into him by having an orgasm myself, I could still give him one, and he'd know. Know that it was still actually OK between us.

Except the next night he sort of looked at me warily, and then went to sleep. So that didn't work after all. I thought he'd liked the blow-job. Maybe it was stuff that involved me getting naked he didn't fancy?

The next day I had my six-week check-up with Russell. It had always been pretty perfunctory in the past and I didn't expect this to be any different. He'd never actually examined me in one of these check-ups yet, preferring to go with my assertions that everything was healing OK.

And it was, which is what I told him. "So much better without an episiotomy!" I said to Russell, which made him chuckle.

"So…have you tried having sex?" Russell asked.

"Yes" I replied. No point lying to him. I'd probably never see him again for one thing.

"And it was OK?"

"Fine." Well, mechanically it had been. It hadn't made me sore or done anything else that Russell would be concerned about. I was pretty sure that being a bit dry and non-orgasmic at this stage still fell into the range of normal.

A few more questions and I was out the door, having thanked Russell for looking after me. I felt kind of sad in a way; it marked the end of an era knowing my child-bearing days were over. Oh well.

Out in reception a very pregnant-looking Sophie-Anne eyed me suspiciously. "You had your baby?" she said, peering at where Sam was dozing in his capsule. Today I had it affixed to a set of wheels, so I could push him round as though he was in a pushchair, but without the hassle of taking him out of the capsule.

"Yeah" I said, feeling that should have been blindingly obvious, but from the state of her, I'd say she was jealous. Of me. Go figure. "I had him early. He was really big. His name's Sam."

"Hmm" Sophie-Anne said. "I guess that suits him. Of course my baby's very big as well, so we're just finalising the date for the C-section. Can't come soon enough" she muttered.

"Mmm, I know that feeling" I said to her. Sophie-Anne looked at me like I couldn't possibly understand anything she was feeling. I was tempted remind her how many children I'd had, but I restrained myself.

"He does look like Eric" Sophie-Anne said, tilting her head sideways.

"Yeah, it's really cute" I said, glancing over at where her fiancé was sitting on the couch. God I hoped her baby had a neck.

Sophie-Anne wrinkled her nose. "Oh well" she said. "I guess you're kind of stuck with the reminder."

I was going to ask her what the hell she was on about, but Russell stuck his head in the waiting room and called her name, and she tottered off with Bert in her wake. She was a really strange woman. And it was probably only mostly because she Australian, I got the feeling some of it was just her.

I paid my final invoice at the reception desk and then rang Eric to tell him we were done, and he walked up from his office to meet Sam and me at Circus Circus cafe for an early lunch. Now that Sam was actually born the final appointment with Russell didn't hold much interest for Eric, and I'd pointed out it was all about me anyway. So he'd opted to skip it, but was still keen to catch up.

We'd just ordered and I was really hoping that Sam stayed asleep long enough for me to eat my chicken burger, when Sophie-Anne and Bert appeared.

"Eric" she said, coming over. "Oh, and Sookie." Honestly she'd seen me half an hour previously in the building around the corner, I wasn't sure why I was a shock to her.

And then I twigged. She thought we'd split up. Me saying he'd gone back to the States and then Eric not being around when I saw her after that had given her totally the wrong impression.

Eric was saying hello and being polite while Sophie-Anne reluctantly introduced him to Bert. She really looked like she wanted to hide Bert away, but there was no chance of that. He kind of stood out. I wondered if Eric had been here alone, and so had Sophie-Anne, whether he would have been able to cope with a heavily pregnant woman hitting on him. Knowing Sophie-Anne she would have broken her own waters if she thought it would have got Eric's attention.

"OK, well. Bye then Eric. See you around" Sophie-Anne was saying, as she followed Bert to the front counter.

"Bye!" I said pointedly. "Good luck with the birth. Hope the baby isn't too big."

"Thanks" Sophie-Anne muttered, before walking off.

Eric turned to me. "That guy has no neck" he said, sounding kind of amazed.

"I know!" I agreed. "That's what I've been telling you." And then waitress bought our food and we lost all interest in Sophie-Anne's neck-less wonder of a fiancé.

Sam had a bad night that night, which kind of meant no sex was likely anyway. Eric looked like he wanted to say something to me in bed, but he never got the chance as Sam pipped him at the post with an almighty roar of hunger.

He was still so very hungry.

And I was worried about the sleepless night because the next day he had his 6 week check up with the GP. Eric had offered to come that to appointment, but I'd told him we'd be fine. Mainly because Sam would be having his first lot of vaccinations, and I wasn't sure how Eric was going to cope with watching needles being stuck into Sam.

First, though, we went in to the doctor so she could fill out the page in Sam's WellChild book and check things like his fontanelle and whether his hip creases were even. She looked Sam over and pronounced him a nice, big, healthy baby. Yeah, everyone thought he was big.

"So how has he been?" she asked, handing him back to me.

"Oh, well. We're in the middle of a growth spurt, so…I'm feeding him a lot. It's um…it's tiring" I confessed.

"Yeah…just remember to be kind to yourself, won't you?" the doctor said, leaning forward and patting my hand.

I felt the hot tears prick behind my eyes, but I knew I couldn't give into that feeling. Sam was about to go and get stuck with what would be, to him, a huge needle, and he needed his mother to be worrying about him right then. "I'm OK" I said.

After we'd seen the doctor we went into the nurse's office and she gave Sam his jabs. He roared with indignation and pain every time a needle went into his chubby little thigh, and he looked at me with his eyes full of tears, trying to work out what the hell was going on and just what I was doing to him.

But when we sat in the waiting room afterwards, and I fed him, I got the feeling all was forgiven. And after the feed, when Sam had shown no signs of an adverse reaction, the nurse waved us off and Sam didn't look like he was holding a grudge.

For the rest of the day Sam was kind of quiet and sleepy. I let him feed as much as he wanted, or comfort himself by sucking anyway. It only seemed fair really. It was kind of nice sitting there in the sun in the living room, nursing him, and I let my mind wander to what the doctor had said. Maybe…maybe I needed to try something else?

I thought about my little storage box hidden away in a kitchen cupboard. The one that contained the breast pump and the bottles. Should I start expressing in the mornings so he could have extra milk before bed?

When Sam was asleep I got the box out and looked at it all. I was never fond of that breast pump, and I remembered what a hassle it was to try to fit in an expressing session between feeds so you didn't end up having no milk yourself when the baby woke up hungry. Not to mention finding the time to actually sit there with the pump attached to you when there was other stuff that needed to be done. Because it wasn't like Jason's cows were exactly expected to be out there doing laundry and running errands, as well as being milked twice a day.

No, the pump wouldn't work. I pushed the box back in the cupboard and carried on with getting dinner ready.

It was another rough night; Sam was kind of all over the place and probably not enjoying the pain in his legs at all. There wasn't much we could do but feed him and cuddle him and deal with the amazing amount of poo he spread through his clothes at 2am. "Not sure whether to laugh or cry" Eric muttered, as he opened up Sam's all-in-one and surveyed the damage.

"Yeah" I said, waiting for him to hand all the dirty stuff to me so I could go and soak it in a bucket of Napisan overnight.

When we finally lay back down in bed, sometime near 3am Eric snuggled up to my back. That was nice. Maybe he was coming around? "You're amazing" he said kissing my shoulder. I wasn't sure what I was amazing at though, blow-jobs, not bursting into tears from tiredness in the middle of the night, or picking a guy who had a neck.

I was too tired to think about it much anyway.

The next day I got the box with the bottles back out again. And then I went to the supermarket.

That evening, when we'd dispatched the noisier, bossier kids to bed I walked into the living room. Eric had Sam propped up on his legs and they were, I think, discussing the frustrations of your architect not following simple instructions. "So, I thought we'd try something new tonight" I said.

"What?" Eric asked, looking from Sam to me.

I held up the bottle of formula I was holding. "Formula" I said, and then I waited, and worried. Maybe Eric would think I was a bad mum for even suggesting it. I'd tandem fed Amelia, but he hadn't really been around for that. Shit, we'd never really discussed his views on breastfeeding.

Eric looked a bit stunned. I didn't think that was a good sign. "Um…OK" he said.

"Or…we don't have to…" I said, shrugging. "It was just a thought. I hoped it might fill him up a bit and settle him at night. Sometimes it does. There are no guarantees though. And you'll have to get him to take it first."

"Me?" Eric asked.

"Well…yeah. I thought you might like to." Eric's face didn't give much away one way or the other.

"Oh, OK. Sure. I mean, I guess it's the same as with Felicia?" He had given her a bottle of course, but she was much older.

"Yeah, it will be. Although I guess Sam's never seen one before, so he might not think it's a great idea."

"Well, we can try, can't we Sam?" Eric said, holding out his hand for the bottle. I handed it over and left them to it.

EPOV

Sookie looked tired and strained. It was getting to her, I figured, all the night feeds and the cluster feeding and everything else that was going on. And then she came out with the bottle of formula for Sam, which was a bit of a surprise. And she looked so hopeful that I would do this, so I thought, fuck it. I could give it a try. It surely came under the heading supportive, didn't it?

That was not, however, Sam's thoughts on the matter. He had no fucking clue what I was trying to do him, shoving that thing in his face. I could kind of understand why it wouldn't appeal, after all, he knew what the alternative was, and there was no denying it was better.

I tried to get him to take it into his mouth and actual suck some milk down, but he screwed up his face and looked angry. I sighed. Well I might be aiming for supportive, but I had the feeling Sam was aiming for pain in the ass.

"Sam" I said to him, "I know it's not what you're used to, but try to look at it this way. If your mom's not fucking tired, then boob-time has surely got to be better. You don't want to live in fear of her falling asleep and crushing you. So do us all a favour and just try some of this stuff, OK?"

Sam looked at me, and I tried putting the bottle in his mouth again. I gave it a bit of a wiggle around and he started sucking, very reluctantly, and with his eyes on me the whole time like I might do something else terrible at any minute. But I felt like we had an understanding on the matter, and that was the main thing.

SPOV

The first night Sam had about one-sixth of the bottle before giving up and refusing to have anymore. I took over at that point. That had been my plan anyway, formula first, then I'd top him up so he was really full and he still got that snuggle that made him all sleepy and then bed. Bed and sleep.

It took about a week of Eric sitting there with him every night and cajoling him into drinking more before he drained a full bottle, and was still sucking in the hope there might be more. I fed him afterwards, and then put him in bed, and went back to the living room to sit with Eric. I actually managed a whole cup of tea while we watched an episode of _Boardwalk Empire_, which was one of the few shows we actually agreed on, before we went to bed. And I think I got a whole five hours of uninterrupted sleep. It was bliss.

And I realised the next day I was starting to feel like myself. And maybe I even looked a bit more like myself. I was wearing a t-shirt I hadn't worn in a while. Sure, it wasn't my tightest t-shirt, but I wasn't constantly pulling it away from my stomach either which was nice. And I put on my old capri-length yoga pants. There were a few lumps and bumps in the mirror when I checked, but it was OK. I could live with it.

EPOV

The bottle was a bit of a sticking point for Sam. He kind of wanted it, but at the same time, he knew he got boob afterward and he was kind of keen to rush to that point, so the trick was to get him to slow down and concentrate on what was in front of him at that moment.

Finally he got it, and we got a bit of peace at night. Not a full night, but enough. Enough that maybe Sookie felt a bit more like herself. She looked a bit more like herself too. It was the stretchy pants that did it. The stretchy pants suddenly appeared again and I always fucking liked those pants.

And surely I'd been patient enough?

SPOV

For the second night in a row Sam drank all his formula and I did a small happy dance when I put him to bed. Finally we were over the hump, I thought. And it was almost summer as well, the weather was warm and we'd spent some time outside on the picnic rug, under the sun umbrella, doing tummy time. Sam was really good at tummy time; he had really good neck control.

Probably that was totally down to the fact I'd had a baby with a guy who had a neck of course, but I still thought it was pretty cool.

So when it was bedtime, we could leave the windows open and enjoy the cooler night air. I'd given up swaddling Sam and he was now in one of my smallest sleeping bags, which seemed to make him a lot happier as he could suck his fist.

I put on my nightie in the bathroom and climbed into bed next to Eric. "Yay" I said. "No one's awake."

"Apart from us" Eric whispered back.

'Yeah, just us. But it's nice when it's just us." I turned and smiled at him, and he reached up and put his hand behind my head and pulled me towards him. Oh…well. Just oh. That was what I thought as he kissed me, and it was such a good kiss. I'd missed sex, but I'd really missed the kisses like this one too. Why had we not been kissing more? Kissing was awesome.

Eric pushed me backwards against the pillows. I was more than happy to go along with that plan. Maybe this was it, I thought. Maybe Eric really did want me again.

"Sookie" Eric said, and there was a slight question in his voice.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Do you…?" He never finished the sentence because I just said "Yeah, yeah I do."

EPOV

It felt so fucking good to be with Sookie again, really fucking good. I just hoped it was going to be good for her. And I kind of wished that she'd take off that bra, but she didn't, and I didn't like to ask again just to be knocked back.

And when I was inside her, even with the fucking condom on, it felt so good, and so right, and I really couldn't remember why we hadn't been doing this more often.

But then I felt Sookie get very close and just not quite get there, and I remembered why. She wasn't quite…right, or something. She was making the right noises, and she looked happy, but she wasn't letting go.

And I really just thought she needed to let go.

"Sookie" I said, into her ear. "Sookie, can we try something else?"

"Um..." she said, probably trying to figure out how to say no.

"Sookie, just…it's so hot when you're sitting on my lap, can we do that?"

"Oh…um…" Yeah, she still wasn't sure.

"Sookie, you're so hot. Please?" I looked her in the eyes, and she bit her lip. "Um, OK" she said. "I guess we can try."

So we rearranged ourselves and I had to make-do with the temporary loss of her heat. But when she sank back onto me it was all worth it. I reached around and unhooked her bra. "Oh…OK" she said.

"Yeah, I missed these" I said, palming her breast. She didn't flinch. She shivered. That was always a fucking good sign.

And then she started to move, and it was really fucking hot. It felt so good, and I was actually kind of glad of the fucking condom for once, because otherwise I wasn't sure how long I'd last.

Sookie was getting close again, really close and then she grabbed my shoulders as hard as she could and a kind of shudder rippled through her body. Yeah, that was fucking awesome. Well, until she looked down and said "Oh no!" in a small voice, and her lip started to wobble dangerously.

SPOV

I was so glad to be having sex again, and that Eric actually wanted to have sex with me. I was just still having the same problem; I got close, but not quite there. I wasn't sure what else to try.

Eric suggested a new position and I wasn't sure, but he looked so hopeful, that is was hard to say no. And then he took off my bra, and that felt really nice. And I got close again, and I got hot and tingly and I came. I felt great, I wasn't broken after all.

I felt great until I realised that one of those tingles had been my let-down reflex and I was dripping milk all over Eric's chest. That wasn't sexy at all. I just wanted to cry. I thought we'd really got there, and then that happened. Eric was never going to want to have sex with me again.

Eric looked at where I was looking. "Oh" he said. "I thought my chest felt a bit wet" and then he laughed.

"Don't laugh, it's not funny" I said, starting to giggle a bit myself.

"No, it's sexy" he said, and his tone of voice had changed completely. He carefully rolled us over so I was on my back and then he licked all around my nipple. "It's kind of sweet" he said, and then he took my nipple in his mouth. "Like…um, sugar water."

"Oh" I said, not sure what to say. "Is this weird?" I whispered. I wasn't sure what the rules were.

"Sookie, just stop fucking worrying about what's weird" Eric said. "It's just you and me; I don't think it fucking matters. I think it's kind of hot actually."

"You do?" I said.

"Yeah." With that Eric moved his mouth to the other nipple and started to move again. And now we'd broken the ice, so to speak, I even managed another orgasm, before Eric came after a few forceful thrusts. And then he kind of lay over me for a few seconds, which was really nice, even if we were kind of sweaty. And sticky.

Later, after we'd cleaned up, and we were lying in bed I turned to face him. "So…it's really not weird? You know…the milk thing?"

"No, don't…no. I'm pretty sure it's just par for the course."

"Yeah…OK. Well thank-you, anyway. It was great."

"It must have been" Eric said, "Because that's the first time you've ever had that reaction to me" he chuckled a bit, and it was kind of infectious. I was just so glad to have him back. I really loved him.

"I love you" I said.

"I love you too, Sookie" Eric said. And then I rolled over so I could get some sleep before Sam's first wake-up.

**A/N _Knuffle Bunny_ is by Mo Willems, and it's very, very popular in our house, especially with the grumpy toddler. A GP is a general practitioner. Sookie's visit there for Sam's six week check up and injections was all free of course, because a lot of our health-care for children is.**

**The WellChild books are what they hand to you when you have your baby and it's their record up to the age of five, so everyone (midwives, Plunket nurses, GPs) mark the important stuff in there for you.**

**Circus Circus is real, if you're particularly interested in what it looks like, look up www (dot) circuscircus (dot) co (dot) nz.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	82. Chapter 82

**A/N Phew! It's getting to be a bit harder to write with a toddler than it was with just a baby around. She's slightly grumpy and unpredictable. And fond of making up weird games that need to involve me. If I don't play then I find she's sitting with a My Little Pony toy cellphone jammed against the ear of our poor cat. Explaining cats don't use phones doesn't help, surely everyone uses a phone? So yeah, just assume this chapter got delayed to avoid the SPCA turning up on my doorstep, because if the cat does figure out how to use a phone, that's who he'll be calling!**

**Disclaimer: So not mine.**

SPOV

Once Sam started to settle down, we started the downhill slide into Christmas. Kind of. I was struggling to think of what to buy anyone, and I seemed to have a lot of presents to buy at this time of year. I'd try to make a list in my head when I was feeding Sam, but somehow my brain would wander off into less exciting territory, like whether I needed to put a load of washing on.

Of course the new charm for my necklace, the one with Sam's name on it, had already turned up and Eric had given it to me. I had tried to argue that really he should keep it for Christmas and give it to me then, but he just shrugged and told me that it was finished now, so I start wearing it. For all I knew it had been made a long time ago, and that included the engraving of Sam's name.

But first up I had to get a birthday present for Thomas. So currently I was stuck wandering the toy aisles of Kmart looking for something suitable. Felicia was trying to help me by pointing out interesting things that were totally unsuitable for him. Sam was staring at me from his capsule on wheels and probably wondering when the hell he was going to get morning tea, and Eric, who had taken the day off to hang out with Felicia and Sam in an attempt to help them get along a bit, had buggered off completely. He was probably getting coffee. At the other end of the mall.

In the meantime, I was trying to get Felicia to help me pick a brightly coloured plastic truck. "How about that one?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "Sam's too little for a truck" she said, glancing at Sam.

"No, for Thomas" I reminded her. She shrugged again, and started to wander off. I grabbed a truck at random and walked over to her. "Let's go and find a birthday card" I said.

Felicia didn't turn around, but just kept poking at the something that made an annoying noise. I was momentarily tempted to return the truck I'd just picked up to the shelves and buy Thomas that instead, but I didn't feel that mean.

On our way to the greeting card display I found Eric. He was talking on his phone and didn't look particularly happy. I really hoped it wasn't anything about the house. Eric was on tenterhooks about the whole thing, waiting for the planning permission to come through. Calvin had this week started working for us at the house full-time, but, without that permission, we were kind of stuffed in terms of starting any major work. So Calvin was pulling some stuff out and just getting everything ready as best he could, in the hope the bulk of the building work would start soon. Any minute now, would be nice in fact.

I managed to get Eric's attention and pointed in the direction of where I was headed and he gave me a cursory nod, before carrying on his conversation.

"So, which card do you think?" I asked Felicia when we got to the display of kid's birthday cards.

"Tink'a'bell" she said, kind of automatically. She wasn't really looking at the cards anyway; she was staring in the direction of where Eric had been standing and obviously waiting for him to appear.

"Um…I don't know that's really Thomas" I said to her. I looked at the Thomas the Tank Engine ones, but wasn't sure about the protocol. He was going to have trouble enough sharing his name with a train when he got older. Maybe it wasn't nice to point that out at his first birthday party. "How about Winnie the Pooh?" I asked Felicia.

"Where's Daddy?" she asked.

"On the phone. He'll be here soon." Well, probably, I thought. "So, um, this one? 'For a sweet little boy who's one'? I wasn't sure if sweet was the way I'd describe Thomas. He was sweet enough, but there was something a little bit…serious about him sometimes. Serious and kind of eerily familiar.

Felicia didn't answer me, so I decided my pick was good enough and we all trooped to the check-outs, just in time for Eric to catch up with us. "Everything OK?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "It could be worse" he said. Well, that didn't sound great.

We'd promised Felicia morning tea out, so we headed to the coffee shop next so she could get her sausage roll with a pile of tomato sauce. "You's not gettin' one of dese" she said to Sam, leaning right into his capsule so her face was centimetres from his. To his credit, he didn't panic. Maybe he was used to the large, looming faces of his sisters by now.

"OK, not too close Leesh" Eric said, patting her back and Felicia turned around and glared at Eric. And then she obviously thought more about that move, because she skipped over and grabbed his hand, before giving Sam, who was kind of oblivious, a rather filthy glance.

Yeah, so far that particular bit of tension hadn't settled down.

We sat down at one of the tables and the waitress brought over the coffees we'd ordered, plus Felicia's fluffy. Sam seemed to be having a bit of a doze now, so I figured I'd leave feeding him until we got home.

Eric sipped his coffee and looked tense. I sipped mine and wished it wasn't decaf, but I wasn't game enough to risk having a perky baby all afternoon. I'd done that once to Amelia, who was actually a pretty good sleeper, and it had taken me a while to put it together as to why she was so up all of a sudden. Yeah, don't give the baby caffeine Sookie.

"So…what was the phone call?" I asked, after Felicia had stuffed a large bite of sausage roll in her mouth and was likely to keep quiet for the next little bit.

"Oh…just the window people. There's a backlog apparently just before Christmas and they were wondering if we were still going ahead or if they could post-pone our installation. I told them we were, but fuck, I just don't know. The council still haven't got back to me." Eric stared at the table and looked a bit defeated. I didn't know what to do to make it better for him. I couldn't really. I'd shouted him coffee. And a muffin. Probably that wasn't going to do it.

In the afternoon Eric and Felicia took a drive out to the new place to see how Calvin was getting on. And no doubt to try to see what else could be done without the permission coming through. In theory, we had extra labourers arriving on Monday. I wasn't sure if Eric had given Calvin the go-ahead to hire them. It was going to get expensive very quickly at this rate, and we weren't going to be able to achieve a lot until we had all the permits in place. As it was, we'd made the first draw-down on the mortgage and I noticed the change that made to what we had to spend weekly. My only consolation was that it was spring and surely I wouldn't need to run the dryer that much.

Well, you'd think that, but I still had to run outside and rescue the washing that afternoon while Eric and Felicia were still out. Poor Sam got dumped on the living room floor when I dashed out and when I got back to him he was just lying there, looking a bit confused about it all.

"Oh, Sam" I said to him. "Even the weather is against us today." Sam gave me what I think was a small smile and just tried to go to sleep on me. At least I could offer him something; I couldn't do much for Eric.

Eric sent me a text to say he'd get Amelia from school so when all three of them arrived home the noise level in the house went up exponentially. Between Felicia shouting "Frow me!" and Amelia yelling "In a minute!" as she walked off, after I'd asked her to bring me her lunchbox, it was a wonder that Sam could stay asleep at all.

But he was actually pretty good at blocking out his sisters. Almost as good as his father was at blocking me out when he didn't want to talk about something. Eric disappeared into the study which was still kind of a study until it became Sam's room when he could sleep through the night, or grew out of the bassinet. I suspected he might be too big for the bassinet long before he gave up night feeds. He liked the cuddles in the middle of the night.

I had a pretty good idea where he got that from.

"So, how was the house going?" I asked Eric, sticking my head in the study door. He was sitting there staring at his laptop

"It's OK. Calvin doesn't have a lot more he can fucking do though. He offered to start clearing up the garden for us. I feel kind of bad about making him do that, but fuck, we're paying him to do something. And the other guys from Monday."

Yeah…maybe I wouldn't have taken Calvin up on his offer to start pulling rubbish and dead plants out, but I guess Eric was kind of right. We had to get something out of the money we were paying him. This was the problem having family working for you. Although…Calvin wasn't really my family. Still, I liked him more than Portia, and occasionally even more than I liked Jason.

I just hoped it wasn't going to be awkward at the birthday party for Thomas the next day.

"It'll be OK" I said to Eric, but he didn't even bother to list all the ways in which I could be proven wrong. Instead he just sat there, looking tense. I tried rubbing his back, but I don't think it helped. And then Felicia came in and announced. "Sam's awake. He's done POOS!"

"Oh, I'll go and get him then" I said, and I left Felicia in charge of cheering up Eric. Not sure she was so great at it at the moment either.

EPOV

I think I'd liked it when I was tired all the time because Sam wouldn't sleep for more than two hours. When I was tired and my brain couldn't focus on all the things that could potentially go wrong with the fucking house project. And some stuff was going wrong already. Mostly the fact that we hadn't got the fucking planning permission yet and couldn't start any of the major building work.

Maybe I'd been optimistic when Calvin and I had sat down and mapped out what would happen when. Fuck, maybe I'd just been stupid. Because everyone said these things never went to plan. In fact that's what Sookie was fond of saying to me when she was telling me not to worry. She'd say that everyone knows house renovations end up taking more time and money and that's what the surplus in the budget was for anyway.

But that wasn't my fucking plan. My fucking plan had been for it to go smoothly and not too far over budget. I didn't want us to end up so far in the financial shit we had to sell this house before the new one was ready. I had visions of us all living in a motel room. Or even worse, Jason's fucking tent.

Oh fuck that was a bad vision.

So I needed it to all work out. Absolutely needed it to. But I had no control over anything at this point in time, and it fucked me off. And I couldn't do shit about it, and neither could Sookie.

SPOV

We ran a bit late getting to Thomas' party. Actually, we ran a bit late getting most places these days. I blamed Sam mostly, although sometimes the culprit was Amelia, or Felicia or, occasionally when he was distracted by something really, really interesting on his phone, Eric.

Although this time it may have been my search through my wardrobe for the perfect outfit. I couldn't understand how most of my trousers could be too tight on the thighs but way too big around the waist. I mean, I'd had a baby not that long ago. Had the weight just sort of slipped down? Why was I destined to be so pear-shaped?

I actually asked Eric that question as I was standing in front of the mirror, trying things on. He shrugged and continued looking pre-occupied, which he'd been doing for a few days now. But then he glanced up and saw my expression he said "You're really more of a, um, hour-glass, Sookie", by way of consolation.

I threw my hands up in resignation. "I knew this top was too tight" I said. I pulled it off and added it to the discard pile that was rapidly growing on the bed. Eric didn't even seem to notice I was now just wearing a bra, which made me sad. We'd been good for a while there but then the house had overtaken most of Eric's thoughts and I think I'd been pushed aside.

I hoped it was that, and not the huge bum and the leaky boobs anyway.

Sam, who was propped in the bouncinette, caught sight of me and I think he looked hopeful. I tried to remember just how far babies his age could actually see. I wasn't sure if he could spot boobs from that distance yet.

As I walked further away from him, he started to whimper so maybe he could. So I ended up feeding him so he was full for the party and that ate into my finding a suitable outfit time. In the end I wore some cargo pants that were a bit tight on the thigh and needed a large belt to pull them in, which kind of gave them a weird '80's effect.

I wondered if the '80's look was still in fashion. Oh well.

When we got to Calvin and Judith's the party was in full swing. Judith met us at the door and took the present off Amelia. "It's for Thomas" Amelia said, kind of redundantly. "He's one!"

"Yeah, he is" Judith agreed. "You guys can go outside if you want. All the other kids are there."

Amelia looked serious. "But I'm at school Aunty Jude, are any of those kids at school?"

"Um…no" Judith replied.

"Oh" Amelia looked a bit sad. It was hard for her to be the big kid in these gatherings.

"Oh, well there's Glen" Judith said, as she suddenly remembered him. "He's at school. Well, he's home-schooled. We think. Portia seems to be at the shops a lot. Anyway, he's here and Brianna and Jaden might be here soon. If Aunty Sarah gets her a into g and actually turns up."

"OK" Amelia said sadly. Yeah she didn't have a lot in common with a 10 year old Glen. No one had much in common with Glen. Except maybe for Portia.

Felicia had disappeared off, I guessed to find the kids and Jessica, and I'd lost Eric too during this exchange. So it was just Sam and I left with Judith.

"How are you doing, anyway Sookie?" she asked.

"Well, I think we're through the growth spurt" I said. "So I'm getting more sleep."

"Is he sleeping through?" she asked nodding at Sam. "I think Thomas did at this age."

"Oh. No, he's not managed that yet." It would be nice though, I thought. I looked at Sam and wondered if he was picking any of this up. He looked kind of dozy so I guessed not.

"Yeah, Jessi didn't sleep through until, ooh, she was about one" Judith said, and I hoped that wasn't going to be true of Sam. "But then I blame Calvin for that, she's such a daddy's girl. He couldn't help but get up to her when she called."

I laughed. "Yeah, I think we all are really."

Judith looked a bit thoughtful at that and I mentally slapped myself for saying that to the woman who's dad left when she was two. God, Amelia and Felicia escaped these awkward moments by the skin of their teeth really.

"Well, come on in, anyway" Judith said in the end, as some other people started to arrive behind me. I wanted to say sorry, but she smiled at me and then turned to them and I had to hope we were OK.

I lumbered into the house carrying Sam in his capsule and wondered where Eric had gone and whether there was anything to eat and whether Sam would fall asleep and whether or not my t-shirt was actually showing too much cleavage.

I kind of had a lot on my mind.

I eventually spied Eric standing by Calvin who was cooking something on the barbecue. Possibly one of those weird South African sausages again. They looked deep in conversation and I wondered if it was about the house, so I left them to it. I found a chair in the shade and plonked Sam down next to me. Somewhere off in the distance I could Amelia trying to boss Felicia and Jessica around. Judith had set out some of the equipment we used at Jumping Beans, as she now had the van it was all kept in, so a few of the kids were trying it all out, but Amelia was determined to supervise. I left her to it.

Lorena was holding Thomas who didn't look at all happy about all these people who had invaded his back garden. I'd smiled at her when we arrived and she'd kind of nodded in my direction, but to be honest, she looked pretty busy comforting Thomas.

So it was just Sam and I for the foreseeable future. And then he decided that sleep wasn't happening and he started to get a bit grizzly, so I got him out of the capsule so he could look around. He seemed to be taking it all in and quite enjoying the atmosphere. And then Portia appeared in front of us.

"Oh, is this Sam?" she asked. I nodded, taking a leaf out of Eric's book and trying to avoid answering the fairly obvious questions. "Do I get a cuddle?" she asked. Oh. Bugger. Yeah, I'd forgotten that fun game. The Comptons were great at pass the baby.

"OK" I said, hoping Portia would just have a quick hold and then hand him back. She held out her arms and said "Come to Aunty Portia, Sammy". I tried not to roll my eyes. I failed. Portia had long ago realised the best way to get attention was to hold the smallest baby in the room, so she always made a bee-line for them. She was a bit taken aback when I handed him over though. "Oh, he's a big boy, isn't he?" she asked.

I nodded.

Portia talked to Sam, who didn't look impressed by the whole thing. I was about to take him back, when Amelia came running over and demanded I go and tell Felicia off because she was bossing Jessica. I wanted to tell her that was definitely the pot calling the kettle black, but I could see that Jessica and Felicia were about to face off so I turned to Portia and said "I'll, um, be back in a minute" and went with Amelia.

Felicia wasn't buying my interference, and I patently didn't have the authority that Eric had. "I get half o'de playhouse!" Felicia told me.

"Well, not of Jessica's playhouse" I said to her. "That rule is for our one at home." Until I had to start splitting it in thirds, I thought. That was definitely going to do my head in.

After a while I managed to get some kind of peace going. I wished Eric would come and step in but he was still busy with Calvin. By the time I could peel myself away though, Portia wasn't anywhere around.

And then I spied her talking to Glen and telling him what he was and wasn't allowed to do in the back garden. Poor kid, he was way too old to have his mother running his life like that, even I could tell that one. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be doing that to Sam when he was 10.

Where was Sam though?

I'd heard that Caroline was here and sure enough, she now had Sam and was talking to Eric and Calvin. Well, I guessed that was OK. Eric would look out for him. And Caroline was pretty responsible. I assumed.

I went to see if Judith needed any help and ended up helping her carry all the food out to the table while she filled me in on the lingering resentment that was festering in their family due to Caroline's visit coinciding with Thomas' birthday. Apparently Portia and Sarah, but especially Portia, were upset that Caroline seemed to favour coming to Auckland to attend Judith's special events and nothing that they organised. Of course neither of them had been married, and Portia didn't really hold birthday parties for Glen and organisation and Sarah were two words that never really occurred in the same sentence, but that didn't stop them from harbouring a grudge. And trying to force Caroline to agree to come back for Christmas this year.

So that all sounded like a big ball of fun for Caroline. I could understand totally why she was hanging out with Sam and Eric and Calvin.

Except that when I looked I could see Calvin and Eric, who both now appeared to be eating the weird South African sausage, and no Caroline. Maybe she'd gone into hiding and taken Sam with her?

But as I was standing by the table which had the food on it, Portia appeared fairly promptly. "Where's Caroline?" I asked her, as she started loading up a plate of food which was supposedly for Glen, but was probably going to be their dinner later on.

"Oh, she's over talking to Mum. I told her that she should explain why she couldn't be here for Christmas because I get sick of her taking advantage of us all. We always have to look after Mum because she's never here, never bothers to come over, doesn't come for any birthdays, missed Glen speaking at church. She's useless and obviously ashamed of her family."

Yeah, definitely poor Caroline. And poor Lorena, for being such a burden to her daughters just by wanting to see them at Christmas. Sure enough, when I looked, I could see Caroline was now sitting with Lorena and the fairly desperate to have this all over with Thomas. Except Sam wasn't there.

I scanned the back garden and eventually spied Sarah standing near the back talking to some people I didn't know. And holding Sam. I walked over there and said hello.

"Oh, Hi Sookie!" Sarah said enthusiastically, and grabbing me in a one-armed hug and kissing my cheek while Sam looked kind of scared he might be squished.

"I just came to get Sam back" I said. And I wanted him back kind of soon. No one was actually smoking but Sarah reeked of it so it was only a matter of time.

"Oh, OK. But you like hanging out with Aunty Sarah, don't you Sam?" she said to him. Sam looked around and I couldn't really tell what he thought on the matter of Aunty Sarah.

"Mmm" I said to her holding out my arms for my baby. Sarah reluctantly handed him over and I went in search of Eric. Only I got waylaid by Amelia. "Mum!" she said. "Felicia's going to poke the cake!"

I looked over at Felicia, trying to ascertain the actual level of danger versus Amelia's love of dramatics. From the look of it, Amelia was possibly right. Judith had lovingly created a Thomas the Tank Engine cake, suggesting they weren't particularly worried about the name thing, and Felicia was hovering nearby looking as though she wanted to see if it would actually go. By touching it. Repeatedly.

I walked over to Eric and sort of pushed Sam at him, and then tried to head off Felicia. "We have to wait until they cut the cake" I told her.

"But its Thomas!" she explained. "Like my trains."

"But it's also a cake, that we all have to eat later on, and if you touch it, the icing won't be nice anymore."

"Is icin'?" Felicia asked hopefully. Crap. That was always the best bit of a cake. I don't know why I bothered making actual cakes sometimes; if I just made a bowl of icing Felicia would be just as happy.

"Yeah, so just leave it, OK? And go and…" I didn't get to finish, because at that moment she spied that Eric was holding Sam and took off to intervene. When you're not quite three there's no such thing as a subtle approach I guess.

"Mum!" Amelia said, as she appeared at my side again. "Can you come and tell Jessi that she gets half the playhouse?"

"Well it's really all hers. Or maybe half Thomas'. At any rate, you're a guest, so you kind of have to go with her rules on it."

"Well that's not fair!" Amelia said, horrified at the thought. "She should be sharing."

"Amelia, she probably would share with you, but she's making the rules not you."

Amelia sighed. This wasn't her idea of a fun party at all, mainly because she wasn't the one in charge. "I liked my party" she said to me.

"I know" I agreed.

Amelia shuffled off sadly and I went back to Eric, only he wasn't holding Sam now. He was now dangling Felicia upside down while she giggled uncontrollably.

"I think she may have eaten already" I commented, but Eric didn't say anything as he had a mouth full of food, so he just kind of shrugged.

"Um…where's Sam?" I asked. It wasn't just like he could wander off after all.

Eric swallowed whatever he'd been eating. "I gave him to Judith when Felicia started to climb me" he said.

"Oh. Right. OK, well that's fine." It would have been fine, except that then Judith passed me with a crying Thomas in her arms. "I don't know how we're going to do the cake" she said to Calvin. And then she saw me. "Oh, Sam's with Mum" she said. "I had to do a swap and give her the less painful kid" and then she walked off to try to find a place to calm Thomas down.

I looked over at Lorena. Yep, she definitely had Sam balanced on her lap. He seemed quite content, and, actually, so did she. And then I realised, Lorena actually likes babies. Possibly because they're easy to control and you can put them in little baby-prisons, but even so. She was actually smiling, and clapping Sam's hands for him.

I decided to leave them to it and go and get something to eat.

We made it through the rest of the party in one piece. Amelia managed to witness the fight that eventually broke out between Portia and Caroline when it all came to a head and relayed it to me in great detail, while I was trying to eat some charcoaled steak. "And then Aunty Portia said 'You don't care about any of us!' which wasn't very nice, was it? But then she was crying, and I was very sad because she was sad. Aunty Caro wasn't very sad though. Aunty Caro said that she needs to stop being such a selfish cow and realise the world doesn't revolve around her, which seemed a bit mean because Aunty Portia was crying. I'm not mean like that to Felicia, am I Mummy?"

"No" I agreed.

"Yeah, Aunty Caro was a bit mean, but then Aunty Sarah said that no one realises the, um, stress she has because Matt wants to take Brianna and Jaden to Whangarei. Did you know he lives in Whangarei now?"

"Um…yes?" I said. I thought Judith had mentioned they'd split up, but I didn't know about the disputed custody.

"So then she cried a bit, and Aunty Portia put her arms around her and said to Aunty Caro that she'd know these things if she was ever around, and Aunty Jude came over and told them that she just wanted them to fucking behave for once and not ruin everything like they usually do, and then she looked like she might cry. But she didn't. She kind of waved her arms around. _And_ she used that bad word, which isn't nice. We don't use that word. Well, Daddy does. Felicia does sometimes. But she's naughty. I still wouldn't yell at her and make her cry though. Unless she broke something of mine. That would be naughty, wouldn't it Mummy?"

"Definitely."

"That's what I thought. It's not nice to break toys." Amelia looked around and spied Felicia hanging out with Jessica. "Felicia!" she called, running off. "Felicia, it's not nice to break toys…" Poor Felicia, she was never going to understand where that had come from.

I was sitting near the table and Glen came sidling up and started loading a plate of sausages. "Hey" I said to him. "Leave a few for other people." He turned around and looked at me.

"Are you still my aunt?" he asked.

Oh. "Um, yeah" I said. "I guess so."

He looked at me for a moment or two. "Even though you didn't keep your marriage vows sacred?"

Oh for God's sake, I thought. Portia's really done a number on him.

"I have no idea what you're talking about Glen, but leave the sausages for now." He stood there for a moment more, and then ran off. Probably to report on me to Portia. I'd be in the shit soon. I hoped I could blame it on someone else.

Eric came and sat next to me. "What was that all about?" he asked.

"God" I replied, still chewing. This steak really wasn't the best.

"OK" Eric said, waiting for me, but I couldn't be bothered elaborating. Instead I changed the subject. "So do you and Calvin have a plan?"

"Um, well, just that he might clear out the rubbish at the back of the section on Monday. But we've talked about rescheduling a few of the contractors that are coming in. Fuck, it's a nightmare until we get the planning permission."

"Yeah" I agreed. I was a bit distracted though, by watching Glen searching out Portia. Probably so he could tell on me. Luckily Judith chose that moment to call everyone over for the cake, and the prospect of getting some of that, even though I knew he'd already had a sneaky swipe at some of the icing, made him temporarily forget me.

"I think after the cake we should get going" I said to Eric.

"Yeah" he agreed. I turned to look at him. He looked tired and stressed still. I didn't think a kids' birthday party was really the most relaxing place at the best of times but Eric looked like he needed a long sit-down in a dark room about now. Probably having Felicia demanding his attention all the time wasn't helping either.

I made sure Amelia and Felicia got slices of cake and left Eric in charge of them while I retrieved Sam, who still seemed OK hanging out with Lorena.

"Thanks for looking after Sam" I said, as I sat down next to her. Sam registered my presence and gave me the best smile he could manage.

"Oh, that's fine Sookie. I just didn't want to see him dragged around too much." She managed to make that sound as though it was totally my fault he'd been dragged around and it wasn't anything to do with her daughters, but that was OK. I'd been blamed for worse things.

"Well, I'm sure he's had a nice time hanging out with his…" I didn't finish that sentence, because I got a bit stuck. Sure, all Bill's sisters still seemed to think that they were Sam's aunty, but the world was full of courtesy-aunty's after all. You didn't really have courtesy-nana's. And she wasn't his nana. In the end I just said "With you."

"Well, anytime Sookie" she said, handing him over. "He's a big boy though; you should put him on solids. I started Bill on solids at six weeks. Made such a difference."

"Mmm" I said, not wanting to hurt her feelings by telling her that no one started their kids on solids at this age anymore.

"And raw steak. Give him raw steak to chew on when he's a little older. They love that."

"OK, well thanks again. And, um, see you around Lorena."

"Yes, goodbye Sookie."

I packed Sam back into his capsule. He looked a bit perturbed that he wasn't getting afternoon tea, but if I stopped to feed him now we'd never leave. And any minute now I was sure Portia was going to track me down.

Eric brought over Amelia and Felicia, who were smeared in chocolate cake. Luckily, Felicia was wearing a brown t-shirt to match her brown and pink checked shorts, so that kind of hid some of it. Amelia's dress had fared worse.

I pulled out my wipes and cleaned the pair of them up as best I could. Sam started whimpering as being strapped into a capsule and ignored wasn't as good as being held on someone's lap and watching a bunch of big kids.

Eric picked up the capsule and took Felicia's hand, and I kind of dragged Amelia along with me. She was complaining that we were leaving early and no one else was, but I was never a fan of these parties that went all afternoon and into the evening. Still, they were her relatives and one day she'd be old enough to party all day and all night with them if she wanted to.

We said goodbye to Judith and Calvin on the way out. Thomas had calmed down, but he looked very tired and was just clinging to Judith. It had been a big day for him. Jessica was nowhere to be seen, so she was possibly still in the playhouse defending it from everyone.

As we got to our car and were strapping everyone in I heard Portia's voice drift over, she must have been down the side of the house. "I don't know why she gets to come and upset everyone, bringing _him_ with her. She has to flaunt him at every opportunity. Poor Mum, it's _heartbreaking_ for her to have to witness that lover of hers with the girls…"

I got in and closed the car door and that stopped me hearing any more. Thank goodness. Eric climbed into the driver's seat a moment later. "Was that you they were talking about?" he asked me, quietly.

"Yeah" I said. "It would have been."

"Huh" Eric said, doing a U-turn so we could drive off. "I don't think I've ever been flaunted before."

I looked over at him, and I burst out laughing. Of course he had been. Every woman he'd ever gone out with had probably flaunted him at some point. "What?" Eric asked, a bit grumpily.

"Oh, you have no idea, do you Eric?" I asked him.

"About what?" he asked, completely confused.

Amelia butted in then. "He doesn't know that Matt is taking Brianna and Jaden to Whangarei, do you Daddy?"

"Um, no. No I didn't know that." He looked at me with a kind of 'was I supposed to know who she's talking about?' look and I shook my head for no.

We got home and I fed and changed Sam. At least he hadn't pooed on Lorena. I never would have heard the end of that. Portia might have been horrified if my demon-spawn had done that to her poor saintly mother.

The demon-spawn she couldn't wait to cuddle and the saintly mother she didn't want at Christmas, that is.

The rest of the evening was uneventful and pretty much the same as any other at that time. The kids played, fought, played some more. I fed them when everyone got a bit whingey, but only an omelette as we'd eaten barbecue in the middle of the afternoon. Amelia drowned hers in tomato sauce and Felicia tried to pick off Eric's plate. Sam sat in the bouncinette and looked a bit sad at being left out until Eric had finished his dinner and lifted him out to hold him, at which point Felicia climbed into Eric's lap as well.

And then we had to get them all to bed. There were baths for the big ones who'd been covered in cake earlier, and Eric gave Sam his bottle. He was starting to like it more I thought, or at least he made a good show of putting up with it for my benefit.

But when I went to put him in the bassinet I looked at him lying there. "He doesn't really fit" I said to Eric. "He's too long for it now."

Eric came and looked, and then kind of shrugged. I guess Eric was used to being in that particular situation, but Sam had the problem that he couldn't let his legs hang over the edge, instead he was kind of crunched up.

So I went into the study, which was now officially Sam's room, and changed the sheet in the cot so Sam didn't have to sleep on a pile of Bob's fur, and then we placed him in it. Eric set up the baby monitor. And we tiptoed out.

Eric and I got into bed ourselves. "It's kind of weird without Sam" I said. "I got used to him being in here."

"Yeah, but I think he'll be fine. Can you hear anything through that?" Eric said, gesturing to the monitor.

"No" I said, shaking my head.

Eric looked a bit torn. "I'm going to go and check on him" he said.

"OK" I agreed. I kind of wanted to know too.

"He's fast asleep" Eric said, coming back into the room a moment later. He climbed into bed. "I guess it's appropriate. After all, the crib got emptied last year when Thomas was being born, now we've filled it again." Eric lay down and I lay against him.

"Yeah" I said. "Although of course Thomas' actual birthday isn't until Tuesday, it was just the party today. And thank goodness it was today and not tomorrow, and we have that to ourselves. Not a day I want to share with the Comptons. OK, well goodnight." I shuffled around and got comfy, and then I drifted off.

EPOV

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. It was our fucking anniversary. One year. It was our fucking anniversary tomorrow. And I'd forgotten it.

I was usually pretty fucking good at remembering stuff, the important stuff anyway. And I never fucking thought I would forget something as important as this. But somehow between Sam arriving and all that put us through and the house, I just…forgot. Even the fact of Thomas' birthday hadn't really reminded me.

But Sookie fucking remembered. Of course she did. And now I was stuck there lying in the dark wondering what the hell I was going to do the next day. Fuck. She was going to be pissed with me for sure.

There wasn't anything I could do about it late on a Saturday night though. I'd just have to make it up to her. Somehow.

And so I lay there and tried to get my brain to shut down and just go to sleep, but it took a long time, probably because I really fucking wasn't looking forward to the next day.

**A/N I don't know if anyone else uses the phrase 'a into g', it's the polite way of saying 'arse into gear'.**

**Whangarei is pretty much pronounced Fong-a-ray, but I'm not an expert.**

**Off to rescue the cat, thanks for reading!**


	83. Chapter 83

**A/N Yes, I'm still here. And I still have a toddler and a cat, so I feel like I've done my job. The fact the cat may or may not be wearing a small plastic pig at the moment is neither here nor there.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Sam's two wake-ups during the night did give me some time to plan what I was going to do before the morning rolled around, although I was kind of distracted both times by the fact that Sam needed burping and changing and once spat up on my pillow.

At least he missed me this time.

So when it was officially getting up time, well, for everyone except Sam who decided that now he had his own room he was fucking sleeping in, I had kind of a plan. I didn't think it was a particularly good plan, but fuck it, there's only so much I can come up with at 3am.

Sookie came out of the bathroom "Have you checked on Sam?" she asked.

"Yep, he's asleep" I answered, pulling out my shoes and stepping over the ones Sookie had left on the floor the day before.

"Where are you going?" Sookie asked.

"It's a surprise. I'll be back soon. Don't um…don't eat anything for breakfast yet, OK?"

Sookie shrugged. "OK" she said, I started to walk out of the room. "Hey! Eric!" she called after me.

"Yeah?"

Sookie walked over so she was standing in front of me. "Happy anniversary" she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss me.

"Yeah. Happy anniversary" I said, before I stepped away.

I headed out of the house and walked up to Mt Eden Road and along to the bakery a little way up from our street. Thankfully they hadn't sold out of bagels yet, because I didn't have a back-up plan for this part. Well, there was that weird bread with the dried fruit in it that Sookie liked. I bought her some of that as well.

Next I stopped at the convenience store two doors' down and looked at their rather basic selection of flowers. They might have had more later in the day, but I didn't want it to look too much like I'd fucking left this to the last minute.

Yeah, who the fuck was I kidding. Sookie was going to know I had. I was just going to have to pretend like it was all supposed to be like this and hope she played along.

I selected some flowers that looked passable and went inside the store. There was one display of greeting cards and they were all pretty shit. I decided to flag the card and go with just the flowers and the food.

When I got back Sam was awake and Amelia and Felicia were a bit grumpy that Sookie was feeding him first.

"Where you go?" Felicia asked me.

"Just, um, out" I replied.

"I di'n't go!" she complained.

"Um. Well, I just needed to get there and back. Quickly. So we could eat. Do you want a bagel or fruit toast?"

Felicia looked at the bags I was carrying and seemed slightly mollified. "Frui' toast" she said, grumpily.

"Good choice Leesh" I told her. I wasn't sure how many bagels Sookie was going to eat and I wanted her to have first pick. Well, nominal first pick anyway.

Sookie arrived in the kitchen carrying Sam just after I put Felicia's toast on. I handed over the flowers. "These are for you" I said.

"They're lovely, thank you" Sookie said, showing them to Sam. They really weren't. Then she spied the food. "Ooh, bagels" she said. "Thank you. What do you think, Sam? Does that sound good for breakfast?"

"Why you askin' him? He doesn' eat food" Felicia said.

"Well, he kind of gets what I eat in the milk" Sookie explained. Felicia looked confused. "How?" she demanded.

"Um, well I eat food and then my body makes milk but sometimes the milk tastes like the things I ate…"

"Like choc'lit milk?" Felicia asked.

"Sort of" Sookie said.

I handed Felicia her plate of toast and she left. "Sugar water" I said to Sookie and she gave me a funny look.

"I still don't know if it's weird or not that you know that" she said.

I shrugged. "Well, it's something Sam and I share" I said, before I sliced a bagel. "Where's Amelia?"

"I don't know" Sookie said, sounding thoughtful. After a few moments though Amelia came wandering in. "Oooh, Sam!" she squealed. "He's so cute! Aren't you cute, Sam?" she said in a really fucking annoying baby-voice.

"Yeah, he's cute" I agreed. "What do you want for breakfast?"

By the time I sat down to eat Sookie was already at the table clutching something that looked suspiciously like a card…and a gift. Fuck. There were gifts. That was…fucking terrific. Now I felt like a major shit.

"Happy anniversary!" she sing-songed, handing them to me.

"Um, yeah. Thanks." I said. I opened up the card. It was great. I still felt like shit though. I leaned over and kissed Sookie. "Present now!" she said brightly, handing over the gift.

"OK" I said, feeling worse. When I tore off the wrapping paper I found a photo frame inside, one of those ones that opened up like a card. On the one side was a photo that Sookie had taken of Sam and I talking on the couch one night, on the other side were little footprints on a piece of cardboard. Underneath the footprints Sam's full name and a date were written. Oh, fuck.

I looked at Sookie, and she shrugged. "I had no clue what to get you, and I'm trying to save some ideas for Christmas, so I thought that might be nice to have on your desk at work."

"Yeah, it's great" I said, before I kissed her again. It was great, and she'd obviously managed to fit in the time to actually organise a real fucking present. Whereas I had failed totally and completely. Fuck.

I felt kind of bad about the whole situation, because really, she deserved some kind of fucking celebration after having Sam. She deserved a lot of things. But I'd been so caught up in the house I'd just…forgotten.

Sookie, I think, took my silence to mean I didn't like the gift. She shrugged. "Well, it's just a small thing, but you know…I did get you a baby as well!"

"It's a great gift, it really is. I love it" I assured her. And I did. But I still felt like a total asshole.

"You're sure?" she said.

"Completely." And I kissed her again in the hope she'd stop asking me.

"Um…I've got something else for you" I heard myself say. "But you won't get it until later."

"Oh, OK then. A surprise, that sounds intriguing" Sookie said brightly. Yeah, it fucking did sound intriguing. It intrigued me, because I had no fucking clue what it was actually going to be.

I spent some of the morning in the spare room trying to work, and think of what else I could do for Sookie. Well, it used to be a spare room. "You'll have to move out for a bit" Sookie said, when it was time for Sam to have a nap. "Use the dining room table, or something."

Yeah, that didn't work very well. Felicia spied the laptop. "Elmo?' she asked hopefully, climbing into my lap.

"Um, trying to work Leesh." I'd had Friday off and I needed to catch up. Although maybe I didn't need to catch up on the fact that Clancy had asked Ginger out and she'd turned him down citing 'professional conflict of interest' like Indira obviously thought I did. I should maybe get her to email the fucking gossip to Sookie and just send the text that actually applied to work to me. It would save me a lot of time.

"But I wanta see Elmo!" she whined.

"OK, fine. You can watch down here" I said, opening up the Sesame St website and minimising the window so Felicia was using a corner of the screen and I could check emails on the rest.

"Dat's no good" Felicia grumbled. "I want t'see the whole fing!"

"Well…we're sharing" I said to her. She gave me a look which suggested that was one of my less brilliant plans, but seemed content. Although she started singing along. And kept telling me to watch what Elmo was doing. And when each clip finished she spent a long time picking the next one.

In the end I gave up and let her have the whole screen, while I pondered just exactly what I was going to do about the whole surprise I now had to produce later on.

Sookie had gone to hang laundry in the backyard, muttering about 'whether the weather would hold'. So far she didn't seem too pissed with me, but I thought it was coming. She was probably expecting something really special for a first anniversary, and it wasn't going to happen.

Eventually Felicia got bored and wandered off to find something else to do. I thought maybe I'd do some research into wedding anniversary presents. I had a feeling there were rules. There were, but none of the choices appealed. I didn't think Sookie needed a clock and one of the options for a first anniversary was paper.

I should have bought her a card after all.

I debated whether or not I should take a trip to the mall, but I didn't fucking know what would be a surprise about some shitty gift I'd just bought today. And it wasn't like I had any amazing ideas anyway. I couldn't exactly use the same idea Sookie had and give her photos of her with Sam.

If I did she'd just complain she looked terrible in them anyway. Fuck, I was screwed.

And then I decided to have a look at some of the house stuff I had saved on my laptop, the timelines and projections I'd worked through with Calvin originally. That just made me more depressed when I realised that it just wasn't going to happen how we'd thought it would. Fuck, I had been so fucking stupid.

Sookie came in from outside. "I think it'll be OK" she said, probably to me. "There's a fair amount of wind so that should blow the clouds over before they actually drop anything."

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"So, do you want to go somewhere?" Sookie asked, walking over to me. "I'd say we could take a drive out to Piha and show it to Sam, but it's a long way in the car for the grizzle-bums, so maybe, I don't know, a walk around the lake at Western Springs? I've got some old bread for the ducks and the swans."

"Um, oh. Yeah, OK." I realised that probably a trip out to Piha would have been great, if I'd thought to organise it ahead of time. Maybe we could have stayed in Tara and JB's shack or something. But at the last minute, no, that wasn't going to work.

"Great. I will just go and get changed and then, I don't know…do you want to just get Subway on the way there and have a quick picnic?" Sookie continued.

"Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good."

Sookie went off to the bedroom and I stared at my spreadsheets for a bit longer. The one detailing the mortgage drawdowns was particularly depressing. I realised after a while though that Sookie seemed to be taking a long time to re-appear.

I walked into the bedroom and she was standing in front of the closet flicking through the clothes in there. "I hate this" she muttered. "Hate, hate, hate finding something to wear." She turned around and held up two almost identical t-shirts. "Which one do you think is going to hide the fact I have enormous boobs?"

I looked at what she was holding. I had no fucking clue, and given the fact I had pretty much fucked up the entire day already, and possibly our entire lives, I was clearly not the person to ask.

"I don't know Sookie, you pick something" I said, probably a bit sharply. And then I left the room.

SPOV

I didn't want to fight with Eric. Not on our anniversary. But he was making it pretty hard not to be just the tiniest bit grumpy with him. And actually I was probably more than a bit grumpy with him. He was kind of like one of those black clouds that were hovering overhead waiting for me to put the washing out, only in Eric's case the black cloud was hanging out in the family room trying to jam shoes onto Felicia's feet. "Will you just sit still!" he grumbled at her.

"I no wanna sit still!" Felicia retorted.

"Well you have to" Eric said, and he sounded like he was talking between gritted teeth. I hoped he cheered up soon. I felt a bit powerless really. Maybe it would be easier when we were alone later on. I wondered what the big surprise was, and I hoped it wasn't that making Eric too stressed.

I contemplated saying 'Cheer up Mr Grumpy-pants' to him, but I wasn't sure how that was going to go down right now. Either it would work, or, more likely, it would push him right over the edge.

So instead I fed Sam and got everything ready and we took a trip to Subway where we picked up some lunch, and then we drove on to Western Springs. Eric was mostly silent all that time, and he didn't say much as we sat at one of the picnic tables and ate either. I sat Sam on my lap and he looked kind of longingly at the food.

Maybe he agreed with Lorena's assessment of when to start solids, even if I didn't.

After that we took a walk around the lake and fed the birds. Felicia tried to pat one of the swans. "Black duckie" she said. "Come here!" She got grumpy with Eric when he hauled her away. Amelia got grumpy with Felicia when the bread for throwing was unevenly split between them. Sam got grumpy in the pram and wouldn't go back to sleep.

Quite frankly Eric's mood was rubbing off on all of us. I hoped it got better soon.

EPOV

The trip to Western Springs really didn't help me come up with anything I could pass off as a surprise to Sookie. I just wanted to get it over with and get back home so I could finally figure out what the hell I was going to do.

So after the trip was over and no one had been eaten by a fucking swan we ended up home again and I was still trying to figure it all out. Sookie announced that she was going out into the garden to pull some weeds. She gave me a kind of funny look, like she expected me to say 'no, don't do that because I'm about to whisk you off somewhere exciting.' Except that wasn't going to happen because of course, I had no plans made. None at all.

So I said that I might wash the cars, not because I deliberately wanted to be on the other side of the house from Sookie, but just because, well…maybe I did need a bit of space. Just to think things through.

Only I still wasn't any closer to coming up with an idea for what this fucking surprise was meant to be. Maybe I should just confess? That would be a surprise for Sookie. Sorry you mean so little to me that I forgot our first anniversary.

I'd just finished rinsing off Sookie's car when Andy appeared with Riley and Ruby. Riley was riding the bike he'd been given for his birthday and Andy had Ruby strapped into a tricycle he could push, although he seemed to spend most of his time stopping Riley from riding straight into the wall.

"You haven't got any helpers" Andy commented.

"No" I said, realising that no one had come to see what I was up to. That was kind of odd.

"Lucky you" Andy said, as he tried to stop Riley falling sideways while still sitting on his bike. "We've been told to 'go somewhere else' for a while."

"Oh" I said kind of feeling Andy's predicament, but mostly worrying about the surprise I had yet to produce for Sookie.

Just then Felicia appeared down the stairs from the front door. "Mummy wants t'know if you want…is Riley goin' to d'park?"

"Yeah, I think that's where we're heading…eventually" Andy said. Riley attempted to ride in a straight line and failed miserably.

Felicia came over to stand beside me. "I wanta go to th'park" she said.

"We went to Western Springs" I said to her.

"It's not the same, it's not a park" Amelia said behind me. She'd obviously been sent to find out whether Felicia had delivered the message correctly. She hadn't of course, but that was no longer Amelia's concern.

"If it's not a park, then what is it?" I asked, turning around to Amelia. She thought for a minute. "Well…it's a springs, obviously. Because there's a lake and stuff."

"And black duckies…" Felicia added.

"They're swans" I reminded her.

"And blue duckies" Felicia continued.

"They're um…" yeah, fuck I forgot what they were completely. "They're not ducks either."

"They're _pukekos_" Amelia said, looking at me. "Mum says that Daddy forgets the proper words for things because he's American" she said to Andy, "But she says it works in her favour sometimes because she can put courgettes in the food and he doesn't realise."

Yeah, fuck. I had no idea what courgettes were. The only things I knew I really didn't like were celery and zucchini, but I'd seen Sookie with celery and I'm sure she'd called it that. She'd also told me I wouldn't taste it if it was cooked in something, and she'd been right. I hadn't seen her with any zucchini though.

I made a mental note to investigate courgettes.

"OK, I'll tell Mum we're going. I want to take my scooter though" Amelia said, before walking back into the house.

"I wan' my scooter too" Felicia said, obviously taking Amelia's announcement we were going as being the actual plan.

"Oh. OK, hang on. I have to put the hose away" I said. I could Amelia yelling "Bye Mum!" somewhere inside the house, so I walked back to the shed to get rid of the hose and find the scooters.

The park was OK, when we got there. I felt a bit sorry for Riley, it can't be easy riding anywhere with Amelia screaming "He's going to fall off!" or "He's going to hit that wall!" or asking if he's actually allowed to ride on the grass every few minutes.

I was surprised about how much energy the girls still had even after our walk earlier in the afternoon. At least now they were a bit bigger I didn't have to lift them on and off things quite so much, and Amelia didn't even really want me to push her on the swing. I did have to watch that Felicia didn't attempt anything that was beyond her physical abilities though, as she tended to think she was capable of doing anything her sister could do.

Andy asked how the new place was going, and I told him that it wasn't going as well as I thought it would. He didn't have much love for the council planning department and told me a few stories from their renovations a few years back. That didn't make me feel any better at all.

"Fuck, I've totally fucked things up today" I said to Andy, as he pushed Ruby on the swings and I kept one eye on Riley and Felicia on the slide, and the other on Amelia who was off making daisy-chains with her new best friend, some girl called Taylor who apparently lived next door to the park.

"Why?" he asked. "You're out of the house with most of the kids. I should think you'd get some reward for that. Riley, not head first, alright mate?"

"Yeah, except it's our anniversary and there's supposed to be a surprise later on."

"Oh. Yeah, 'course it is. Well just take her out for dinner" Andy said, shrugging like it was no big deal. I guessed he'd been married for a while and the novelty had worn off. But this was a first anniversary, surely there had to be more than that?

"You think that'll be enough?" I asked. Wasn't there supposed to be jewellery or something as well?

"Yeah, I mean how often do you actually go out?"

I thought. I couldn't really remember. We were supposed to go out for my birthday and there'd been a table booked at Molten. Except that Sam came the day before. So maybe we could try Molten again.

"OK" I said. "I guess that's better than nothing. But I'll need a babysitter."

When I got back Sookie was nowhere to be found. I actually found Sam first, mainly because I wanted to get my laptop out of the spare room and had forgotten it was his room now. He was asleep in bed.

And, bizarrely, so was Sookie when I found her.

Now that I had an actual surprise to tell her about it was a bit frustrating not to be able to, but I decided that I would actually book somewhere for dinner first. So I made a few phone calls. The first one was to Molten. Which did not, apparently, open on Sunday nights. Fuck.

Then I tried the restaurant across the road from Molten, the restaurant further down the road, and some Italian place in Epsom we'd been to once. But, apparently, there were a lot of bookings for Christmas parties this time of year because it totally made sense to do that in November.

I gave up. We'd have to wing it. I went outside and brought the laundry in while Amelia fretted that I might fold something incorrectly and Felicia tried to pick Bob up. She was getting a lot closer to being able to do it and Bob was getting a lot quicker on his feet dodging her.

It probably did him the world of good.

When I got back inside Sookie wandered out of the bedroom. "Wow, thank you" she said, yawning. "Sorry, I fell asleep."

"I know" I said, "We've been back for a while."

"Oh, have you. Oh well, it was a good break. Sam's having a decent sleep too, which I hope means good sleeping tonight because he's not over-tired and not no sleep tonight. But it's hard to tell. So, what do you want for dinner? You can pick, seeing as it's a special day."

She smiled at me and didn't seem to be waiting for me to come up with some great surprise. "Oh, well actually I thought we could go out" I said to Sookie.

"All of us?" she asked, looking over at Felicia who was covered in grass stains.

"Um, no, just us" I said.

Sookie pulled a face suggesting she thought that was an almost impossible feat to pull off. "I don't know…" she said slowly.

"No, it's OK. I figured it out" I told her. "We won't leave until after we've given Sam his bottle and last feed and he's in bed, then we should be back before he needs you again. Halleigh will come over and sit here for us, Andy volunteered her. Said she owed him. But if Sam does wake up, he could just have another bottle, couldn't he?"

"I guess so" Sookie said, thinking it through. "It might work. OK, well that'll be nice then. Where are we going?"

"Now that's the surprise" I said, leaning down to kiss her. Yeah, it was going to surprise me too.

When we had everyone in bed and it looked as though Sam was as full as he could be for the foreseeable future, Halleigh arrived and we said goodbye and got into my car in the driveway. "Wow" Sookie said. "I even get to go out in a clean car."

"Yeah" I said, wondering how this finding dinner thing was going to pan out.

We parked in the Mt Eden village and I started to walk, unsure really of where I was going. We walked past that pub which had the Belgian Beer café and I wondered about going in, there was also the circus café, but we went there a lot in the daytime so it wasn't really special. I wasn't sure really what to do, so I stopped and it was only when Sookie said "I've wanted to try this place since they had a good review in the Herald that time" that I realised we'd stopped outside something called the Eden Cloak Room. And it looked like a fucking cloak room, it was tiny. And it seemed to be more a bar than a restaurant.

But I could see a free table inside. "Yeah, let's try in here" I said, as though that was the plan all along.

Sookie gave me a huge smile and we walked in and sat down. It was pretty fucking noisy in here and I wondered if Sookie might say something, but she didn't, she just kept smiling.

"This is pretty good, isn't it?" she said, leaning across the table and giving me quite a good view of her cleavage. Not that I didn't get to see her boobs a lot these days, but it was kind of nice when they were there for me and not because Sam was borrowing them.

"Yeah…it's OK" I said, looking around. It was incredibly tiny when you were in here. I doubted I was going to get back out of my seat anytime soon.

"It's nice to be out with grown-ups" Sookie commented, looking at the menu. "Somewhere they don't have a kids' menu and high-chairs and colouring in books and waitresses who think Felicia's adorable." She smiled at me again. Maybe this was OK. Maybe she really did want to be here.

Maybe I'd actually fucking done something right.

And we had a really good time. Sookie was right; it was good to be somewhere where kids weren't part of the atmosphere. Not that I didn't like our kids, but sometimes even they were a bit much. This was good. We hadn't been just Sookie and Eric in a while now.

"You look happy" I said to her, as they served the appetisers everyone here insists on calling entrees.

"Yeah" she said. "Why wouldn't I be? I love it when other people cook for me! And I'm actually out of the house, and can you believe I fit this dress? It's a great night. And now I'm going to enjoy my bruschetta and not have to worry about cutting up anyone else's dinner for them, or whether my baby might wake up and need me to feed him before I eat myself."

"OK" I said, "You do that."

"I might try a bit of your tuna though" Sookie said, after a mouthful. "Just to test it."

"OK, you do that too."

It wasn't the longest meal I'd ever had, but it was good one. I'd forgotten how nice it was to just sit and talk to Sookie, the Sookie who wasn't stressed and being pulled in a million different directions. We really had needed this.

We got home and Sookie still looked happy. Halleigh said that Sam had slept the whole time and she'd very much enjoyed having a TV all to herself for an evening because Andy always wanted to watch crap.

She went home and Sookie checked on Sam. "He's still snoring" she whispered, walking back out of his room. "I think he likes the cot more than the bassinet. Maybe he's one of those kids that needs room to move around when he sleeps?"

"Maybe" I agreed. And then I realised I wanted to prolong our time together. "Want to sit on the deck?" I asked.

"Yeah, go on" Sookie said, so I took her hand and led her out there. She was in a really good mood tonight, and that was without drinking anything.

"So it's been OK, has it?" I asked, as we sat side by side on the ottoman.

"Well, it's been eventful, I'll tell you that" she said. "I can't believe it's only been a year."

"Oh, yeah. I meant tonight. But that's good too, that the year's been OK." And then I thought for a bit. I didn't want to spoil her good mood, but I felt like maybe she was in a good mood under false pretences. "I have a confession" I said.

"Oh" Sookie said, her gaze sliding towards me. She looked kind of worried.

"I forgot. The anniversary. I forgot it was our anniversary today. Until you said something last night. The surprise was…well, kind of made up as I went along."

"Oh. Oh, is that it. I thought it was something bad." Sookie sounded relieved.

"That's not bad?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It's OK. You've had a lot on your mind. Well, we both have. I can barely remember to feed myself sometimes. Maybe that's how I managed to get into this dress. But I know you're worried about the house."

"I am" I agreed. I waited for her to add her usual comment about how it will all work out and she didn't, instead she said "Remember our wedding night?"

"Um…yeah…" I said, wondering what she wanted to do.

"Remember I told you a story? I could tell you one now if you like?" she snuggled closer to my side, and I put my arm around her.

"Go on then." I kind of hoped it was another dirty one.

"Once upon a time…" she started.

"Is this actually one of Amelia's stories?" I asked, interrupting her.

"No!" she said, indignantly. "This is all mine. So anyway, once upon a time there was a house in Mt Eden and in it lived a woman and two small girls. Now the woman had a broken heart and it was so broken she didn't think she'd ever be able to fix it again. So she got up, and she did what she had to, but she wasn't really living. And then one day a stranger from, um, well we'll say over the sea because it sounds better for the purposes of the story…" she paused and smiled at me. "So a stranger from over the sea, who talked funny and had many, many strange habits, such as trying to order an entrée when he really wanted a main…"

"Yeah, OK. I think we get the point, Sookie."

She giggled. "So this stranger, he turned up at her door. He'd followed her home. Possibly he'd been stalking her." She turned to me and looked a bit serious. I wondered what was coming next, even though I kind of had an idea. "This stranger, when he kissed her it mended that broken heart of hers. And she was better with him. I think he kind of fixed her…"

"Maybe they fixed each other?"

"Maybe they did. Yeah, they fixed each other. And they created something better. They made a family, rather than people just living in a house. And it wasn't easy, but they loved it anyway. And they lived happily ever after. In Mt Eden. Just…in a different house. And that was better too. OK, my ending kind of sucks, but you get the point." She smiled at me again, and I kissed her.

"I do get the point, and it's a very good story" I said. "Better than most of Amelia's."

"Well, she does get it from somewhere, you know" Sookie said. And then she was quiet for a bit. "So basically, just, um…I know you're stressed Eric, about the house. But honestly, this is just a blip in our lives. A kind of crazy blip that we'll get through. It'll be fine, because we're still us."

"Yeah…" I said slowly because I wasn't really convinced it was fine. "I just wanted it to be right. For you, for us. For all of us. I have this fear that we'll have to live in Jason's fucking tent or something when we run out of money and the house still isn't finished." I laughed, but Sookie looked thoughtful.

"You know" she said, "That's not a stupid idea."

"Oh, it's a very fucking stupid idea, Sookie" I said.

"No, I mean, if we had to we could. It's pretty much summer; we could pitch a tent in the garden at the new place if we had to. It'd be OK. We'd cope. The kids would think it was so much fun."

I looked at her incredulously. "You want to live in a tent? With two kids and a baby?"

She shrugged. "People have done worse things. My parents lived in Gran's garage when they were first married, even after Jason was born. They had to save up for their first house. And my other grandparents lived in a bedsit in London that was up four flights of stairs. Nan had to lug the pram up and down that every day so she could take Mum out to get the shopping she needed. That's why they emigrated here. So yeah, I could cope with a tent for a few weeks. If it came to that."

I looked at her to see if she was joking. She was smiling, but she wasn't joking. "You'd…live in a tent?" I asked again.

"With you I'd live anywhere" she said. She paused for a minute. "I think that's the bit of the story we forget sometimes."

"What is?"

"Well, we know you followed me here, but I'd follow you too. I have done, in fact. I seem to remember following you to your hotel room." She raised her eyebrows at me.

"You were drunk that night" I said gently.

"Not that drunk" she scoffed "I knew what I was doing. I'm a big girl. And I know that sometimes things are tough and you get over them and where you live isn't the most important part of the equation. What matters is us."

"Yeah, it does" I agreed, kissing her. "So…you're OK? About everything?"

"Of course I am. I'm fine."

"Good. Very good" And then I kissed her some more.

At some point Sookie ended up straddling my lap and that felt really fucking good. "So" I asked, "Is it warm enough for sex on the deck yet?"

She shook her head. "No" she whispered. "It's still a bit chilly." I got the feeling that there was more to it than just the temperature. But she'd come a long way in the last few weeks so I wasn't going to push it.

"Shower then" I said, and I stood up, taking her with me.

"Eric!" she hissed. "When I said I'd follow you, I thought I might actually get a say in the matter!"

"Oh" I said, stopping. "So you don't want a shower?"

"Of course I do, but you can't just presume" she said haughtily, and I laughed. Sookie pulled a face at me, but couldn't hold back her giggles.

The shower was a fucking excellent idea. We hadn't had one together for so long. Mainly because when Sookie was pregnant, we couldn't both fit. But I loved it, really fucking loved it. Loved being in there with Sookie.

Although I could tell she wasn't that confident under the harsh bathroom lights. She'd look away every time she saw me looking at her. "Sookie" I said, lifting her chin so she'd look me in the eye. "You're beautiful."

She didn't reply to that, but she started to do some fucking excellent things with her mouth, kissing down my torso and towards exactly where I wanted her mouth to be. Fuck, she was good at this. I may have groaned. A lot. And then I came, hard.

And I had to admit, I did feel a lot better.

When I knelt down in front of Sookie though, and tried to lift one of her legs, I could feel her hesitation. I realised we hadn't done this, since the birth, but I couldn't see she had anything to worry about. "Just relax" I murmured. "And trust me."

"OK" she whispered. "I trust you."

Maybe she relaxed, slightly, I couldn't really tell. She did let me lift her leg though. And there was really nothing to worry about. Certainly when she came, her hand gripping the back of my head and her heel jammed hard between my shoulder blades I wasn't worrying about anything much anymore.

We could always get a decent tent, after all. I'm sure they had better ones for sale. Somewhere.

I stood up when Sookie's aftershocks had stopped. "OK?" I asked.

"Perfect" she said.

Best fucking anniversary ever.

Well, so far at least.

**A/N Piha is pronounced Pea-har**

**Pukeko is pronounced Poo-keck-oh. If you want to see what they look like, trained ones feature in a series of ads from a NZ energy company. Check out www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=Hw8QJWdC650**

**Courgettes are the same as zucchinis, we just like to be tricky!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	84. Chapter 84

**A/N Phew! Yeah, my writing time is totally screwed up now thanks to that one nap thing. But we got there. Thanks for sticking around as well!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Once Eric stopped being so grumpy, our first anniversary was actually really good. I'd had a surprise nap, followed by a surprise dinner out, followed by, well, Eric surprising me with the news he kind of forgot what today was until last night.

I just wish he wouldn't preface those kinds of statements by saying "I have a confession…" because I just start imagining the worst. Although I'm not sure what the worst would actually be. I half expect him to confess there's an investment property somewhere that I don't know about, given he almost bought a house without me. But given that I would expect it, maybe it wouldn't be that bad. It would have to be something like…another wife, or maybe even just a fiancée stashed somewhere in the States.

Yeah, that'd be the worst.

So forgotten anniversaries kind of pale in comparison to that. And it wasn't like he didn't try to mark it. But Eric's been so tied up in the house that everything else is kind of on the backburner at the moment. And really, that's just the way it goes sometimes. God knows I'd seen my parents sacrifice countless weekends to the renovation of the houses they'd owned, not to mention the stress of buying properties in the first place.

Once you've seen your mother sit and cry in the supermarket carpark because the mortgage interest rate is 27% and she's just used up all her overdraft to buy groceries, you kind of appreciate when things are good.

So if I had to spend a summer in a tent, I would. Because I could live with worse and, God knows, most of the women in my family had at one time or another. I was from the spoiled generation who hadn't struggled as much.

And Sam would probably sleep better in a port-a-cot under a tree once it got to the middle of summer humidity, anyway.

So I could only hope that telling Eric all of that helped him get rid of some of the stress. For someone who was usually so good at seeing the big picture he sometimes got bogged down in the details when it came to doing the things he thought he was doing for us. Most of the time I just appreciated the sentiment.

Hell, I would have been happy if my total surprise for the day had been a nap and someone else bringing the washing in. Eric could have stopped at that point. But I'd liked my dinner out, and I'd like to do it again sometime, so maybe I wouldn't tell him that.

And my day was topped off by a shower where, as Eric might say, we had a rather nice time. If telling Eric I'd live in a tent with him didn't make him feel better, I hoped at least the blow-job would. I certainly felt a lot better when he'd finished with me. Until I stood up that is.

"Ooh! Freezing!" I yelled, as the last of the hot water disappeared, and so did Eric as he tried to sidestep away to avoid the spray of cold water. He didn't really manage it, given the shower's not all that big, so all he did was push me further into in the stream.

"Oi!" I said, as I reached over and turned off the water. "Watch out for me."

"What?" Eric said, feigning innocence.

"You know" I said, as I took the towel he offered me. "You knocked me right into the water then."

Eric chuckled. "Well sometimes I don't see you down there" he said, wrapping his own towel around his waist.

"Yeah, we're stuck in a tiny box together Eric, how hard is it to see me really?" I asked, but I didn't get an answer as he chuckled again and stepped out of the shower.

I stepped out as well, trying to warm myself up by rubbing rather vigorously with the towel. Eric grabbed me though, and, as he was still quite wet, it made all that drying rather redundant. "I like being stuck in a tiny box with you though" he said.

"Well, mostly I like it too" I conceded, although I had felt kind of on display when we'd first got in here. The lighting wasn't flattering. Maybe we could have dimmers put in the bathroom in the new house? Although dimmed lights weren't going to be any good when I had to pluck my eyebrows.

Eric released me and started drying himself. "Can I put in an order for a bigger water-heater for the new house?" I asked.

"Yeah, I was thinking bigger" Eric said thoughtfully. "Maybe even solar heating."

"That sounds good" I said. And then I realised that Sam was yelling at us from his bedroom.

"Oh, crap" I said, and I hurried to go and find some pyjamas to put on. When I came back into the bedroom with Sam in tow, Eric was lounging on the bed in his underwear. He did look more relaxed than I'd seen him in a while, so that was a good sign.

I settled myself on the bed next to Eric, who helped me get my pillows arranged so they were supporting my back, and then I got Sam latched on and that made him a lot more relaxed as well. He'd stopped crying when I'd first picked him up, but I could see he was just bordering on losing it again the whole time I'd spent carrying him into the bedroom.

I felt quite dreamy and relaxed myself. It was kind of nice, feeding Sam. Sometimes anyway. When I wasn't too tired and didn't have a whole bunch of other stuff crowding into my brain. I turned to look at Eric who was lying on his side watching us. He looked a lot better when he wasn't frowning and tense, and seeing Eric look like that made the last knots of tension in my body drift away. I could really recommend anniversaries, they were great. I felt lot more connected to Eric than I had in a while even though, at this point in time, I was physically connected to Sam.

Eric reached over and stroked Sam's head, and then looked up at me. He seemed to be thinking of something but I wasn't sure what.

"Is it…weird?" he asked in the end, kind of quietly and tentatively. Which seemed, well, weird when Eric spent all his time telling me that I was far too concerned with what was and wasn't weird.

Only in my highly relaxed state I wasn't sure quite what he was referring to. "Is what weird?" I asked.

"Um…well, you know. Switching."

"Switching sides?" I was kind of lost as to what Eric was getting at here.

"No. Um, switching from us…before. To feeding Sam. Is that…OK?" Eric looked up from Sam to me.

"Oh" I said, thinking about it, because it wasn't something I'd been thinking about while I was doing any of it. "No…surprisingly it's not. But I hadn't thought about it before. And now I wonder if it should be weird. Bugger."

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "Maybe I shouldn't have asked."

"Do you feel weird about it?' I asked Eric, wondering if he did and that's where this had come from. He was usually a lot more direct when talking about sex.

"No" he said, and he didn't sound particularly worried about it. I figured we were probably good then.

I switched sides with Sam and had to rearrange the pillows I was leaning against. "We should get a proper chair you can sit in and put it in Sam's room" Eric said, as he helped me get comfortable.

"Mmm" I said. "But the night feeds won't last much longer. Well, I hope they won't. And then…that's it I guess."

"Yeah" Eric said. "I guess that's it." It was hard not to miss the hint of wistfulness in his voice. "Sam's pretty special though, isn't he?" he asked me.

"He is, he really is" I agreed. It was hard not to feel kind of lucky and that we'd totally dodged the bullet with having him turn up healthy and whole. And then I heard myself say something that I hadn't even really acknowledged as my own feelings yet. "And who knows?" I said. "Maybe one day."

"Yeah" Eric said. "Maybe." And we left it at that, as Sam was obviously finished and I needed to get him back to bed before he thought it was actually up-time.

It was up-time soon enough anyway. Mornings always seemed to come around too early for my taste these days. Amelia never seemed to mind though, and she didn't even need coffee to make her the perkiest person in the house at 8am.

Eric didn't exactly look perky, but I think he was still relaxed. He was unfortunately holding Sam though while trying to make coffee one-handed and Sam decided to spit up down the back of Eric's shirt.

"Is it bad?" Eric asked, backing up to me, which meant that Sam gave me a lovely big smile over Eric's shoulder.

"It's baby-sick" I said. "I don't think are degrees of severity. You'll have to change your shirt or smell like stale milk all day."

"Bad Sam" a small voice near the floor said.

"He's OK, Leesh" Eric told her, while trying to hand Sam to me so he could find another shirt.

Eric dropped Amelia at school which gave me more time to prepare the rest of us for Mother, Sister and baby help, as it was now designated by Felicia.

Felicia ran ahead to the classroom once we'd parked, and I tried to catch up but I was carrying the capsule and it was really heavy these days. Probably because it's occupant kept getting heavier by the week.

By the time I actually got into class and over to Amelia's table Felicia was already there. Unfortunately, so was Debbie Pelt. I tried to think whether I'd been told she was doing today, but I couldn't remember anything like that being discussed.

"Um. Hi, Debbie" I said, putting Sam's capsule down on the ground. He looked kind of disgruntled because the view of chair legs and feet was kind of a stink one.

"Oh, hello Sookie" she said, looking up from where she'd been hovering over Sebastian. Felicia was standing near Amelia glaring at Debbie, but thankfully Debbie seemed oblivious. I wasn't sure how she'd take Felicia's utter devotion to Sebastian; I had the feeling that Felicia wouldn't be good enough for her.

And that thought made me half-hope that they'd one day grow up and get married. Just so I could see Debbie's face.

Debbie didn't say anything else to me, but she bent down to Sebastian and quietly said "You're OK, aren't you Sebby?", and Sebastian just nodded while continuing to stare at his desk. And I still didn't know which of us was staying or going.

"Um, I'm doing this morning though, aren't I?" I asked her. That made Amelia pay attention. Her head shot up. "You're not staying, Mum?" she asked.

"Oh, no. I was just here to see Mrs Garfield about um…" an uncomfortable look crossed Debbie's face. "Well, Sebby needs some extension" she said in the end. I couldn't imagine how he wasn't getting enough extension in the all the extra tuition and activities she'd signed him up for.

"Oh, OK then" I said, wondering if Debbie often meddled in what was going on at school, and feeling a bit sorry for Sebastian if that was the case.

"Connor took Sebastian's bag off him" Amelia blurted out, looking up at me again. "And threw it! He's not nice."

"He's a shit-head" Emily mumbled, and I silently thanked God that wasn't my kid swearing. Debbie pretended not to hear it though, and I think she was probably trying to pretend she hadn't heard Amelia either.

"Shi'ead" Felicia said to Emily, while nodding her head in agreement. Oh terrific, we needed that one at home.

"Are you allowed to say that, Mum?" Amelia asked me. "No" I replied. "Don't say that Felicia" Amelia admonished. I sighed. Sometimes I half-expected to just come home one day and find Amelia had decided she could replace me because I was kind of hopeless and obviously in need of good direction.

"Connor's really bad, Mum" Amelia continued, her eyes going wide when she said bad. "He's um…oh, what did you say Daddy was? Encourageable?"

"Incorrigible" I corrected.

"Yeah" she agreed. "That. He made Sebastian cry and his mummy had to come here, although I told him it was OK because, well, nobody _died_." Amelia looked a bit concerned that her comforting presence hadn't been enough for Sebastian.

"Connor's an arsehole" Emily provided, because Felicia didn't know enough swear-words already.

"What's that?" Maisie asked.

"Never mind" I told her quickly, wondering where Emily's new vocabulary had come from. I hoped she wasn't going to want me to spell any of these words for her.

"It's meant to be asshole" Amelia said to Emily, sounding superior.

"No it's not" I said automatically.

"Well, Daddy says it is!" Amelia argued.

"Daddy isn't always right" I informed her, and she looked like she was going to argue that point with me, which kind of worried me about what Eric was saying when I wasn't around. However Chloe piped up next.

"We should be nice to each other" she said, in a voice that wasn't much more than a whisper. "And the planet, because it's sad when we put rubbish everywhere. That's why I can't get a Barbie laptop. Even though I asked Santa for one." She stopped, and then sat there looking quite sad about the whole thing.

Wow, that was totally off the topic. Debbie had just been standing there all this time and Sebastian was still trying to pretend that everyone wasn't really talking about him. I felt really bad for him now.

"OK" Debbie said. "Well…I assume you can take things from here, Sookie?" she asked me, looking like she very much doubted that I could. To be honest I had my doubts too. I was sure the other tables of kids were easier to work with.

"Yeah, I'll be fine" I said. Sam started full-on grizzling so I bent down to lift him out of the capsule while Debbie said her goodbyes to Sebastian.

"Oh, Sookie!" Debbie said, glancing at me again. "That's a very big baby." She managed to make that sound like I'd done something wrong.

"Yes he is" I agreed, wondering how much longer I'd hear that one. Maybe eventually he'd learn to walk and just get mistaken for Felicia's twin or something.

"You must have torn horribly!" Debbie continued, coming around to have a closer look at Sam. I guessed having been in my ante-natal coffee group we'd shared birth stories the first time around and now she figured she was entitled to know all the details this time too.

"Not really" I said.

Debbie eyed me critically. "Mmm" was all she said to that. "I guess maybe not then."

God knows what she meant by that, because I didn't reply and she flounced out of the classroom after saying "I'll send you a text about a catch-up before Christmas. All the mums from the class are going."

"Great" I said, as she walked away.

"What tore?" Amelia asked.

"Mostly, my patience" I said to her.

I tried to sit on one of the little chairs and balance Sam on my knee although it wasn't easy. Sam seemed fascinated by it all though. Now he was more alert he kind of enjoyed seeing what everyone else was doing.

The writing went OK, with me helping with spelling and a few ideas. They were definitely getting better at it as the months wore on, although summer holidays were coming up in a few weeks and we'd all get a respite for a few weeks.

Felicia came over to me. "Bessian's a bit sad" she said.

"I know" I agreed. I kind of wished Jason was here to teach Sebastian a few tricks he could use against Connor, although I wasn't sure Debbie would appreciate it.

When it was time for the kids to finish up their writing I walked around the table checking everyone was OK with what they'd done and didn't need any last minute help. Sam had given up helping and was back in the capsule where he'd dozed off, and Felicia had wandered off to play with some blocks by the mat in the corner of the classroom.

I reached Sebastian and asked him if he was OK, but then I glanced at his paper and it was blank except for a drawing of a kid that looked suspiciously like Connor being eaten by a three-headed dragon. It was a very good drawing, but it wasn't quite what he was supposed to be doing.

"I haven't written anything" he said.

"Oh…well, I guess everyone's allowed an off-day" I said. "I'm sure Mrs Garfield won't mind." There were some kids who refused to produce any writing, week after week. It wasn't like they were exactly being marked on every paragraph they turned in.

Sebastian turned to look at me and then very quietly and very solemnly he announced "Connor's a shit-head arsehole."

Well, at least he'd learnt something this morning. "You're probably right" I said to him.

"But he's not _always_ right, is he Mum?" Amelia interjected. "Like Daddy isn't always right?"

"No one's always right, Amelia" I explained, and Sebastian sighed and went back to colouring in the dragon's claws.

"The important thing is to do what's right for the, um, balance…thingee. In the planet. Oh, I forget the rest…" Chloe said, and Amelia turned to look at her.

"Mum says she wasn't right about my dad. She should have known he was a shit-head from day one. But Sebastian's right about Connor" Emily said, while adding a small flower drawing to the bottom of her work.

There were general murmurs of consensus and I left them all to it.

Our next stop was a bit of a drive away so I hoped Sam stayed asleep and he did, thankfully. Felicia got bored though. "We there yet?" she asked.

"No" I said. "Aunty Linda lives in Papatoetoe so we have to go on the motorway."

Felicia didn't have an answer to that, so she ate another one of the sandwiches I'd brought for her, and then asked the same question again five minutes later.

Aunty Linda's place looked the same as ever. Once upon a time it had been a large house on what was about the nicest street in Papatoetoe, as it backed directly onto the Grange Golf Course. But over time Papatoetoe had become less desirable and now it all looked a bit old and tired round here.

I still felt like Aunty Linda had gone up in the world though. Old habits die hard.

"Oh, Sookie love!" she cried, when she opened the door to us all. "How are you, love? And is this Sam? Hello Sam! Do I get a cuddle?"

"Um, yeah. Just let me get inside and put him down" I said, wondering how Sam was going to take to Aunty Linda.

He did pretty well. "Oh, he's gorgeous!" Aunty Linda said effusively, when she had him in her arms. "I love little babies. I wish Hads would have more, but she says definitely not. Oh, he's so tiny and cuddly."

Sam looked a bit confused at being called tiny. The only other person who ever thought he was small was Eric. But we tended to have babies that were on the big-sized in our family, and Hadley's last three kids with Tony had all been rather generously proportioned when they arrived.

We were sitting in Aunty Linda's back garden under a sun umbrella. Probably so she could smoke, although I really, really hoped she didn't. I'd have to move away if she did because I was fairly sure Eric wouldn't be thrilled about Sam coming back smelling all smoky.

"Have a biscuit, love" Aunty Linda said, pushing a tin towards Felicia.

"Fanks" Felicia said, taking two out, looking swiftly at me, and cramming one really quickly into her mouth. I jammed her sun-hat on her head and she took off into the garden to have a look around.

"How's he been?" Aunty Linda asked me, so I went through the standard response to that question and explained he'd been good, although we had a rocky start and growth spurts were hard, but we seemed to be over the hump now.

Aunty Linda nodded understandingly all the way through. "Mmm" she said in the end. "It's hard, but it's sooo worth it" she looked a little wistful. She'd really wanted more kids. "Oh, I could just eat you up!" she said, pretending to munch on Sam, he looked worried for half a second, and then giggled a bit, so Aunty Linda repeated it a couple of times.

I sat there and stretched my legs out so they were resting on another chair that was in the sun wondering what the chances of tanning versus getting skin cancer were. It was probably 50/50. I sighed. I really missed my days of carefree tanning wearing only SPF4 tanning oil that smelt like pina coladas. Stupid hole in the ozone layer.

Although I probably had to admit that possibly my over-use of hairspray in the late 1980's had contributed slightly to that situation.

I looked over at Aunty Linda's over-tanned and very wrinkled cleavage. I guessed I could only hope I'd stopped tanning early enough to prevent that happening to me.

But my thoughts about tanning were interrupted by Felicia arriving back. "What dey doin' over dere?" she asked, pointing at the golf course.

"Playing golf" I told her. "It's a game. You have to hit a small ball with a stick and try to get it into a hole."

Felicia looked back at the men with their golf bags. "Dat sounds fun. I wanta play!"

"Um" I said. "Well it's really a game for grown-ups."

"Oh" Felicia looked sad. "Dere's no kids here" she said.

"Only Sam" I told her.

"He's a baby. Jus'a baby." Felicia said sadly.

Aunty Linda, though, took pity on her. "I might have something" she said, passing Sam back to me. I figured it was probably time to feed him anyway and he looked kind of happy when he realised that was what happening.

Aunty Linda arrived back about five minutes later. "I thought I still had these in the garage" she said, holding up a really old and faded set of small plastic golf clubs. "I think we got them for Hunter, originally."

So Aunty Linda helped Felicia set up a make-shift golf course while I fed Sam. Felicia seemed to think it was all great fun and was giggling away as Aunty Linda showed her what to do. When I'd been Felicia's age Aunty Linda had always seemed a bit remote and glamorous and slightly scary, but I wondered if being a grandmother for all these years had mellowed her a bit.

Or maybe it was just that Felicia was pretty fearless.

When Sam was done he gave us a nice loud burp after I sat him up. "I don't know how you do it" Aunty Linda commented.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Breastfeeding" she said. "In my day we were all told the bottle was better and it kind of seemed like it was."

I shrugged. "You get used to it" I said.

Just then there was a shout of "Nan!" from somewhere down the side of the house.

"Round here!" Aunty Linda shouted back and then Hunter appeared in the back garden with us.

"Mum said I had to bring these back to you because I don't have anything else to do." He placed a pile of platters and large serving bowls on the table and snatched up several biscuits in the same movement.

"Are you going to say hello before you start taking stuff?" Aunty Linda asked him.

"Hello" Hunter said, with his mouth full so it was quite muffled.

"Hads had Tony's family over at the weekend" Aunty Linda said to me "Which is why she needed the extra stuff." She nodded at the things Hunter had just dropped off.

"Oh, OK" I said, wondering just how big Tony's family was.

"So what else have you got on today, Hunt?" Aunty Linda asked him.

Hunter threw himself down on a chair and helped himself to another biscuit. "Nothing" he said with a sigh. And then I twigged, of course it was the summer break for uni students.

"So no luck with a job yet?" Aunty Linda asked him.

"No" he said, sounding kind of pissed off about it. "Absolutely nothing."

"So coming over here was to make sure you got out of bed then?" Aunty Linda asked him.

Hunter shrugged. "I'm tired" was all he said to that.

"So how is uni?" I asked Hunter.

"It's alright" he said, glancing at me and giving Sam a once-over. He didn't seem to have an opinion on Sam though; I guess babies aren't the most interesting thing when you're 20.

"Exams go OK?" I tried.

"Yeah." I gave up after that, he obviously wasn't giving much away.

Felicia came over waving one of the golf-clubs. "Play wif me?" she asked plaintively.

"I'm talking to Aunty Linda, Felicia" I said. "Sorry."

Felicia frowned. "You suck" she said, which made Hunter giggle. At least that cheered him up. And it made Felicia notice him.

She poked him with the club. "You c'n play wif me" she said.

Hunter looked at the golf club critically. "Have you still got those?" he asked Aunty Linda.

"Yeah. 'Course I have, they come in handy. Trev wanted to put them in the inorganic a few months back but I said no, because Sookie's kids might like to use them when they come over."

Yeah, now I felt guilty for not visiting more. I sighed. I was sure she didn't mean to make me feel bad, but now I was making a resolution to visit more. This was what I always did when I was here and somehow it never happened.

"Com'on!" Felicia said to Hunter.

"Yeah. OK" he said, standing up and following her. He may have acquiesced because he was kind of used to having his own younger siblings around, but I suspected that Felicia being well-practiced in bossing Eric around also helped her immensely. It probably never occurred to her that Hunter didn't want to play with her.

"So he can't get a job over Christmas?" I asked Aunty Linda, as we watched Felicia show Hunter where he was hitting the ball to.

"No. He had something lined up with Housing New Zealand…I don't know really what he was doing for them. But they decided they didn't need as many people. So he missed out. And now he can't find anything. Of course, he'd like something to do with his course, with houses and stuff, but he can't really find anything."

"Oh, well that's no good." I said, and then I asked how Hadley and Tony were getting on, and about Uncle Trev's business. Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev had owned a string of different businesses over the years and the latest was a lawn-mowing franchise. Apparently they were doing OK, and had several people working for them, but even at this busy time of year they weren't doing quite well enough to hire Hunter for the summer.

And I suspected that Aunty Linda thought that if Hunter was working for her he might not take it all that seriously and they really couldn't afford that.

Just then my cellphone rang, and it would have been a lot easier to get it out of my bag if I wasn't also trying to balance a now sleeping Sam on my lap. In the end Aunty Linda took pity on me and grabbed it and handed it to me. She chuckled a bit as she did it, but she didn't comment on the fact my phone was currently blaring out _Born In the USA._ Eric thought he was funny and I kind of wanted to change it, but it required figuring out how you did that in the first place, and I just hadn't got around to it.

Plus, at least this way I knew when it was him.

"Hello" I said.

"Where are you?" Eric asked, sounding a bit grumpy.

"At Aunty Linda's. I said we were going here today."

"Oh. Yeah." Eric sounded a bit sad now. Sometimes after mother help we bought lunch and ate with him. He was probably sitting there now waiting for us all to turn up and feed him.

"Yeah, so just, um. Go to the café or something" I said. I watched Aunty Linda wandering off further into the garden and taking out her cigarettes. I hoped the wind wasn't blowing this way.

"Oh. No, I wasn't ringing about that" Eric said. "I was ringing to say it's through."

"Through?"

"The planning permission. It's through. So we can go ahead, which I think made Calvin a bit fucking happier because apparently he's had a shitty morning clearing broken bits of furniture out of the garden and one of the guys he'd hired quit. So now he needs a replacement."

"Oh. Well that's great" I said.

"It's fucking fantastic, Sookie" Eric corrected, obviously feeling I wasn't taking this joyously enough. I was, but I was also keeping one eye on Felicia, one eye on Aunty Linda's smoke, and trying not to drop Sam despite the fact I was losing the feeling in the arm I was supporting him with.

"Yeah, I know it is. So do you feel better about it all now?"

"Yeah…although it's a pain in the ass that Calvin lost that guy just hours before. Now he's stuck finding someone else at short notice."

"It's arse."

"What?"

"It's a pain in the arse."

"I think they paint the same fucking picture Sookie."

"Well…no, but anyway, I might be able to help with another worker. How about an architecture student looking for a holiday job? I can probably get him at nearly minimum wage."

"How about at actual minimum wage?" Eric asked. "Or, even better, below?" he muttered.

"Yeah, he's not going to work for tips Eric. Plus, he's family so I can't rip him off completely."

"Who is it? I don't want fucking Jason crawling all over our house."

"Yeah, I think Jason's kind of past labouring jobs. No, it's Hunter."

"Hunter?"

"Yeah, Hadley's eldest son. Currently teaching Felicia the finer points of golfing."

"So…cheerleader Hadley's son?"

"Yes, that Hadley" I sighed. I don't know why that stupid costume she wore to Aunty Linda's 60th had to be the most memorable thing about her as far as Eric was concerned.

"Do I know him?" Eric asked.

"He came on Christmas day."

"Sookie, lots of people came on Christmas day, some of whom I'm pretty sure none of us were related to."

"Um…young guy, came with his expensive looking girlfriend…" I trailed off and there was silence on the other end of the phone.

"Nope. No idea" Eric said in the end.

"Well, never mind. I'll ask him anyway; see if he wants the job."

"Yeah, that'd be good" Eric said. And then I thought of something.

"Do I get a finder's fee?" I asked.

"A…finder's fee?"

"Yeah, for finding Hunter."

"Not if it's nepotism."

"Oh well. Bugger."

"Yeah. OK, I'd better go" Eric said. "I have to drive out to…fuck, um, Won-gap-ar-oa."

I thought for a moment, and clicked where he was going. "It's Fong-ah-pah-row-ah, that's how you say Whangaparoa."

"Uh-huh, well as long as the GPS can find it."

"OK, well good luck getting there. See you at home."

"Yeah. And Sookie?"

"Yeah?"

"It's definitely ass." The phone went silent and I moved it away from my ear. "It's arse" I said to Sam. "Definitely arse when it comes to your father" he opened his eyes and looked at me and seemed to be completely on my side with that one.

I balanced Sam and wandered down to see how the golf lessons were going. "Nooo!" Felicia was saying to Hunter. "You have'ta put de ball over dere! You're not doin' it righ'!"

"Oh, OK then" he said, doing something else entirely.

"You're a ask'ole!" she said to Hunter, which made Aunty Linda and Hunter start laughing. Felicia looked even huffier at that.

"That's not a nice word, Felicia" I warned. Although at least her version was closer to being correct than her dad's.

"So, Hunter" I said, turning to him. "You're looking for a job I hear?"

He sighed. "Yeah" he said. "But I can't find anything." He stared into space and I wondered how hard he'd actually been looking.

"So, we need another pair of hands at the house we're renovating. It's a villa."

Hunter perked up a bit at that. "You're restoring a villa?"

"Um, no. Renovating."

"Oh." Hunter sounded a lot less enthusiastic about that. I guess it didn't exactly scream architectural adventure.

"Well, kind of restoring" I amended. "It was made into two flats sometime in the 1950's. I mean…there are plans…" I trailed off realising I wasn't making the world's greatest pitch.

"So what's the job?" Hunter asked.

"Bit of everything, just helping out. My, um…Eric's friend Calvin is project managing it all for us. So really it's helping him out and pulling down walls and making sure the kitchen installers don't stuff up. Things like that."

"Oh. And you'd pay me?" Hunter asked.

"Yeah…maybe not that much though" I said, not wanting to get his hopes up. Aunty Linda laughed at that. "You can tell who you're related to" she said. "Bloody Corbett was as cheap as a Scotsman."

"Yeah…" I said thinking. "Dad would have had a go at doing it himself though. Remember Mum's fishpond?"

Aunty Linda nodded and laughed. "Poor Michelle. It wasn't quite what she wanted."

"No" I agreed. "It wasn't." I'm pretty sure Mum's dream of a fishpond hadn't involved Dad digging a hole in the back garden and sticking the old claw-foot bath from the shed in there. It didn't look too bad, apart from the fact that if you looked at the edge it was obviously a bathtub. And then the cats discovered the joys of fishing as a past-time and between the small presents left on the mat and the fact that Tina kept falling in, Dad had to make an ugly big cover for it out of chicken wire that had ruined the over-all effect.

And the worst bit was when Dad discovered there was actually a market for those old claw-foot baths.

Hunter looked from me to Aunty Linda and back again. "So I can have the job though?" he asked.

"Yep" I said. "I'll give you the address and you can go and talk to Calvin tomorrow."

"Sweet" Hunter said, and he looked the happiest he'd done since he got here.

Eventually I managed to peel Felicia away from the golf set which she was kind of attached to, and drove home to Mt Eden. It was nice to see Aunty Linda, but it was also nice to say goodbye. I kind of felt sorry for Mum now that Aunty Linda had been so keen on dropping around every Sunday.

After a brief period of trying to get a few chores done at home, we went back up at the school to pick Amelia up.

"Will Bessian stil' be sad?" Felicia asked me as we were waiting for the bell to ring and the horde of kids to pour out with Amelia probably about the last person out of the classroom as usual.

"I don't know, sweetheart" I said. I hoped that at least he'd vented a bit with all those useful new words that Emily had been teaching the kids. I saw Debbie arrive and smiled at her and she smiled back at me, kind of weakly. I thought that would be the end of it, but she decided to come over.

"Oh, Sookie" she said. "How did this morning go?"

"Um. Good" I said. "I think it all went well." I wasn't about to dob Sebastian in to his mother and tell her he hadn't written anything.

Debbie looked thoughtful. "Your daughter's very protective, isn't she?" she asked me. "I guess she's had to be, with the upheavals in her life and a younger sister to look after." Debbie looked at Felicia, and then looked away. Possibly because Felicia was leaning over Sam's capsule demonstrating how to stick a finger up your nose for maximum effect.

"Um" I said, not sure how to respond to that. "Yeah, I guess she is."

Debbie nodded and then walked off to meet Sebastian as he came out.

Sure enough Amelia was almost the last person out of the room and she would have been the absolute last, had Chloe not gone back in because she forgot something.

"How was the rest of your day?" I asked her, as we started to walk out of the building and across the playground.

"S'alright" she said. "Maisie isn't talking to Emily because Emily called her stupid for having a My Little Pony lunchbox. I like the ponies though so I'm Maisie's friend. Don't think I'm Emily's friend. Chloe's Emily's friend, except that Chloe really wants to play with me and Maisie. Chloe's alright, but she's not that much fun. Oh, and Sebastian isn't sad anymore."

"He isn't?" I asked.

"Nah. He said those bad words to Connor and Mrs Garfield put him in the thinking corner. I think he thought about how not to be sad anymore, so that was good. What's for dinner?"

"Um, mince pie" I said.

Amelia sighed, "Again?" she asked.

"Yeah."

Felicia, who'd been feeling left out announced "I c'n play golf now!"

Amelia turned to her "No you can't."

"Yes I can!" Felicia argued.

"What's golf?" Amelia asked me, after a beat.

"A game, you hit a ball with a stick" I told her.

"Doesn't sound like fun" Amelia grumbled.

"Some people like it" I told her.

"Not me" she said. "It sounds like a _boy's_ game."

"Yeah" Felicia said happily, as we reached the car and got in to drive home.

**A/N Papatoetoe is commonly pronounced Pap-ah-toe-ee-toe-ee, or shortened to Pap-ah-toe-ee. It should more correctly be Pap-ah-toy-toy, though.**

**An inorganic is a collection of inorganic household rubbish, so it's your chance to get rid of all that stuff lying about. Happens about every second year.**

**Housing New Zealand is the government department that adminsters state houses (of which there aren't many now) and other housing schemes.**

**And Felicia would pronounce ask as arsk, so her 'ask-ole' is therefore closer to what Sookie says, than Eric.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	85. Chapter 85

**A/N Yes, I am still here. The forecast in Auckland at the moment is heavy rain, slight chance of storms and high probability of snotty-nosed children. And so, we roll into winter!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

It was a huge weight off my mind when we got the council's planning permission through for the renovations, especially as I'd already been out that morning and found out that Calvin had found that clearing the yard was a fucking shitty job and one of his labourers had fucked off as that wasn't what he was hired for.

Problem was that there was a lot of shit in that yard and at some point in time someone was going to have to clear it all out. And I fucking hoped it wasn't me.

But apparently Sookie had hired some relative of hers to come and work with Calvin, a college kid who needed a job over the summer. I hoped that would work out, although I had no idea who he was. Sookie assured me I'd met him, but I'd met a lot of people at Christmas and they'd all kind of blended into one big noisy mess of people after a while.

Well, apart from Wayne. I could remember him, mainly because it was so fucking noticeable when they all left and I no longer had him following me around and staring at me as if he hoped he could vaporize me with his mind.

So when I got home that night, having managed to not only find my way to another place with a ridiculous fucking name that no one could pronounce, but find my way home again, I was kind of in the mood to celebrate. Except that Sookie and I had had our night off the day before and there was no getting away from the kids tonight.

First to greet me was Felicia. "I played golf" she announced.

"Golf?" I asked.

"Yeah. S'game. You gotta hit de ball, wif de stick. It's a boy's game. Big boys. Like Hunta."

"OK."

"I got lots o'goals."

"Well that's good then."

"Yeah. I's good at it."

"OK, well high-five then." I held out my hand and she slapped it joyfully. I hoped I wasn't going to have to take her to any real golf courses soon, although…I did wonder how much money you made in women's golf. Possibly quite a bit. I wondered how Felicia felt about supporting her family, but she'd already run off down the hall so I couldn't ask her just at that moment.

I tried to get as far as the kitchen, which is where I figured Sookie was judging by the fact I could smell something that suggested dinner was in progress, but Amelia appeared in my path.

"Sebastian was sad today!" she announced.

"Oh. OK." I tried to remember Sebastian. I had a feeling he was the quiet kid with the fucking over-bearing mother.

"Yeah. Because Connor threw his bag away. I had to look after Sebastian until his Mum came, but he wouldn't let her take him home because he wanted to stay with us. Well, maybe not Connor. But Connor was in the thinking corner thinking about not being bad anyway. But I think he's stuck being bad. Emily had some names for what he _actually_ is, and they were quite good ones, but maybe not very nice words. But then Sebastian said them to Connor later on and then he had to go to the thinking corner. He forgot to be sad after that. He might be sad when his Mum finds out he was in the thinking corner. Mrs Garfield says that you have to go to the thinking corner when you forget to think in the first place, so you remember to think next time. I don't know if that's right though. I don't know how you'd forget to think. I'm always thinking. But anyway, Sebastian was happier after that."

"Oh, OK" I said again, but Amelia started talking over me before I'd completely finished. I was starting to wonder if she equated thinking with talking.

"He was much happier" she continued. "But Mrs Garfield had to give us a talk on bad words again. Because it was bad words that Emily told Sebastian he could say to Connor. But they're not bad if it makes you stop being sad is it?"

"Um…maybe if they make the other person feel sad they might be…" I was struggling to keep up with the flow of Amelia's speech and kind of worried I was supposed to be doing some kind of parental guidance moment here, but frankly, I pretty much sucked at that. It was much more Sookie's area of expertise than mine and at the moment I was faced with the fact that I didn't really care which of the kids in Amelia's class were sad or not as long of none of them were complaining to me about it.

Amelia thought about that for about 10 seconds and I wondered if I might finally make it out of the hallway. "No" she said in the end, just before I tried to move past her. "No I don't know if that's right."

"Um. Pretty sure it is. You can check with Mom though."

"Yeah, see you're not right about that. It's Mum. You get that wrong. A lot. Mum says you're not always right about stuff."

"Does she?" I wondered what Sookie had been telling the kids when I wasn't around.

"Yeah, because you weren't right about the assholes."

"Which assholes?"

"Oh…the bad words that Sebastian said to Connor. I asked Mum and you're wrong. That kind of makes sense because you're wrong about a lot of words really. You didn't know what yellow was the other day."

"What?" I was completely lost by the conversation now.

"You know, when I was singing the song about the colours and I couldn't remember what yellow was and Mum said it was no good asking you because you don't know it's kowhai. Like the tree by the back fence."

"Yeah…I didn't."

"So…well, Mum was right then, even though no one is right all the time. But maybe she's more right than you? That's right, isn't it?"

"No, I think we're about even" I tried telling Amelia, who seemed to have constructed some fucking bizarre competition between Sookie and I which required advanced knowledge of Maori terms and New Zealand swear-words. I couldn't help but feel that the contest seemed to be stacked in Sookie's favour.

"Mmm, maybe I'll go and tell Mum she was right."

"OK" I agreed, as Amelia took off down the hall yelling "Mum! MUM!"

I finally got as far as the bedroom so I could lose the suit but when I arrived in the kitchen after that, Sookie was nowhere to be found. Felicia was there though; she and Bob were eyeing each other up to see who was going to make a move first.

"Where's your Mum?" I asked Felicia, trying to make sure that I was actually using the right word.

"Sam did poos" Felicia said. "Ask'ole" she muttered, as Bob finally made a break for it and ran past her. I wasn't sure whether she was referring to Bob or Sam, but I was kind of glad her version sounded a lot more like Sookie's than mine and I couldn't be blamed for that one, because I'd never hear the fucking end of the fact she could say 'for fuck's sake' pretty damn clearly now.

Felicia turned to me. "Can I have a biskit?" she asked.

I knew the answer to this one at least. "No." I said. "It's far too close to dinner." The oven was on and I could see something in there so I was pretty confident we were all getting fed and no one needed to start rustling up snacks just yet.

"You suck" Felicia said.

"Yeah. Also, apparently, I am not always right and I'm not the best source around here for Maori words."

Felicia looked a bit blank at that. "'Frow me?" she asked.

"Yeah…maybe in a minute. I just want to see your mum first."

"She's wif Sam" Felicia sighed.

"No, I'm here now" Sookie's voice said, as she came into the kitchen and set about placing Sam back in his bouncer so he could watch what was going on. He didn't have a lot of choice about it, of course, but he seemed kind of content. Plus, if he hung out where Sookie was there was less chance of one of his sisters accidentally maiming him.

Or maybe not accidentally in Felicia's case.

"Frow me!" she demanded again.

"Hang on. Just…go outside and I'll be there in a minute and I can throw you properly."

"Promise?" Felicia asked.

"Yep, definitely" I said.

Sookie was bustling about doing whatever I assumed was required for dinner. "So, um, hello" I said to her.

"Yeah. Sorry. Hi." Sookie walked over and kissed me and then went back to cutting up some beans. "I take it you found Whangaparoa then?"

"Well, not me personally. The GPS found it. I just discovered that it's a fucking long away from here for still being part of Auckland. Seriously, couldn't you guys like draw a line or something and decide that's where the city ends?"

"Mmm. Seems awfully, um, well mean. Although I guess maybe we could get rid of some of West Auckland without too much loss."

"See, there you go. It wouldn't be that difficult. Instead I had to drive over the Harbour Bridge and out to the fucking end of the earth."

"I don't think it's exactly _that_ far, Eric" Sookie said, as she put the beans in a saucepan and started rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

"Sookie, everywhere here is practically the end of the world."

She sighed. "You're so Northern Hemisphere-ist sometimes." And then she changed the subject before I could respond. "Was Amelia telling you what happened at school today?"

"Yeah…although I'm a bit lost. From what I can gather there was some sadness, a fair amount of thinking and I'm not always right about stuff."

Sookie looked at me. "That about sums it up. I just feel really sorry for Sebastian. I worry what's going to happen to him next year."

"Um…we're not responsible for him, are we?" I asked her.

"Well, no. But I feel bad for him all the same…" I held up a hand to cut her off.

"I don't think you have to worry. I think that maybe his mother has to worry, but not you."

"Yes, but his mother's Debbie and I don't think she's exactly equipping him for life's challenges" Sookie said.

"Well…" I said, finally figuring out who Sebastian was and trying to think of a way I could stop Sookie going any further before she announced she actually wanted to adopt Sebastian or something. "At least he has Amelia."

"Um…she told him that it was OK because no one died, I'm not sure she's as comforting as she thinks she is" Sookie said.

"Oh, well she's right, I guess. No one did die, did they?" Sookie shook her head. "So I'm pretty sure he can cope. Anyway, we're meant to be celebrating, not worrying about random children who may or may not benefit from Amelia's attentions."

"Yeah. True. I guess we are" Sookie agreed.

"So, are we having a celebratory dinner?" I asked, peering at the oven and wondering what was in there. I was kind of hoping for something roasted. With Yorkshire puddings.

"Oh…well, consider this a celebratory mince pie" Sookie said, closing the dishwasher door and pointing to the oven.

"Did you just rebrand ordinary mince pie so it sounds more exciting, Sookie?"

She shrugged. "I don't know, you're the management consultant, you tell me."

"Well, you know" I said, moving closer so I could put my arms around her. "I could help you with your marketing strategy if you like. For a small fee." I bent down to kiss her.

Sookie pulled back. "Phft" she said. "I've seen what you charge, there's no way I'm paying your exorbitant rates."

"I might negotiate" I offered.

"I might withhold your portion of the celebratory mince pie" Sookie countered.

"OK. Celebratory mince pie it is then." I bent down and kissed Sookie again.

I didn't hear Amelia arrive in the kitchen until she said "Are you having another baby then?"

"What?" Sookie asked, stepping away from me like we'd been caught by her parents or something.

"Another baby" Amelia said slowly. "You know. Do you want to do another magic cuddle and have another baby? I mean, I don't mind, but Sam's very little. And Felicia's very sad because she's outside all alone and no one's throwing her."

Fuck, I'd forgotten Felicia.

"No!" Sookie said to Amelia. "I'm not having another baby. Not soon, anyway." She caught my eyes briefly and then looked away. And I'd heard it. It was the same as the night before. She was starting to come around to the idea of another kid, which was fucking exciting really. But I didn't want to push this one, because, fuck knows, that had never worked for me before.

And I really got that she was maybe scared because of what happened with Sam when she was pregnant, and the worry that he wouldn't be OK. And I completely understood the overwhelming tiredness that a newborn brought with it, because I'd fucking felt it now. And I hadn't even given birth to Sam or been feeding him at all for those first few weeks, so my tiredness was probably nothing compared to hers. So I understood, I really fucking understood.

But maybe, maybe when Sam was a bit older like Felicia is now. Maybe we could try again.

Maybe we could actually try, period. Because there hadn't been a fucking lot of actual trying last time.

"DADDY!" Felicia wailed from the deck. "FROW ME!"

"Yeah, I better deal with that" I said to Sookie.

I walked past Amelia. "And me" she said. "Throw me, too. So it's fair!"

"Yeah" I said. "Come on then."

I didn't really have much more time alone with Sookie until much later in the evening. Our celebratory mince pie was nice, but dinner was noisy and Amelia seemed pretty determined to talk over everyone and give us another rundown on the events of her day. In the new, improved version of the story it appeared that Sebastian had been thoroughly grateful for her assistance and was almost certainly one of her friends now.

I secretly suspected that Amelia's attentions might be doing more to put Sebastian off girls forever than anything else.

And then while Sookie got the girls bathed and read stories, I got to hang out with Sam, who'd kind of missed out on the whole being thrown in the air thing earlier. So to make up for it I lifted him up in the air a couple of times before I gave him a bottle. Not too far, and I didn't drop him, so I was pretty sure it was OK. Sam looked a bit confused the first time it happened, but soon seemed to enjoy it.

Well he didn't cry or spit up on me, so I'd take that as signs of enjoyment for now.

He was definitely getting better at drinking from the bottle though, although we'd learnt that if he caught sight of Sookie, and sometimes even if he just heard her voice, he'd lose all interest in it and look at her pleadingly until she caved and fed him herself.

It was hard not to be kind of impressed with him when that happened, because I had only about a 50/50 chance of that look ever working for me, but Sam seemed to have an amazing strike rate with it from day one.

Sookie arrived in the living room just as we were finishing up. "It's OK" she said. "Pearlie saved the day, again."

"Who?"

"Pearlie. The fairy. In Amelia's books. It's what I read tonight."

"Oh. OK then. That makes more sense. I thought we were back to the kids in Amelia's fucking class again."

"Yeah, I don't think there are any kids called Pearlie around, Eric" she said, dismissively. I turned Sam around so he could see Sookie better, and he looked pretty happy at that.

I shrugged. "What's that kid Felicia plays with sometimes?"

Sookie thought for a bit. "Havana" she said in the end.

"Yeah. See? There are tons of kids with fucking stupid names around."

"Mmm, not like Sam, eh?" Sookie said, leaning over to tickle Sam's tummy.

"No, not like Sam at all."

"And you would know" Sookie added.

"I would" I agreed.

Later on, when it appeared that Sam was going to sleep, at least for a few hours anyway, we could finally be completely alone. As Sookie got into bed she turned to me and said "I didn't say before, but it's kind of exciting, isn't it?"

"What?" I asked, putting my phone on the nightstand, and turning to look at Sookie. "Being here in bed with me?"

Sookie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah. That as well. The house though, that's exciting. Now that we actually know we can rip our very expensive purchase to bits."

"Well, most of the value is in the land" I said, as Sookie lent over towards me and I put my arm around her.

"So…we're not letting Jason come and put the tent up on the front lawn anymore?"

"No. No more fucking tents."

"He'll have to stay inside the house then" Sookie said.

"Well…I'm sure there's a motel around here somewhere. He'll be fine."

Sookie laughed, which was probably a good reaction on her part, but really I was only half-joking. I was pretty sure I was going to like my new house, fuck knows I'd be spending enough time and money on getting the damn thing right, so I was also pretty sure that I didn't need Jason standing around in it drinking endless fucking cups of tea and forgetting to take his horrific-smelling boots off.

"I'm looking forward to the nice bits" Sookie said. "When we get to pick the wallpaper and stuff. And maybe some new furniture. Although…I guess most of the stuff we have is OK. And we're kind of on a budget."

"Yeah…we could probably get a few things" I said. "Like…a bigger bed."

Sookie kind of swished her legs around under the covers. "There's heaps of room in this bed" she said. "Even with you in it."

"I'm not the problem, Sookie. It's the kids. And Bob. You get all of them in and it's a bit fucking crowded."

Sookie sat up straighter and looked around at the bed. "Well…I guess maybe" she said in the end. "Will that mean you're not going to sleep on top of me at night then?"

"I probably still will, but I'd rather not fucking sleep on Sam if I can help it." The morning I'd woken up and discovered Sookie had brought him into bed to feed had been a bit of a shock. I'd been fucking terrified, in hindsight, that I might have rolled over onto him. Sookie didn't seem anywhere near as worried as I was, but then she was less likely to squash the poor kid fucking flat.

"Yeah, I think you'll be OK" Sookie said, proving my point that she was a bit fucking blasé about it all.

"It'll be better for movie night" I said. "At the moment I'm not sure where Sam'll fit."

"I guess" Sookie said slowly. "It'll be nice to pick some stuff together. We haven't really done that."

"No, we haven't" I agreed. I pulled Sookie a bit closer and I tilted her face up so I could kiss her. "In the meantime" I said "we should probably get your money's worth out of this bed."

"Yeah…I'm not sure that's how it works, Eric" Sookie said.

I shrugged. "Well, if we wear it out then you won't feel so bad about dumping it."

"I guess so" Sookie said. "Although…you might have to be quick if you want to have any sleep before Sam wakes up again."

"Well, I'm awesome at being quick" I said, as my hand moved down to cup Sookie's breast. She still insisted on wearing a nursing bra to bed, but at least she was prepared to take it off for me. Well I hoped she was.

Maybe she'd just let me take it off for her.

It was nice being with Sookie again, fucking Sookie again, and it was almost like it used to be. There was the awkward bit where Sookie would bring out some lube, and then there'd be the point where she'd go "Eric! Eric! Don't forget a condom!" as if she thought I'd try to forget on purpose.

I may have wanted to have another kid someday, but I wasn't that fucking stupid.

But Sookie was back. My Sookie, the one who actually wanted to have sex and who made the best fucking noises when I touched her the right way. And I didn't even mind the slightly leaky boobs when she came.

It was kind of hot, in a way, watching her let go so completely. And knowing that she was letting go with me.

Afterwards we lay in bed in the dark. "I should go to sleep while I can" Sookie said.

"Mmm" I agreed. I was certainly feeling fucking sleepy now. And now that I didn't have to worry about the planning permission I was looking forward to a decent night's sleep. Well, I guessed it depended on what Sam had planned, but I'd been trying to explain to him the joys of sleeping while it's dark.

One day perhaps he'd believe me.

"But now I'm thinking about buying furniture. Maybe we could get a new lounge suite?"

"Maybe" I mumbled into Sookie's hair.

"I guess it depends on how much money is left over after the renovations."

"Mmm."

"That's a very sleepy 'mmm'."

"Mmm."

"OK, I'll let you go to sleep then. Maybe when Sam wakes up I can talk to him about the furniture."

"OK. 'Night Sookie."

"Yeah, goodnight."

Next morning I'd agreed that I'd meet Sookie and Calvin at the new house mid-morning so Sookie could introduce us all to her second cousin, or whatever he was. The kid she'd hired.

When I arrived there didn't seem to be a lot of work going on and when I found everyone I figured out why. "I brought muffins" Sookie said, from her seat in one of the kitchens. "Help yourself." She had Sam balanced on her lap and he was staring longingly at the food. Calvin had a mug in one hand and a muffin in the other, and the other guy, Dixon, was doing the same.

Fuck, I didn't think feeding them was such a great idea. We were paying them for a start. Paying them to work, not to stand around eating food that Sookie had made for them.

I grabbed a muffin and asked Calvin how it was going. "Good" he said. "Yeah, we've started taking out some of the windows at the back. So I moved the table. It looks good though."

"Table?" Sookie asked. "What table?"

Fuck. She didn't know about that yet. She looked at me. "Did you buy a table?" she asked sharply. Sam looked at her as best he could, obviously worried at the change in his mother's tone of voice.

"Um…" I said. "Well, yeah…"

Sookie sighed. "Well, show me then" she said, standing up.

Calvin led us to where the table was and then beat a hasty retreat. Probably because he wanted to grab some more of the muffins while I wasn't around.

There was an old sheet covering the table and I pulled it off so Sookie could see. I thought it looked great.

"It's enormous" Sookie said, looking from the table, to me, and then back again.

"It's not that big. It'll fit in the kitchen, so we can eat in there as well as in the dining room. I thought it might be…well, you know. Homely." I looked at Sookie and waited to see what her reaction would be.

She walked around the table and ran a hand over it. "I like the wood" she said in the end. "What is it?"

"Oh. Um. Oak. American Oak." Sookie looked up when I said that.

"Couldn't find a nice piece of rimu, huh?"

"Yeah…I think this'll do."

Sookie looked at it a bit longer. Sam gave up looking at it and looked at me. "Where'd you find an American oak table around here?" she asked.

"Oh. That furniture store up on Mt Eden Road. I had a look in there a few weeks back on the way back from the park. They'd discounted this one as it was the last one they had and they wanted to get it out of the store."

"So it was on sale?" Sookie asked, raising her eyebrows.

"It was discounted. And I may have negotiated a further discount."

Sookie sighed. "Well it's nice, but I kind of wanted to buy furniture together." She thought for a moment. "You haven't already bought a bed for us, have you?"

"Nope" I said truthfully. "But I have plans for that. I think we'll replace Felicia's one at the same time, and see if we can get a good price."

"Yeah, I don't know how she copes with all the lumps" Sookie said.

"It's pretty fucking lumpy" I agreed. And I would know, having slept there myself, back in the days when I was banished to the spare room. Or Sam's room, as it was now.

Sookie shrugged. "Well, I guess it's OK. But don't buy anything else without me, OK?"

I nodded, wondering how she'd feel about the couches I ordered for the family room. Fuck, maybe they'd have to come from Santa.

She came around to stand beside me again. "It is an awfully big table, though" she said. And then her head swivelled around to look at me. "You didn't buy this to have sex on, did you?"

"No." But the thought had crossed my mind.

"I've met you before" Sookie said, "and if you don't buy it specifically for sex, like the ottoman, then it'll be like the freezer and you'll want to have sex on it as soon…" She didn't finish because someone cleared their throat behind us.

"Uh, Sookie?" said the voice. I turned around and there was a young kid standing there, blushing. I looked at Sookie and she was blushing almost as badly. It was hard to tell who was more embarrassed.

Well, I wasn't fucking embarrassed. "You must be Hunter" I said, extending my hand.

"Yeah, uh. We've met" Hunter said, shaking my hand and trying to make eye contact with me and avoid making it with Sookie.

"Sure" I said. "Christmas, yeah?"

"Uh-huh" Hunter said, staring at the floor.

Sookie had obviously recovered by now and gave Hunter a bright smile. "Hey, thanks for turning up Hunt" she said. "So I'll take you around to see Calvin and he can go over what's happening."

"OK" Hunter said, turning to follow Sookie. "It's a pretty cool place" he said.

"Yeah" Sookie agreed as they left the room. "But of course pretty soon it won't be two separate flats. Unless Eric really pisses me off…" I didn't catch what else she said. I turned around and recovered the table. I really liked that table. And I kind of had big plans for it.

When I got back to the kitchen most of the muffins were gone and so were Calvin, Hunter and Dixon. "Calvin's putting Hunter to work in the other kitchen" she said. "So I think they'll be good. I might head home so Sam can have lunch and a nap." Sam looked pretty pleased at that thought.

"OK" I said. "I'll see you tonight" I bent over to kiss her.

"And as for you" she said to me. "You owe me. Big-time."

"Yeah?" I said, dropping my voice. "What do I owe you?"

"Many, many, many hours of furniture shopping."

"Great" I said. "That sounds…great." It sounded fucking miserable, but I guessed it was fair. Maybe.

"And if you're very, very good…" Sookie said, and then stopped.

"Then what?" I asked.

"Then…I might let you keep that table." With that she walked out. Yeah, she'd thought about it too now, about having sex on that table.

It was only a matter of time.

**A/N Kowhai is the Maori word for yellow and also the name of a tree with yellow blossoms. It's pronounced Co-fye.**

**The Pearlie books are by Wendy Harmer. They're Australian and we like them because it's nice to actually read a story where Christmas is in summer with thunderstorms, not snowstorms. You know, like normal.**

**Rimu is one of our native timbers. It's pronounced Ree-moo.**

**But of course I don't speak Maori, so I'm only giving you my best approximations.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	86. Chapter 86

**A/N During my exciting weekend spent peeling mandarins, cleaning up playdough and explaining why the cat does not need a sunhat, I got a few emails through with reviews to some of my older stories, from some readers who'd had them recommended to them. So a big thank-you to those of you who are not only reading this, but also bothering to recommend my stuff to other people. It means a lot to me.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Christmas was a pretty busy time anyway, but when you added a new baby and house renovations into the mix, it got kind of stupidly busy. I tried desperately to remember how I ever managed to fit work in.

A lot of our time seemed to be taken up with making decisions on the house. Stupidly I had assumed that because we had the plans I couldn't understand everything was pretty much sorted, bar, say, the colour of the walls.

Although I had ideas about the colour of the walls.

But no, apparently there were lots of decisions about every aspect of the house that needed to be made. And sometimes you just didn't care. Eric and I spent most of one Sunday morning staring at a selection of recessed lights that were carefully spread out on the floor of one of the rooms of the house, before realising that both of us were waiting for the other to make the decision because really, lights are lights.

And it wasn't just the little things either. Calvin pulling off walls had revealed a few nasty surprises hidden away which needed dealing to. There was some rot, and a fair amount of warping which made it difficult to line things up, apparently. I guess that's what you get with a 100 year old wooden house, but still, we could have done without that.

To top it all off though, you then got the things which wouldn't work quite as the plan had suggested. Like the skylight in the ensuite. Because it wasn't going to have any external windows, we were putting a skylight in. Except it was hard to fit in a house with such a big space in the ceiling. After a lot of discussion though between Calvin, Eric and the architect Terry, they managed to figure it all out. It was actually Hunter who figured out the best way to fit it. It was nice to know he wasn't wasting his time with his classes at university of course, and I'm sure he was going to be pleased to be able to say he did something in this job which didn't involve ripping out old kitchen fittings or buying pies for lunch.

Calvin and Eric were pretty happy that they were out of the discussions on that one too. Calvin because he had enough on his plate and Eric because, I think, he was worried someone was going to make him go into the roof space where Calvin reported that Dixon had seen some pretty big rats.

Eric decided at that point that his skills were much better utilised organising some proper exterminators to come and put traps in. Well, that was after I said he couldn't put Bob up there for a week and not feed him. I wasn't particularly swayed by his argument that if Bob got hungry enough he'd just eat the rats.

Terry was, I think, kind of impressed by Hunter, but also slightly embarrassed that it was the architecture student, who was mostly in charge of buying pies, after all, who had come up with the final solution. But I think he was prepared to let it slide due to the sheer amount of hero-worship Hunter was lavishing on him any time he was around. I suspected that Hunter was angling for some possible work-experience with Terry, if not an actual job next summer. Preferably one that involved fewer pies.

I was just happy that I was still getting a skylight and no one was going to steal my cat and lock him away in a roof space. It probably wasn't a coincidence that after Eric and I had the conversation about Bob's possible future as a hired assassin, I managed to drop a piece of fish that I'd just cooked onto the kitchen floor, near where Bob happened to be sitting.

So for the most part the house was under control. It was everything else that was driving me a bit mad. We had the usual functions to attend, the daycare Christmas party, where Amelia loudly derided how small and unimportant the whole place was now, but still queued up for the face-painting that was on offer. Poor Sam looked a bit taken aback when he had to go home accompanied by a large flower and a slightly smaller Spiderman. I was pretty sure Felicia had opted to be Spiderman because that's what most of the boys at pre-school had requested, and she seemed happy with the outcome, despite Amelia's sighing and tutting and Sam's wide-eyed stares of horror.

But Amelia putting up with the party seemed only fair given that we all had to go to another one of Amelia's dance recitals to watch her perform a rather energetic dance routine to an Abba song. She looked happy to be on stage despite the fact Felicia got a bit grumpy and bored and Sam just fell asleep in the capsule. Possibly because he only had a view of my feet, although it could be that dance recitals just weren't his thing.

This year, though, we also had to sit through a special end of year assembly performance at Amelia's school. Her class were acting out a version of the _Kiwi Night Before Christmas_ while a class of older kids took turns reading the story out. Amelia got to be the Mum and we'd had to rustle her up some hair-curlers as part of the costume. Luckily she'd been happy to wear her own Tinkerbell nightie with them. Sebastian was playing the dad and I felt a bit sorry for him when I was back-stage before the performance.

"You don't look right" Amelia said to him. "Are you sure that t-shirt's alright to wear?" She waited for Sebastian to answer, but he just shrugged, and maybe stepped closer to Debbie. Poor Amelia, if she was making Debbie seem comforting there was no hope for her.

"I think the t-shirt is fine for Sebby" Debbie chimed in. "It's a lovely t-shirt."

Amelia frowned at her. "He doesn't look like a _dad_" she explained. "There's no holes or _anything_!"

Debbie gave me a look which I'm sure signified she wasn't at all surprised that I couldn't keep my family out of rags, and then her eyes slid to Sam, who, thankfully, wasn't wearing some of the baby clothes we owned which did have holes. He was wearing a bodysuit which had come back from the States with Eric which read '50% Mom, 50% Dad'. I was never getting away from that mom thing.

"I think he'll be fine Amelia" I tried. Amelia huffed, but relented. Felicia, who'd been standing there silently, pointed at Sebastian's shirt and said "I's like t'reindeer."

"They eat tomatoes" Amelia said knowledgeably.

"No they don't" Emily piped up, not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to argue with Amelia. And given that she had the less-coveted role of possum, she was spoiling for a fight.

"Yes they do!" Amelia said. Poor kid, the day she figured out Eric just made this stuff up she was going to be devastated.

But we had bigger problems than Sebastian's t-shirt or what reindeer ate. We had a rogue kakapo who wouldn't sit down, shut up, or do what he was told. At least I think that's what Connor was meant to be, he had a beak, a green t-shirt and some wings so kakapo was really my best guess. Pain in the bum was my current feeling though. There were a lot of kids backstage and Connor running around whooping it up wasn't really conducive to keeping everyone under control.

"Connor, that's really not appropriate" Debbie tried, when he first ran past us, whooping.

"Oi!" I tried, on his second pass through. "Sit down before you knock someone over." I immediately regretted that because I could see in his face I'd just given him a way to knock someone down and claim it was an accident. Crap.

At that moment Eric arrived backstage, as I'd texted him and asked he collect Felicia and Sam from me when he got here. Connor just about ran straight into him as he strode over to us. The pair of them stopped and looked at each other.

Eric pointed a finger at Connor. "Are you being good?" he asked him.

"Yeah!" Connor said, with a fair amount of bravado.

"Really?" Eric asked.

Connor shrugged, and looked at the ground. "Go and sit down where you're supposed to before I report you" Eric said, and he did. I was fascinated. I didn't think my threatening to report him to Mrs Garfield or even the principal would have had the same effect at all.

Sometimes I think it helps to be tall.

The performance was good, even if Amelia did try to invent some lines for herself when really she was just meant to be background action to the kids reading the poem. Mostly she just dragged poor Sebastian around by the hand a lot.

Eric was a bit confused by it all. I think he'd missed the bit where it said it was the Kiwi Night Before Christmas, and he'd had visions of sugar-plum fairies. "Why is Santa wearing flip-flops?" he whispered to me.

"He's wearing jandals, because he's delivering presents to a bach. What else would he wear?" I hissed back. I think that just confused Eric more. He still applauded it at the end though. And it was a pretty good show, overall. Despite the fact Chloe the sheep cried for most of it.

When Amelia appeared after it was all over she was waving an envelope at us. "I got a card!" she yelled.

"Oh" I said, while realising that getting cards for Amelia to hand out hadn't been on my to-do list. Bugger. I was going to have to organise that in the week before school finished.

"Yeah" Amelia continued. "It's from Sebastian. He likes me." She smiled broadly at that. Felicia looked a little annoyed.

"I'm sure he does" I said to her. "But, um, did he give cards to everyone?" Now that I thought about it, I could remember a pile of envelopes in Debbie's handbag. No doubt she'd organised it all for him.

"Well, yeah!" Amelia said. "But he gave me one, so he definitely likes me. I don't think he gave Connor one…maybe he did, but he likes me!"

"He likes me too!" Felicia interjected.

Amelia turned to look at her. "You're just little. You don't get cards" she said. "I do because I'm in Sebastian's _class_."

"But…I like Bessian!" Felicia wailed, turning to Eric.

"Well…how about we get a card and you can give it to him next week?" Eric said to her.

"But he no gived me one" she said, sadly. "Maybe he no likes me?"

"I'm sure he does" Eric said, as firmly as he could. Felicia looked a bit down, and obviously decided to pass on her feelings to Sam. "Sam's stinky" she said. "He's done poos!"

"No he hasn't" I said. Well, if he had, we could worry about it at home.

"Poopy-baby!" she yelled into her brother's capsule. Sam rewarded her with a nice tooth-less smile, which I think just infuriated her more.

Debbie bustled over, holding Sebastian's hand. "Well, I'm glad that's over" she said to me, kind of as though we were friends.

"Yeah" I agreed. "For this year, anyway."

"So I'll see you tomorrow?" Debbie continued. "At brunch?"

Oh, crap. I'd forgotten Debbie had organised a big get-together with the other mums from the class. I hadn't found a way to avoid it, especially since she'd arranged it for a Saturday, so, in theory I had Eric around to wrangle the kids for me. Although he was intending to go to the house after Felicia's soccer as Calvin said he'd be there, clearing away some of the debris. I assumed that Eric was going in a purely supervisory capacity, but I still wasn't sure about taking three kids with him. Although maybe the older two could amuse themselves.

"Yeah, I'll have my helper with me though" I said, gesturing to Sam.

"Oh, well _of course_ you will, Sookie" Debbie said, like she was encouraging me not to leave my baby on the side of the road. Honestly, I wonder how she thought Amelia and Felicia had survived so long with me in charge of them.

"Thank-you for your help with Connor" she said, turning to Eric. "He's a terrible handful. Even Mrs Garfield struggles with him, I believe." She smiled warmly at Eric. Aha, I thought. That's how she thought they survived. Because Eric's actually in charge and his super-parenting abilities obviously countered my hopeless meandering through life. I sighed. I wasn't going to win this one.

Eric shrugged. "No problem" he said, and then, over Debbie's head he spied Connor trying to trip Chloe up at the same time I did. Connor looked up though and caught Eric's eyes, and Eric pointed from his own eyes over to Connor. Connor gave up and walked away.

OK, maybe there were a few super-abilities lurking around there. But I still maintained being tall helped.

"Well, good work, Eric" Debbie said. "And see you at 10am tomorrow, Sookie. 10am _sharp_" Debbie said, and then she turned and started to pull Sebastian away with her. "Hang on Mum" he muttered, and he pulled a small, crumpled piece of paper out of the pocket of his shorts and handed it to Felicia, before he let Debbie pull him away.

Felicia looked at it excitedly. "Is a card" she said.

"No it's not" Amelia said, peering over her shoulder. "It's just paper. He gave me a proper card, like you buy at the shops."

"There's a tiger!" Felicia said, pointing to the picture Sebastian had drawn on it. "And…Spida-man! "

"That's not Christmassy" Amelia retorted. "Look! Mine's got a reindeer on it. A reindeer with a tomato on her nose. See?" she pushed her card in front of Felicia.

"Mine's better" Felicia said. "Bessian likes me."

"I think that's meant to be Rudolph, Ames" Eric said, pointing to her card.

"Well…no" Amelia said, sounding pretty adamant. "I think it's a girl reindeer. The card's sparkly…so it must be a girl." That seemed to be the matter closed for her. I guessed Eric's super-abilities only went so far after all.

"Bessian likes me" Felicia said to me, ignoring Amelia. "But he no like Sam. Sam's a baby. And he makes poos. In his nappy."

"At least they stay in his nappy" Eric muttered.

"Mostly" I agreed, because sometimes they didn't, and he'd got Eric again recently with that. I was even starting to think that maybe he was doing it on purpose because so far, I'd been remarkably poo-free.

"Yeah" Eric agreed, as we started to walk to where the cars were parked. "Mostly."

So the next morning I found myself sitting at one of the cafes in the Mt Eden village utterly bored out of my brain. Most of the other mums I didn't mind, and I quite liked Maisie's mum, Becs, but she wasn't here as they'd gone away for Christmas early and Maisie was missing the last week of school.

So instead I was stuck sitting between Tanya and Debbie in a special kind of hell. Debbie droned on and on about how difficult it was planning a Christmas function for her husband's clients because she had so much to do during the day normally. I sat there and idly wondered whether it was the facials or the manicures that she was doing without.

Tanya told us all how sad her Christmas was going to be as she wasn't going to have Emily for the day, as she was going to her dad's. Then in the next sentence she explained how she'd been invited to some party on Christmas Eve and was going to enjoy the freedom to get black-out drunk and pick up random men.

Yeah, it was hard to know where to look during that story.

And then Chloe's mum, or one of Chloe's mums anyway, started up about her new business. Danielle was setting up a business to make t-shirts with interesting slogans about saving the planet from organic fair-trade cotton. She wanted her opinion on her price-point. Would we buy t-shirts for $100 each?

"Yes" Debbie said emphatically. "Well, you pay for quality, don't you?"

"Can we get a discount?" Tanya asked Danielle. I just stayed quiet and calculated how many t-shirts I could buy from Farmers for that amount of money.

Finally, the brunch was over and Sam and I could go. I couldn't help but think that Sam was a lot more popular at these gatherings than I was. When I'd got him out of his capsule to sit on my lap he'd managed to get a huge amount of attention and quite a few smiles and coos. Needless to say he lapped it all up and tested out his new ability to smile on his captive audience.

As we were leaving Debbie came over to me. "Where are you parked, Sookie? I have some things for you."

"Oh" I said, wondering what on earth Debbie could want to give me. Maybe it was my roster for mother-help for the next year. We'd recently been given the class assignments for when the kids returned after the summer holidays and it appeared the group of kids at Amelia's table were all going on to the same class, so Amelia would have Sebastian to look after for another year, and I guessed I'd have Debbie to look after me. Lucky old me.

"Um, over there" I said, pointing to where my car was parked outside the cake shop.

"OK" Debbie said. "I'll come over there in a moment" and then she turned on her heel and walked off.

I wandered back to my car, still none the wiser, and when I'd finished strapping Sam's capsule in Debbie arrived clutching a large black rubbish-sack. "These are for you" she said, holding it out to me. "It's some of Sebastian's old things he's grown out of. I thought you might have a use for them." She smiled over at Sam and to his credit, he smiled right back.

It was tempting to tell Debbie where she could shove her hand-me-downs because I knew she had a pretty low opinion of me and my abilities where my family were concerned, but the part of me that had been raised by Corbett Stackhouse went 'yay! Free stuff!' so I just smiled broadly, said "Thanks, Debbie. That's really thoughtful" and threw the sack of clothes in the car.

"Well, I thought you could use them" Debbie said, looking pretty pleased with herself. "After all, it's not easy buying into the Grammar zone around here."

"No, it's not. Well, bye Debbie. Have a good Christmas if I don't see you again beforehand."

"You too Sookie" Debbie said, and then she gave me air-kisses on both cheeks before she turned heel and stalked off. She was an odd woman.

EPOV

The house was finally starting to take shape, which was a fucking relief. Although at the moment the shape it was in was pretty shambolic. Every time I turned up there it felt like something else had been ripped out, knocked down or opened up. And sometimes you just didn't want to know what was lurking in those walls. As it was we'd had to deal with damp and fucking rats in the roof. Sookie had said cheerfully that possums would have been worse, but I wasn't sure. Rats were fucking bad enough. And apparently we weren't even allowed to use Bob to get rid of them.

But the work was taking place slowly but surely, although the number of decisions required to get anything done was kind of mind-boggling. I'd recently had a final meeting with the people who were putting the kitchen in and I couldn't tell you half of the things I'd agreed to. I'd run the cabinet finishes and the door handles on the cabinets past Sookie, but both of us kind of struggled with finding it all suitably important. They were door handles, after all.

If they were really fucking crummy, Calvin could change them for us later.

But it often felt like I spent every waking moment I wasn't working at the house, just making sure it was all OK. Technically Calvin was the project manager, but it was my house, and I wanted it to be right. And although my definition of it all being right might have stopped at the cabinets having door handles, rather than having the absolute fucking best door handles out of every door handle available, I still fucking cared. And I wanted to be here.

However, Amelia and Felicia didn't want to be here. They found it boring. After the initial excitement of watching Uncle Calvin knock things over and hammer things in, it had all got pretty routine for them. And they weren't above fucking whining about being here.

"Is borin'" Felicia said, as Calvin and I tried to discuss what the hallway was going to look like after it had been re-shaped.

"Well…maybe you guys could go outside?" I suggested. The backyard was pretty big, just a bit over-grown. And full of crap that needed clearing out. They'd probably love it.

"Mum says we can't" Amelia said, pulling out her notebook and her pens. "Mum says it's dangerous down there."

"Oh" I said. "Well, just find something to do in here then."

Felicia wandered over to Calvin. "You's hammerin' Uncle Cal?" she asked.

"Um, not at the moment, Leesha. Maybe later on, OK?"

Felicia shrugged and shuffled back over to where Amelia was sitting on the floor. "I's wanna draw too" she said, sitting next to Amelia.

Amelia sighed and ripped one page out of her notebook. "You can have _this _piece of paper" she said to Felicia. "And this pen." She handed over one of the pens.

"I's have brown?" Felicia asked.

"Yeah, you like brown" Amelia said, turning back to her own work.

I figured they were occupied for the near future and I followed Calvin as he walked around the house showing me what they'd done and what they had to do in the following week. I asked him how Sookie's cousin, or whatever he was, Hunter was working out, and Calvin said that he was going OK and seemed pretty keen, and was enjoying the money because he was going away with his girlfriend to somewhere called Fonga-mah-tar over New Year's and he needed the spending money.

I was kind of glad he was working out so well. I wasn't sure what the policy was on me firing Sookie's family members. But the kid didn't seem to mind getting his hands dirty, and he'd saved Terry's ass when he'd figured out how the skylight could be fitted into the ensuite, so we'd keep him around for now.

When I'd finished with Calvin I went to find out what the girls were doing. Amelia was still sitting where she had been, in a room which, I realised now, was fucking hot and stuffy. The poor kids should probably have been outside on a day like today.

"Where's Leesh?" I asked her, and she looked up from her artwork.

"What?" she asked me.

"Where's Felicia?" I tried again.

Amelia looked around, and then shrugged. "Dunno" she said.

I walked out of the room and found Calvin. "Have you seen Felicia?" I asked him.

"Nope" he said. "She hasn't been here since you left."

"Fuck."

"She won't have gone far" Calvin said. "Try the back garden."

I walked out the back door and into the wilderness that was the backyard. Fuck, if Felicia was out here we'd never find her. "Leesh!" I tried calling. "Leesh!"

There was no answer, but then she might just be busy. I hunted around and looked under all the bushes I could see, moved some of the trash around and hoped like fuck there were no open holes in the ground. Or drains. Or any fucking thing that Felicia might have fallen into.

But I couldn't find anything like that. And I couldn't find Felicia either. I walked back into the house just as Calvin was coming out the door. I hoped that meant he'd found her.

"Not out there?" he asked. I shook my head. I guess he hadn't seen her then.

Calvin put his hands on hips and looked around. "I'll check the ceiling" he said. "I can't remember if the ladder's still up there or not."

Fuck I hoped Felicia wasn't up there with the rat commune, or the rat traps. But…at least then we'd know where she was. I followed Calvin and we found the ladder lying on its side in one of the bedrooms.

"OK, so it's not the roof then" Calvin said, looking kind of stumped. "Would she have gone out the front?" He looked at me and I thought about it.

"Probably" I said. At home she couldn't work the front door and if it was open we had a wall and a gate. Here there wasn't a wall; it was just a pile of old stones that used to be a wall. And that was pretty fucking useless.

As I headed towards the open front door Amelia came out of the room she was in. "Is Felicia back yet?" she asked.

"No" I said. "Do you know where she went?"

Amelia shrugged. "She was bored. She wanted a purple pen, but I had the purple. She likes brown though."

"Uh-huh. She didn't say anything else though?"

"No. Did she run off?" Amelia asked.

I sighed. "I think so. I can't find her."

"That's naughty. Like Nemo. He ran off."

"Well, he swam off" I said, but Amelia just looked at me like I was being an idiot.

"Yeah, I said that. Swam off. He was naughty." She gave me her most disapproving face.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"When's lunch?" Amelia asked.

"What?" I said, confused by the change in subject.

"I'm hungry. Can we get fish and chips?" OK, maybe not a change in subject then.

"No" I said. "I have to find Felicia."

"She says you're good at finding. Are you?" Amelia asked.

"I hope so, Amelia. I'll be back shortly; you just stay here and don't wander off, OK?"

Amelia sighed. "I don't wander off, Felicia does that. I'm a good girl" and then she turned around and walked back to where she'd left her artwork.

I walked out the front door and down the steps. "Leesh!" I called. "Leesha!" I looked around and tried to figure out where she would go. She was bored and she was possibly hungry, but there wasn't a convenient café replete with toybox around here. It was just houses, and anyone could be in any of those fucking houses.

Fuck, this wasn't good. And it was about to get fucking worse, as I saw Sookie pull up and park outside the house. She got out and walked around to where I was standing. "What's happening?" she asked.

"Um…I lost Felicia" I confessed, as I watched all the colour drain from Sookie's face.

**So for anyone who's kind of confused about the pie thing, and the fact that all of our pies tend to be savoury ones, I found this article which talks about a NZ bakery which opened in Brooklyn.  
****www (dot) nzherald (dot) co (dot) ?c_id=6&objectid=10716170**

**And you can also look at their website - www (dot) dubpies (dot) com**

**The Kiwi Night Before Christmas is a real adaptation written by Yvonne Morrison. For an excerpt check out  
****www (dot) kidsfriendlynz(dot) com/Magazine/december%202005/article%**

**Kakapo (pronounced Car-car-po) are a New Zealand native parrot. They don't fly and they're green all over so they're not the world's most exciting parrots, but they're very cute and horribly endangered.**

**A bach is of course a holiday house and pronounced batch.**

**Farmers is a department store.**

**Eric's 'Fonga-mah-tar' is phonetically how you'd say Whangamata. Well, thereabouts. It's a very popular holiday destination about two hour's drive from Auckland.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	87. Chapter 87

**A/N Right, back again having survived another day of being bossed around by my toddler!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

When Eric said he'd lost Felicia I felt my heart sink. My mind immediately went to the case a couple of years earlier of the two year old girl who went missing when her mum turned her back for a moment. There had been all sorts of theories about where she might have gone and whether someone had snatched her off the street. They'd found her body a week later, crushed into a stormwater drain no one had thought she'd ever fit in.

Eric was just standing there, waiting for me to say something. I wasn't sure what to say. He was supposed to be good at finding.

"She's definitely not inside?" I asked in the end.

"No, I looked, although Calvin is having another look now" he said. He looked a bit sick about it.

"You checked out the back?"

"Yes! I checked the backyard, but if she's back there, then at least she hasn't fucking wandered off. I just…" he stopped. "How far could she get on her little legs?"

I shrugged and shaded my eyes to look up towards the top of the street in the hope I might see a small figure trotting along. Of course I didn't. But it didn't mean she wasn't up there.

Then I looked in the opposite direction. That way led to the park with the little playground on the corner.

"Try the playground" I said to Eric. "I'll get Sam out of the car and we'll walk around the top of the street and see if she's up there."

"Yeah…OK" Eric said, looking worried.

"She won't have disappeared" I said to him. "She'll be somewhere."

"I just…I hope it's not in someone's house. I mean…we don't know anyone around here. I feel like we should have checked a list or something…" Eric trailed off.

"List?" I asked, as I turned to get Sam's pushchair out of the car.

"Yeah, you know. One of those lists that tell you where all the paedophiles live." Eric stared at several of the houses as if that was going to tell him who was lurking in there.

"Um, I don't think we have any of those for around here. So, go and check the park." Eric sighed, but he headed off. I was just hoping that Felicia had gone to use the slide and hadn't been lured away by anyone. Fingers crossed I'd remembered to give her the speech on not talking to strangers. I'd given it to Amelia a lot of times, but she'd talk to anyone, usually at great length. Probably that was her best defence against being snatched.

If someone tried to take Felicia, I just had to hope she'd bite them.

I started walking up the road, but then I had a thought and decided to look down the side of the house first. I pushed Sam as far as I could over the uneven lawn and then stuck my head down the side. There was more debris down here and quite a large pile of planks. "Felicia!" I called. "Felicia!"

Nothing. No reply. I was about to walk back up to the footpath and start walking up the road when a voice suddenly said "Felicia's over here."

Oh. I pushed Sam around to the neighbour's house in time to see a stunningly gorgeous woman walk down the side of her house. It was almost like coming face to face with Elle Macpherson or something, she was all glossy hair and long legs and really, really good teeth. I wondered if she was renting or if I was stuck living next to her forever. I sighed. Gran had inherited a cat that had moved over from the next door neighbour's house, I wondered if it ever happened with husbands.

"Sorry" she said. "She kind of turned up and decided to help me." The woman looked down and that was when I noticed she was holding a paint-brush, and that Felicia was standing next to her, covered in a fair amount of red paint. "I's good at helpin'" Felicia said brightly.

"Sweetheart" I said. "You had us all really worried. We didn't know where you were. Daddy's still looking for you." I didn't have my phone on me, or else I could have sent Eric a text. We'd have to go and find him next.

"I's here!" Felicia said. "Helpin'"

"But we didn't know that. It was kind of scary" I said to her.

Felicia frowned. "Like Nemo?" she asked.

"Like Nemo." I confirmed. Felicia looked thoughtful again. Then she turned to the woman who was still standing there. "You like Nemo?" she asked.

"I do" she said. "But it makes me a bit homesick."

Ah, I twigged to the accent. I just hoped she was better than Sophie-Anne and didn't think we were all living in an episode of _Home and Away_. "Are you from Sydney?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said. "Well, Wagga Wagga originally. We're over here because my husband got shoulder-tapped for a role as a GM with Vodafone. We've only been here a few months, so it's all kind of new. I don't really know anyone."

"Oh. Well, I'm Sookie Stackhouse" I said, holding out my hand to her.

"Kennedy. Kennedy Keyes" she said, shaking my hand.

"Your parents liked alliteration too" I commented, and she laughed. "And you've met Felicia, and this is Sam" I said, pointing to the pushchair.

"Hello gorgeous" Kennedy said to Sam, and he beamed at her. He was getting pretty good at the smiling thing.

I heard Eric's voice come drifting back over, he'd obviously abandoned the park. "Leesha!" he yelled. "Sookie!" God, now he thought he'd lost everyone.

I walked back up to the footpath. "We're here" I yelled, sticking my head around the side of the old wooden fence that ran between our house and Kennedy's. "I've found Felicia" I said, as Eric came jogging over.

"Where was she?" he asked.

"Helping" I said, pointing to where she was standing next to Kennedy.

"Oh" Eric said, taking in the splatters of paint down Felicia's shirt. "I's good at paintin'!" she announced.

"Yeah, you were a big help" Kennedy said to her.

"Um…thanks for looking after her" Eric said, and then he looked at Felicia again. "What have I said about running off, Leesh?"

"Um…it makes Nemo's daddy sad?" she tried.

"It makes me sad too. Don't do it again!" Eric warned.

"OK" Felicia said, quietly. "But I's not runned off. I's just visitin'."

"No more visiting without telling me or your mom first, OK?" Eric said.

"OK" Felicia agreed.

"So, do you guys own the place next door?" Kennedy asked me.

"Yeah. Hopefully one day we'll be able to move in" I said. "In the meantime, it's a building site. I, um, hope it's not disturbing you guys or anything."

"Oh no, it's fine" Kennedy said. "And actually it was quite useful the other day, I was trying to put some shelves together and I had to borrow a screwdriver from your builder. It's all this stuff you don't bring with you when you move, you know?"

"I guess it would be" I agreed. Eric was just kind of standing there, looking like he couldn't figure out how we'd moved onto general conversation. Kennedy looked over at him. "Sorry" she said. "I'm Kennedy Keyes."

"Eric Northman" Eric said, shaking her hand.

"I'm so pleased to meet someone who stands out more than I do!" she said with a laugh. Eric looked confused.

"It's the accent" I said to him. "Yours is worse than hers." As soon as that was out of my mouth, I realised that could be taken entirely the wrong way.

Luckily Kennedy laughed. "Yeah, nothing wrong with my accent. It you guys who can't say anything correctly. I went to the fish shop in the village the other week and nearly died laughing every time someone else came in to place an order."

Eric frowned. "You all sound the same to me" he said. God, he really had cloth ears sometimes.

Kennedy laughed. "Give over, mate" she said. "Just because there are more of you guys, doesn't mean we have to sound like you."

Eric looked a bit taken aback at that. I guess he wasn't used to people picking on him because he was American. Other than me. But I think he thought I just did to be annoying, not because it was a genuine past-time for those of us who came from the antipodes.

"Um…" he said. "No, but…" Yeah, he was totally lost.

Kennedy laughed. "Don't worry, I'm only kidding."

"I think I sound fine" Eric grumbled.

"Well, I've got to tease you about something" Kennedy said. "It's not like you guys are any good at cricket or anything."

"Oh, shut up" I said to her, and she laughed. I quite liked Kennedy, even if she did bring the cricket up.

Felicia was getting a bit bored by all of this and looked dangerously close to wandering off again. "Right" I said to everyone. "We'd better head off and let Kennedy carry on with what she was doing."

"Painting a bird-house" she supplied. "That was this week's project."

"Well that sounds, uh, good" I said, wondering what it was like to have time for projects. "OK, Felicia, say bye and thank-you to Kennedy."

"Bye" Felicia said. "Fanks Kenn'dy"

"Bye Leesha, you can come back again if you like" Kennedy said.

"OK" Felicia said brightly.

"But only if we know that's where you've gone" Eric said to her, sternly.

"OK!" Felicia said.

"See you soon!" Kennedy said brightly, as we walked out of her front garden, Eric holding Felicia's hand and me pushing Sam, who was starting to look a bit dozy after all this excitement.

We got back to the house to find a rather annoyed Amelia waiting for us. "Where were you?" she said. "I'm hungry!" Eric walked past us to go and find Calvin and tell him to call off the search.

"We had to go and look for Felicia" I said to her, surveying Felicia's shirt. She was wearing a lot of paint.

"I's paintin'!" Felicia said to Amelia. "Wif Kenn'dy."

"Who?" Amelia asked.

"The lady next door" Eric supplied, as he came back into the room. He lifted Sam out of the pushchair and that brightened Sam up a bit. He liked it when he had people to look at.

"Can I go next door too?" Amelia asked.

"Not unless you're invited" Eric said. "And we know where you are."

"OK…but, so if I tell you I can go next door then?" Amelia asked.

"You have to be invited" Eric reiterated. "You can't just go and disturb that poor woman any time you feel like it."

"But Felicia went over there!" Amelia protested. "I want to go too."

"Just wait for an invitation" Eric said, as he walked off with Sam in his arms. I guess to go and show Sam what had happened in the house since he was last here.

"Can I go over there, Mum?" Amelia asked, turning to me. "Please?"

"Not right now" I said. "We're going to get lunch in a minute."

"Maybe we could have lunch next door?" Amelia asked.

"I don't think so." Amelia slumped down into a pout, probably feeling that she was being unjustly punished for being the kid who didn't wander off.

I looked at Felicia again. "Um…just stay there. I might have something for you in the car" I said.

I went out to my car and raked around in the bag of clothes Debbie had given me earlier. Sure enough there were some things that would fit Felicia, and one of them was a Spiderman t-shirt. She'd love that.

I took it back inside and tried to remove her t-shirt. Only she wasn't giving it up. "Noo!" she wailed.

"Come on, Felicia" I said. "This shirt's all covered in paint. You'd be better off without it on."

"I likes the paint!" she said. "Is cool!"

"It's not cool" Amelia said. "It's all painty."

"Is Kenn'dy's paint. Kenn'dy's cool" Felicia said.

That just made Amelia sigh loudly. "Well I don't know Kenny!" she said. "No one will let me go over there!"

"It's Kennedy" I told Amelia. "The lady next door is called Kennedy, and Felicia, you need to change your shirt."

"No!"

"But this one has Spiderman on it" I tried, holding the t-shirt up. "And it's red too."

Felicia looked thoughtful, but undecided. I decided to sweeten the deal. "And it's Sebastian's t-shirt."

"Bessian's?" Felicia asked, at the same time as Amelia said "How come you've got Sebastian's t-shirt?"

"His mum gave me some of his old things to pass along" I told them. "Because he's grown out of them." They'd had stuff from Tara's daughter Charlotte before so it wasn't a complete novelty to them, having hand-me-downs. And Felicia, of course, was practically brought up in them.

"For me?" Felicia asked, looking happy.

"Well…for you and then maybe Sam" I said.

"Sam no like Spida-man" Felicia said, as I finally got to remove the painted on t-shirt from her, and put the clean one over her head.

"Well, we'll see" I said to her. Eric came back into the room with Sam at that point.

"Cool t-shirt, Leesh" he said, and Felicia beamed. "Is Bessian's" she said. "He gived it to me. Not Sam."

"Oh, OK" Eric said, taking her at her word and putting Sam back into the pushchair.

EPOV

It was fucking scary when Felicia disappeared on me like that. Sookie had been calm about it all, but I was pretty sure she was blaming me for it. And I was definitely blaming myself. I couldn't figure out how she could have disappeared quite so completely, and that fucking worried me. Sookie didn't seem to worry about predators lurking about, but I couldn't help but think the worst. After all, she couldn't get far on her legs. Someone had to have taken her. And even if there was a neighbourhood-watch in this street, who would notice another van in front of our house? There had been so many contractors coming and going with the house renovations that another one wouldn't attract any attention at all.

I scoured the park but she wasn't there. And if she had been, probably anyone could have walked off with her anyway. Even on a Saturday it was empty. No one would have seen a thing.

I wondered how long you had to wait to report a missing kid in New Zealand. I really hoped it wasn't 24 hours or anything fucking stupid like that.

As I walked back to our place I just felt sick, sicker than I'd ever felt before. Sicker even than when my mom left. We were going to be that family, the one that appeared on the TV news pleading for the safe return of our kid. The kid we'd never see again. Unless she was found 15 years later locked in the basement of some psycho's house after he was raided by the FBI, or whatever the fucking equivalent was here. And I'd only hear about her release on the news because Sookie would have had me fucking deported for losing Felicia.

I tried calling a few more times and then Sookie yelled back that she'd found her. Next door. With some woman I'd never seen before. Who looked less like a psycho than what I'd been picturing, but then how did you tell anyway?

I decided maybe I'd trust Sookie's instincts on the matter. That seemed like a good call. And Sookie seemed to be the woman's best friend now, despite the fact they'd just met. I had no idea how she fucking did that.

And then it occurred to me that maybe Sookie's instincts weren't all that shit-hot anyway. After all, she'd married Bill the drug-addict. OK, so it was long-shot that she could have seen the future when she did that, but I worried that maybe she looked for the best in people and ignored the rest.

And worse, then I realised she'd married me too and I'd just lost the two year old. Fuck. We were screwed. Any fucking day now Sookie was probably going to befriend a serial killer and bring them home. She was far too trusting. And nice. Probably she shouldn't be so fucking nice to everyone.

Well, me. She could still be nice to me. And the kids. But I worried about just how nice she was being to everyone else.

But the woman seemed OK, although she and Sookie decided to give me shit about my accent and the fact I couldn't differentiate between theirs. Fuck, it all just sounded the same to me.

So as far as I could tell Felicia didn't seem the worse for wear, and I just hoped she wasn't going to do that again. The sooner we could finish the house and get the wall and a big gate built out the front, the better, as far as I was concerned.

SPOV

Over the next week or so I saw Kennedy a few times whenever I called in to the house to see how Calvin was getting on, or deliver food to Calvin and the other guys, or pick things up, like the time we had the wrong switch surrounds and the electrician told us we needed to take them back for exchange.

So that was keeping me busy. Kennedy was a little bit less busy. Turns out that she was a teacher, but until she'd got her registration sorted out for New Zealand, she was stuck at home, and with her husband working really long hours trying to establish himself, I think she was kind of lonely.

That was the problem with moving for someone's job, the other partner is stuck trying to make a new life from scratch too. I just hoped Eric would never decide that he could do better in the States and move us all over there. I'd miss my friends and what little family I had, just like Kennedy did. It didn't look like fun.

Amelia finally got to meet Kennedy after we called in to drop some donuts in to Calvin one afternoon. She was pretty taken with her at first sight. "Are you Felicia's friend?" she asked Kennedy.

"Yeah, I guess. She did help me paint, after all" Kennedy replied, and Felicia beamed at that.

"So…will you be my friend too? I'm very helpful" Amelia announced.

"OK" Kennedy said. "What are you good at helping with?"

"Oh" said Amelia, who I think hadn't expected to have to prove her qualifications as most helpful kid around. "Um, I set the table…and, oh! I help with Sam. I take care of him when Mum's busy." She beamed at Kennedy and earned herself a glare from Felicia.

"You's not allowed to pick him up" Felicia grumbled.

"No, _you're_ not" Amelia said to her sister. "You're just little. I'm OK."

"Well, don't pick him up too much" I cautioned. I wasn't really sure just how fond Sam was of being hauled around like a large teddy bear. And he was getting a bit big for Amelia to be carrying him around now anyway. All we needed was a dropped baby for CYFS to come down on us like a ton of bricks.

Sam didn't look too upset about it all though. He just smiled at Kennedy. He really liked Kennedy. Maybe I should have been worried about Sam wanting to move next door, rather than Eric.

When it was nearly Christmas, and on Amelia's last day at school for the year, Eric and I got to go out. To a proper, grown-up Christmas party.

It was only by fluke that we were actually going at all. I'd found one of Eric's carefully printed out emails folded up in his trouser pocket before I took a suit in for drycleaning and for some reason, I'd decided to look at it.

Well, nosiness was the reason, really.

It was an invitation to the Auckland Central Business Banking function from the bank Sophie-Anne worked for. Even though Eric didn't work with their clients as much as he used to, someone had obviously kept him on the guest list. And I figured no way would Sophie-Anne be there, given she'd probably just had a baby. Assuming that she'd ever got Russell to agree to that C-section.

There was certainly no mention of her in the email invitation, it was sent on behalf of some guy called Rasul, who was probably covering her maternity leave. Unless she'd quit altogether, although that seemed an unlikely move for Sophie-Anne. She seemed like the type of person to hold onto her position with everything she had.

So when Eric got home I put the email in front of him and asked if we were going. It had said that partners were invited too. I was, most definitely, Eric's partner.

"Um…well, I wasn't going to go…" Eric said, looking at the email. "I just…well, it's just a lot of standing around and talking to people. Watching them get drunk and fall over. Or do a really bad job of sneaking into the supplies closet. Not exactly Christmassy." And then he looked at my face. "Unless...you want to go?" he asked.

Well I did. "I do" I said. "I want to be a grown-up again. There'll be a buffet and everything." And I'd had that whole nine months where I couldn't eat buffet food so I kind of thought that sounded appealing.

"Oh…" Eric said, and I couldn't tell what the 'oh' meant. "But, um…what about a babysitter? Won't it be hard to get one, you know, this time of year?"

"Well" I said, "I think Judith kind of owes me. After I had Thomas last week." Yeah, I'd been the fill-in for Lorena when she'd come down with a case of pre-Christmas attention-itis because Caroline wasn't coming home. It wouldn't have been too bad except that Thomas decided he'd just sit in my lap all day and wasn't happy when I needed to move him off to feed Sam. Neither of them seemed to particularly like each other and I was the one caught in the middle.

"Plus" I continued "Sam coped with us out for a few hours on our anniversary, I'm sure he could cope again. We'll put him to bed before we go and cross our fingers that he lasts until we get back. We don't have to be out late, but just anything would be nice. Please?" I looked hopefully at Eric.

"Um…" he said. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah! And it's not like Sophie-Anne will be there."

"She won't?" Eric asked.

"No, she's about to have her baby. Or she's just had it, one or the other."

"Really?"

"Yeah! You saw how pregnant she was the last time we ran into her."

"Mmm" Eric said thoughtfully.

"I wonder if the baby had a neck" I mused, but Eric ignored me, so I went back to the original topic. "So, can we go?" I asked.

Eric sighed. "OK" he said. "You make the arrangements with Judith, I'll RSVP to Rasul's assistant."

"Yay!" I said.

EPOV

I never really saw the point of these Christmas functions. People were usually far too focussed on getting drunk and you couldn't actually use the occasion to make any fucking contacts, because no one remembered they'd spoken to you, unless maybe you'd slept with them. And even then, you couldn't fucking guarantee it.

But Sookie seemed convinced it was a good idea to go. She kept saying it would be fun, that we wouldn't have to talk to anyone there, we could just eat the food and enjoy the atmosphere and maybe dance.

I kind of liked the idea of her dancing.

So we put the kids to bed, and ignored Amelia's protests that she wanted to come to the party too and it really wasn't fair we were going without her, and hoped like hell that Sam would stay asleep long enough that Judith wouldn't have to call us to come home. Mostly he only woke up once or twice a night now. And compared to what he had done, that seemed entirely reasonable.

And once Judith was installed, and Sookie had fussed about getting her chocolates to eat and making sure she knew it was OK to call us if Sam woke up and was unhappy at being presented with another bottle, we could drive into the city.

To me it seemed a fuck load of bother just to hang about with a bunch of people I didn't care about and eat some fucking dismal hors d'oeuvres, but Sookie seemed excited.

"I can't remember the last Christmas party I went to" she said. "It must have been…um, maybe before I had Amelia? But I would have been pregnant. So no food. Well, I ate the bread rolls. Bread rolls are boring."

"They would be" I agreed.

"I hope there's salmon tonight. Or maybe shellfish. Scallops would be good."

"They would." I turned to look at Sookie and she looked really happy to be out of the house and going to eat shitty seafood in the boardroom of a bank. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all.

It was pretty bad. We walked in and there was just a bunch of people and noise. I got Sookie a ginger ale and myself a beer at the bar, and then we just stood there for a bit. Rasul came over and greeted us, said he might have some contacts for me, and then moved away to work the room. A couple of other people I knew turned up as well, and we made small talk with them, but eventually Sookie and I ended up standing around, feeling rather awkward. "Um…food?" she said.

"Yep. Let's get you some seafood" I replied.

SPOV

When we got to the Christmas party I realised that maybe they weren't as good as I remembered. Or maybe the ones at my old bank were better. Possibly it was just easier when you knew most of the people there and it was just a nice chance to socialise with them. I'd never bothered bringing Bill along, and he really hadn't wanted to go anyway, so usually I just hung out with my friends and had a good time.

Now I was hanging out with Eric and I wanted to have a good time, but we felt a bit out of place. At least there was food.

Once Eric and I had a plate each we stood by the window, with its view right down the harbour to Waiheke, and just talked. That was kind of nice. I guessed we could have been chatting just as easily in the living room, but it was nice to know I had Eric's full attention in a way.

"So, Amelia had some weird idea that you're a spy?" I said to him, as I tried some scallops.

"Spy?" Eric asked, between mouthfuls of his own food.

"Yeah…or secret agent. She was talking about it after school today. I think the story went something along the lines of Connor was being a pain, Amelia told him not to be naughty because she's pretty convinced Mrs Garfield has deputised her on account of her extreme helpfulness, and then Connor asked if she was going to tell the guy who's the spy, or whatever, and Amelia thought he meant you for some reason, but she was pretty impressed with her awesome ability to maintain law and order in the classroom because Connor shut up after that."

Eric frowned a bit. "Oh. Yeah. Well, that's what I told him."

"When?" I asked.

"When we went to the zoo. I said I was working for Santa." Eric shoved a forkful of salad into his mouth.

"Oh" I said. "I thought it was because you were tall."

"What was?" Eric asked.

"The whole getting Connor to do what you said thing."

Eric looked a bit confused at that. "Why would that make any difference?" he asked, frowning.

"I don't know. It just works that way." I shrugged and tried to decide whether I was really going to risk eating the mussel I'd put on my plate earlier. It was one thing to be able to eat seafood because I wasn't pregnant, but it was another to eat really risky things. I decided to go for it. How bad could it be?

"Because I'm tall?" Eric said.

"Yeah" I agreed, swallowing the mussel and hoping it was indeed OK. "I don't know…it just makes you more authoritative or something."

Eric thought for a bit. "But it doesn't work with you" he said in the end.

"I'm used to you" I said, patting his arm.

"What else happened today?" Eric asked.

"Oh, the usual. Sam smiled at everyone a lot. I think he smiles more at women than men, though."

"Well, that seems sensible" Eric commented.

"Or odd. Um, Felicia thanked Sebastian for his Spiderman shirt and he didn't know what to do, I'm not sure he even knew Debbie was giving his stuff away. Felicia's sweet, but she's a bit stalker-ish."

"No" Eric said. "She's fine."

"Mostly. If you're not Sam she's alright. It was Sam's day for the advent calendar, well, nominal day. So Felicia got in first, which annoyed Amelia and we all got lectured about how the camels have to go together. That advent calendar causes more fights than anything else, I'm sure of it." I finished my food and put the plate down on a table. Eric and I stood there for a while and looked at the view in silence, with his arm around my lower back. It was a really good view from up here.

And then the music started up down the other end of the room. There were obviously some people here who'd been drinking for a few hours now and they were cutting loose. I was kind of keen to join in.

"Hey" I said to Eric. "There's dancing."

Eric looked at me. "Off you go then."

"No! This is isn't like me dancing to Katy Perry in the living room when Amelia's playing it. You have to join in too."

Eric sighed, but he let me pull him over to where the dancing was. "I like watching you dance" he said, as he put his arms around me.

"I know, but at least this isn't Katy Perry, which is a nice change for us all. Amelia's been slightly obsessed."

"Mmm" Eric said, pulling me closer. We weren't so much dancing as swaying in unison, but that was OK. I could live with it. "I'm not sure some of that stuff is appropriate for Amelia" he added.

"Yeah" I agreed. "The look on your face when she was singing the peacock song was priceless. I can't ban it now though, she'll realise it's not about birds. It was bad enough the other day when she wanted to know if I kept having babies because I really liked the magic cuddles and did that mean Sebastian's mummy didn't like them. I wasn't sure what was worse, talking about my sex life or Debbie's!"

Eric laughed at that. It was kind of funny, although slightly mortifying at the time. "You can though, Sookie" he said.

"Can what?" I asked.

"See my peacock" Eric said, smirking at me.

"Well, gee. Thanks for that. I'll remember that the next time I think a magic cuddle is a good idea." I snuggled in against Eric's chest as we moved around.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something I didn't expect to see here. Well someone. Sophie-Anne.

"Sophie-Anne's here" I said to Eric.

"OK" he said.

"But…I think she just had the baby. Where's her baby?" I wondered if she'd brought it with her. Surely not, but you never knew. If she was desperate enough to be here, maybe she was desperate enough to bring a baby to a Christmas party.

Eric shrugged. "Probably at home. Like our baby."

"Yeah, but our baby's older."

"Not our problem, Sookie. As long as she leaves us alone, I don't care what she does, or where her baby is."

"Yeah…" I said, "But I hope the baby was OK."

Sophie-Anne didn't seem to have any interest in Eric and me, she was, from what I could see, making her way rather determinedly around the room attempting to speak to everyone here. I felt kind of sorry for her. She obviously felt she couldn't even miss a Christmas party while on maternity leave.

After a while I said to Eric. "I'm going to the ladies" and I walked out of the dimly lit boardroom into the brightly lit area by the lifts. It took a minute before my eyes stopped hurting and I could make my way over to the ladies room. I used the toilet and then stared at my reflection in the mirror, kind of wishing I hadn't as the harsh fluorescent lighting wasn't doing me any favours at all. Despite the fact Sam was getting better at night there still seemed to be some rather dark shadows under my eyes.

And then I heard something coming from one of the other cubicles, the only other one that had been occupied while I'd been in here. It sounded like sniffing. Loud sniffing.

I wasn't sure what to do. These things always happened at Christmas parties, someone feels slighted by the object of her crush and falls to pieces, her ability to cope not helped by the amount of alcohol she's consumed. Did I really want to end up with some 22 year old crying in my arms, I asked myself.

I knocked on the door. "Are you OK?" I asked.

"Yes" said a voice inside.

"Are you sure?" I asked, hoping for another 'yes' in reply, so I could leave.

Instead the voice said "Sookie?" Crap, I thought. That didn't sound good.

Sophie-Anne opened the door and I could immediately see the problem. The large wet patches on the front of her lovely green silk top. "I'm leaking!" she cried.

"Yeah" I agreed. "It happens. Especially when your milk's still getting settled." I sighed. There wasn't much point lecturing her on the benefits of merino breast pads at this point in time.

"I can't go out there like this!" Sophie-Anne wailed.

"No, I wouldn't bother" I agreed. "I'd just go home and feed the baby." The look Sophie-Anne gave me suggested that wasn't the answer she'd expected. I think she'd thought I would have a magic cure for breastmilk on silk.

Sadly, for Sophie-Anne, I didn't.

"But…I need to be there" she said.

"Why?" I asked her.

She frowned. "Well, to network of course. The same reason Eric's here."

I shrugged. "Eric's here for free seafood and dancing. He's with me." I surveyed her top again. "Seriously, Sophie-Anne, go home. You've made an appearance, no one expects more than that. When did you have the baby anyway?"

"Eight days ago" she said.

"You must be a bit sore then" I said, "Standing around."

"I've got a belt-thing" she confessed. "To hold the stitches together."

"Yeah, see stitches and parties don't mix. Just go home."

"But…" she began, but I cut her off. "Go home."

Sophie-Anne sighed, but I could see it was starting to sink in. "What did you have anyway?" I asked.

"Girl" she said. "Aimee."

"Well, Aimee needs you. And those guys in there aren't going to care if you were standing there with sore boobs and a stitched abdomen while they were drinking their third whisky of the night. Come on, let's go." I walked out of the ladies room and Sophie-Anne followed me, her arms crossed over her chest, and one hand holding her purse.

"Did you have a jacket?" I asked her.

"It's in there" she said, pointing to the boardroom. "By the bar. The navy one, with the white piping."

"OK, you wait here; I'll go and get it." I walked back in and had to let my eyes readjust to the dim light. I located Sophie-Anne's jacket and then found Eric sitting with the Rasul guy and some others. "Come on" I said to him. "Our baby-sitter's waiting."

We said our goodbyes and walked back out to the foyer. Eric looked a bit taken aback to see Sophie-Anne standing there, but he didn't say anything and he certainly didn't mention the wet patches on her top. I helped her into her jacket, and the three of us rode down in the lift in silence.

We walked to the carpark and Sophie-Anne turned to me. "Thanks Sookie" she said.

"Oh, no problem. Hope Aimee is good for you tonight" I said.

Sophie-Anne beamed at me. "I think she might sleep through the night" she said.

"Well, there's always hope" I agreed, remembering how deluded I was as a first-time mum. It's never like you think it will be. "Merry Christmas Sophie-Anne."

"You too Sookie" she said. "And you Eric." And then she turned and walked off to where her car was parked.

I followed Eric to ours. "What was that about?" Eric asked. "And why were you nice to Sophie-Anne? You hate Sophie-Anne."

I shrugged. "I think that was a Christmas miracle Eric, I really do. Poor thing, I think she's finding motherhood isn't like any other job."

Eric stopped to look at me before he unlocked the car. "You're far too nice sometimes" he muttered.

"I just hope" I said, climbing into the car, "that Aimee has a neck. I'm pretty sure she'll forgive her mother for a lot of stuff, but she might be really pissed about that."

"Yeah" agreed Eric, as he started the car. "She might."

**A/N The case Sookie mentions is the real life case of a little girl called Aisling Symes who went missing in Auckland in Oct 2009. It was quite horrible when they figured out what had happened to her.**

**Home and Away is an Australian evening soap opera full of the dramas of a bunch of teenagers.**

**Vodafone is multi-national telecoms company, they mainly provide cellphone and broadband coverage in NZ.**

**CYFS is Child, Youth and Family Services.**

**Waiheke is pronounced Why-heck-ee**

**Thanks for reading!**


	88. Chapter 88

**A/N Survived another day at home with the toddler who's trying to rule the world. Or at least train the cat to follow her unquestioningly. She hasn't figured out though, that if she gives the cat a bowl, she's supposed to put cat food in it first. The poor cat, empty bowls just confuse him totally.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I have a toddler with megalomaniacal tendencies and a really bewildered cat.**

SPOV

Christmas day itself was a lot quieter than the previous year. Well, as quiet as it ever got in our house. It's surprising how much noise two kids can make as they tear wrapping paper off presents. Sam just sat in the Bumbo seat and looked worried, like he thought there was some kind of terrible massacre going on all around him. Luckily I hadn't wrapped him in Christmas paper so he was safe for the moment.

I had wrapped up some of the old baby toys for him to open, given that we didn't need a lot more stuff in the house that would have to be packed and moved to another location in the near future. Unfortunately I hadn't considered Amelia's amazing ability to catalogue everything everyone owned when I'd done this.

"They're Felicia's" Amelia said, pointing to some stacking cars which Eric had just opened for Sam.

"No, no. They're Sam's" I assured her.

"Mine?" Felicia asked, looking up from the new trains she'd just unwrapped.

"Well…" I said. "Um…" I looked at Eric, if there was ever a time for him to pull out the bullshit card, it was now.

"Recycling" Eric said, figuring out that I was trying to cue him in. "Santa has to recycle some toys; otherwise the elves get too worn out…"

"Do the elves die?" Amelia asked.

"Um…no, they have elf retirement homes" Eric said, "But if they all retire, then Santa can't get enough toys made…so, he has to recycle. Old toys go back and get re-used."

Amelia frowned, and started to say something, but stopped. She stared at the things she'd been given, eventually picking up a box which contained a kit that allowed you to decorate your own mug. "I don't want someone else's stuff" she said.

"Well…they only recycle the simple stuff" Eric said. "And it's purely coincidence that Sam got back something that looks remarkably like the toys Felicia used to have."

"So I didn't get recycled?" Amelia asked.

"Probably not" Eric confirmed.

"My trains cycled?" Felicia asked.

"Um, no" Eric said.

"So, it's just baby stuff then? For the babies? Because they don't know?" Amelia asked.

"It, uh, appears that way" Eric said slowly.

"Babies is pooey" Felicia said loudly, looking at Sam, who just smiled at her, and perhaps wondered how long before the train she was waving around was getting recycled by Santa's elves.

It was nice not to be cooking for most of my family and half of Bill's this year. I wasn't sure quite how it had worked out that I'd had them all the previous Christmas, but it had been a bit much. But Judith was back having a Christmas lunch at her place and I'd heard nothing from her but grumbles about Portia, Sarah and even Caroline for the last couple of weeks.

I think secretly she loved having her chance to be justifiably put upon by her siblings.

But I was glad that Sam's first Christmas wasn't going to turn into another round of pass the baby with everyone we knew. Thomas had had to suffer through it the previous year and I wasn't sure he'd ever recovered. He was kind of clingy at times.

So I could get away with a casual lunch of roast chicken, roast potatoes and salad, which was a bit easier to prepare than a full roast. I still did a pavlova though, as I didn't want to totally spoil Eric's day. As it was I was surprised he could face food. He'd spent the night before pretending to be Santa and the reindeer and as far as I was concerned four strawberry cupcakes chased down by eight cherry tomatoes was a recipe for feeling a bit queasy.

After lunch Eric and I sat on the deck and watched Felicia bounce round the back garden on her new moonhopper. Amelia had dragged her one out as well, although she was getting a bit big for it now, and was trying to give Felicia pointers on what she should be doing. Felicia didn't seem to appreciate Amelia's lessons though, and kept saying "Noo! I's doin' it right!"

"No, you're not Felicia. You're bouncing on the grass not the path, and the path's the _road_, you can't go off the road like that!"

I just turned a blind eye to it all. Eric and I were sitting on the ottoman, under the sun umbrella and Sam was on a blanket next to us doing tummy time. He seemed to like being outside more than inside, and I guess there was more to watch. I kept glancing at him to make sure he was in the shade though. It was pretty hot and he wasn't really old enough for a lot of sunblock yet. It made things a bit tricky in the middle of the day. He seemed OK, though, propped up on his arms talking to his new red teddy bear.

"So" Eric said. "Last Christmas in this house."

"Yeah" I said, taking a sip of my coffee. "Kind of weird to think about." I thought for a moment. "But nice. I mean, I'm looking forward to it. It's just…well; we've always been here, in this house. When it's been us." I wasn't sure if that was clear or not, but Eric seemed to get it.

"It's my third Christmas here" Eric said. "It seems like more, and less, all at the same time." He shoved another Christmas mince pie into his mouth. Somehow he still had room even after lunch. I was full up and couldn't face another thing.

"Does it feel Christmassy though?" I asked.

"Fuck no. It's still just wrong that it's summer" Eric said, and I laughed and took another sip of my coffee.

"This is good" I said.

"Of course it is" Eric agreed. "I had lessons."

I'd been kind of stumped as to what to buy Eric so I'd shouted him some lessons in how to make perfect coffee at home from a coffee roasting place on Mt Eden Road. Kennedy had organised the same thing for her husband Danny after seeing it in the paper, as apparently he was a coffee addict as well.

Eric had grumbled about me making him hang out with a stranger, but I think they coped. Certainly Eric seemed to enjoy his lesson and when he turned up at home, with a large box under his arm containing a brand-new coffee maker, I figured I could expect pretty decent flat whites at home from now on.

But of course the coffee maker wasn't on sale; it was significantly discounted for those people who'd been through the sessions.

Still, it was nice and new and shiny and was going to look very presentable in my new kitchen. And it had turned out that the kitchen wasn't the only new room I was getting. In my total incomprehension of the plans for the renovations I'd missed the small room next to the kitchen. I was getting my own office.

I'd turned up at the house one afternoon with a wad of cash in order to pay the two extra guys Calvin had hired to move the junk out of the back garden. It all seemed a bit dodgy paying them cash in hand but I'd decided not to ask too many questions and just go with it. However, Eric had been there as well and he'd led me to a door with a big red bow on it. "Merry Christmas" he said, as I opened the door to find the world's smallest office.

It was perfect.

I'd hugged Eric, then Calvin, and then Hunter who was standing behind Calvin and hadn't had enough foresight to find another important job to do somewhere else. I'd never had my own office before. It was kind of exciting.

Felicia was really getting the hang of the moonhopper, but she'd strayed a bit too close to the camellias and her enthusiastic bouncing had flushed Bob out of the nice shady spot he'd found. "Watch out for Bob!" I yelled at her, which I think just made her aim towards Bob.

Poor Bob, he was quite quick getting over the back fence when he wanted to be.

"I wonder if Bob will want to live with Kennedy instead when we move?" I asked Eric, but before he could reply there was a loud wail from Sam. I turned to look at him and he stared up at me with huge, accusing blue eyes. His world had just turned around and he looked like he was pretty sure that it was my fault.

"Oh!" I said, grabbing Eric's arm to get his attention. "Sam rolled over!"

"What?" Eric asked.

"Sam rolled over. Look! He's on his back now."

"Huh" Eric said. "Do you think he'll do it again?"

I shrugged. "He might do, but it was probably a fluke. He doesn't seem very happy about it."

"I'm pretty sure he'll do it again" Eric said, getting off the ottoman and moving over to where Sam was lying on the rug. Eric liked this kind of stuff, I realised. He liked when there was a milestone in sight and he could go into coach mode. Helping kids learn to move around safely was kind of what I did for a living, but I tended to be a bit more relaxed about it all with my own kids. But I figured that was OK, because I had another parent around who did want to sit there for hours and try to make the baby roll onto his back again.

It was kind of cool that I did really. For me and for Sam.

"OK" Eric said, flipping Sam back over to his tummy, which made Sam look relieved. "Try that again, buddy."

Sam looked at Eric, and decided to ignore him. He went back to trying to get to the teddy bear using the force of his mind to move forward. Well that's what it looked like anyway. He didn't have enough co-ordination yet to actually use his arms and legs to do anything.

"You can do it" Eric said, encouragingly. "Just roll over."

Sam's eyes flicked briefly to Eric, and then went back to staring at the bear.

"What about…" Eric said, "we try this." And he moved the bear to one side of Sam.

Sam looked really annoyed at that move. And incredibly like his father. It was weird how a change of expression could totally alter who I thought he looked like. When he smiled I sometimes got flashes of seeing my dad or even Jason, but the grumpy look was really all Eric.

Sam kind of moved his torso as far as he could towards the bear, and then stopped, glared at his father, and tried again. In the process he lifted one side of his body a bit too far and gravity took him over onto his back.

"Yay!" Eric said. "High-five!" as Sam burst into tears. "It's not that bad" Eric said, as he held Sam's hand and hit it with his own.

"Yeah, to him it is" I said, leaning over to smile at Sam. He wasn't buying my sympathy. I think he suspected I was involved with Eric's evil plot to make his world all twisty. I picked him up and that made him a bit happier.

Amelia and Felicia stomped over. "I'm hot" Amelia said. "I want a drink."

"How do you ask?" Eric reminded her.

"Can I have a drink, please?" she said.

"Me too" Felicia added. "I's firsty. And I want de hose."

"The hose?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, de hose. I's too hot." Felicia sat down on the steps and fanned her face with her hand.

"I want the hose too!" Amelia half-yelled.

"OK" I said to Eric, "You get the hose, I'll get the drinks." Eric walked down the steps of the deck and I put Sam back on his rug and went inside to find some drinks.

By the time I got back and handed them out, along with some biscuits, and Eric had brought the hose around and started spraying the kids, after offering me first go, which I declined, I remembered to check on Sam.

He was fast asleep on his tummy on the rug. Sometimes it was hard work being the third kid.

EPOV

Christmas was better than the year before had been. Well, it had been OK, but I could have done with a few less people, tents and caravans clogging up the fucking house for the day. It was nicer when it was just us. And now that there were five of us, that seemed like quite a lot of people anyway.

It still took a bit of getting used to that it was Christmas in the middle of fucking summer in this country. Everyone said summer and Christmas as though they meant the same thing. When Hunter asked Calvin and I if he could take some time off as he was going away for Christmas I thought he was talking a couple of days. But no, it's a couple of weeks.

It didn't matter too much anyway. I wasn't going to be working during that time and no one else around here seemed to. It was kind of fun hanging out with the kids even if I seemed to spend a lot of time standing in the back garden hosing Amelia and Felicia, and occasionally Riley and Ruby, down. And Sam was starting to move around now, which was fucking incredible. He didn't really want to roll onto his back the first few times he did it, but he soon got over that and I think he did it to get Sookie's attention. I'd watch him and he'd roll, and then lie there and wait for her notice and when she did, he'd give her his best toothless smile.

He might not be the loudest out of the three kids, but that didn't mean he wasn't figuring out ways to get our attention. He was pretty smart if you asked me.

I ended up being tasked with the kids while Sookie tried to pack as much of our stuff up as she could. Anything we didn't immediately need went to the new place. This meant that the Christmas decorations didn't go into the roof when we were done with them. They went back in their box and we took them, along with some other things Sookie had packed, to the new place.

Where I got to put it in our new, improved rat-infested roof.

"I'm sure the rats have actually gone now" Sookie said, encouragingly, as I started to climb the ladder.

"Yeah…" I said. "The exterminator guy said he thought he'd got them all."

"Well, it should be fine then" Sookie said. I wasn't sure it would be. Did rats come back?

"I can do it if you want" Sookie offered.

"No, I'll do it" I said, still not budging. "It'll be fine."

"Yeah. Of course we could put it under the house" Sookie suggested.

"There's an under the house?" I asked.

"Yeah, I saw the little trapdoor on the side of the house." She paused for a moment. "Did the rat-catcher guy check under the house?"

Fuck. I had no idea. Probably not. "Don't know" I said.

"Mmm" Sookie said. "Roof might be better then,"

"Yeah" I said, starting to climb the ladder and realising I'd have to get the exterminator back in after New Year's.

By the time I'd got the boxes arranged in the roof, Sookie had disappeared. And we wondered where Felicia got it from. I checked the house to make sure it was all closed up and gave the table a once over. It was all very well having it delivered here, but there was always the chance that someone would think it was a good idea to saw wood on it or something. It looked OK, which was a fucking relief. I didn't think I could easily find a replacement and I was still intending to one day have sex on that table. It was just a matter of finding a time when Sookie and I were here without anyone else, including the kids.

All that was left was to find the rest of the family after I locked the front door. I found all of them next door talking to the neighbour, Kennedy. At least they were predictable.

"So it looks as though I might be able to do some relief teaching" she was saying. "Unless something permanent comes up."

"Well that's great" Sookie said.

"Can you be my teacher?" Amelia asked.

"Well, probably not" Kennedy said. "But if I ever end up working at your school, I'll stop in and say hi."

"You could do mother help?" Amelia suggested. Yeah, she was really taken with Kennedy. Both girls were. And Sam seemed to like her too, although maybe not as much as he liked Sookie. Sookie definitely got better smiles out of Sam, and he very rarely took his eyes off her when she was around. But you couldn't blame him. He wasn't a moron and he knew where his next boob-time was coming from.

"Well, I'm not actually a mother" Kennedy explained. "So I don't think they'd let me."

"Felicia comes, and she's not a mother" Amelia tried.

"It's not quite the same" Sookie said.

"Um, shall we get going?" I asked. We were supposed to be having brunch and I was starting to think food would be a fucking good idea.

"Yeah, OK" Sookie agreed. "Bye, Kennedy!"

"Bye!" she called out and we started to walk off. Sookie had wanted to see what the walk to the village was like from the new place. In theory it was a shorter walk than we had before, but that didn't stop it taking a fucking long time because we had to walk at Amelia and Felicia's pace.

"We should have brought the double stroller" I said to Sookie, as Felicia wandered in front of the stroller I was pushing Sam in again.

"Yeah, Felicia won't get in it" she said. "You know that. Although I have to admit, it was kind of handy when I had Thomas. He and Sam were so much better when they couldn't see each other and I was just pushing them around the block."

"Uh-huh" I agreed, wondering if Amelia could possibly skip any faster. Probably the fact she was also singing was slowing her down. "Skip, skip, skip to the loo. Skip, skip, skip to the loo…" she sang.

"It's my lou" I said to her. "Skip to my lou."

Amelia stopped, which wasn't what I wanted to happen about now, and looked thoughtful. "No, that's wrong" she said. "That doesn't make sense. It's the loo."

"Eric's right" Sookie said. "It is my lou."

Amelia stayed standing still for a bit longer. "No" she said in the end. "No, it has to be the loo." And then she skipped off again. I gave up, I couldn't figure out how she could believe me when I told her Santa recycled toys but she wouldn't believe I had the words of some kid's song correct.

And I really didn't fucking get that loo thing anyway.

So we carried on our slow progression towards the village with Amelia skipping and singing at the top of her lungs and Felicia running in random patterns all over the sidewalk. Only when we reached a slight slope Felicia managed to get up a bit of speed and tripped over her own feet and crashed into the sidewalk knees first.

She sat and looked bewildered. "Daddy?" she said, her lip wobbling slightly. I put the brakes on the stroller and walked over to her. "It's OK" I said, lifting her up. She looked at me and blinked away the tears. "Is ouchy" she said.

"I know, but you're very brave."

"Yeah" she said quietly. "I's brave."

"Is she bleeding?" Amelia asked.

I crouched down and balanced Felicia on my knee. She was bleeding. "Yeah" I said. "She is."

"I's bleedin'" Felicia announced solemnly to Amelia.

Sookie came over and cleaned up the blood as best she could with a tissue, which caused Felicia to wince and cling to me, but she still didn't cry. "It'll have to be princess plasters" Sookie said. "That's all I have in my bag."

Felicia sighed, but let Sookie put the garish pink Band-Aids on her knee, and then we set off again with me piggy-backing Felicia, Sookie pushing Sam and Amelia pouting slightly because she hadn't done anything interesting like fall over and graze her knee.

We finally reached the café just in time for Sam to get a bit grizzly and decide that actually he was the one missing out on anyone's attention. So I ordered for us, while Sookie fed him and tried to stop Amelia and Felicia from squabbling too much over the rather old and tired looking books the café provided for kid's entertainment.

Fuck, I was kind of glad to finally get some coffee. And the food was pretty good too, although I'm sure Sam was starting to look like he wanted me to hand some of my eggs over to him. "Are you sure he can't eat real food, yet?" I checked with Sookie.

"No" she said. "No, he has to be about five months at least." Yeah, I didn't think Sam was aware of that fact, but we'd have to take Sookie's word on the matter.

Sookie kept looking like she wanted to say something, but every time she opened her mouth one of the kids butted in. I kind of hoped that Sam might be a bit quieter than his sisters. Especially when Amelia announced she needed to use the bathroom and skipped off singing "Skip, skip, skip to the loo" at top volume, because obviously everyone else in the café needed to hear that.

Not to mention Felicia's shout of "Fuck's sake!" when she dropped her spoon on the floor. Yeah, at that point I was concentrating really hard on just eating my bacon as quickly as possible and not making eye contact with Sookie.

The walk back to the new place was possibly worse than the walk to brunch. The day was hotter now and the kids were scratchier as a result. Felicia made it half-way back and then had to be carried the rest of the way, and Amelia had given up skipping and just dragged her feet.

And then we packed everyone in the car and drove back to our old house. It was hot and airless from having been shut up for a few hours and it wasn't pleasant to be inside. Sam had fallen asleep in the car on the way home, and he was just a little sweaty ball when I lifted him out of the capsule and placed him in the cot. Sookie opened all the windows she could, and ushered Amelia and Felicia out onto the deck for popsicles.

I wasn't sorry when the sun started to set and the temperature dropped a bit. I grilled some steak for dinner and Sookie and I discussed when we'd have to move things like the barbecue and the ottoman over to the new place. The deck there wasn't started yet, so they were probably here for the foreseeable future.

But this led Sookie onto a conversation about how we might have to hire furniture and 'stage' this house properly when we wanted to sell it. It all sounded like a fuck-load of extra work to me, but she was adamant that you had to do it, and she was the one who watched all the home improvement shows, after all.

Felicia's bravery over grazing her knee didn't extend to her bath that night. It was hard to blame her, nothing's worse than having water touch a fresh graze like that, but having her yell "No, no, no, Daddy!" and refused to sit down in the bath wasn't helpful.

"You have to sit down" Amelia lectured her. "Otherwise Daddy can't give you a bath."

"I no want to!" Felicia said. "Is ouchy."

"Well, sit with one knee up out of the water" I suggested, and we finally got her arranged in a way that lessened the pain.

After that Sookie read them both a story while I gave Sam his bottle and tried to pretend that he wasn't really just biding his time with me until Sookie showed up. I knew where his priorities were.

As Sookie was putting him to bed, I went back out onto the deck to get some air. It was still pretty warm. Bob crossed the lawn in front of me, turned to stare, and carried on. Fuck knows what he was up to. I probably didn't want to know.

SPOV

As New Year's was fast approaching I'd decided that I might make some plans. Plans were good. Well, maybe not the ones for the house which I had no hope of ever interpreting, but generally plans were good.

At any rate, I felt like I needed a plan.

Now that Sam was getting a bit bigger, taking a bottle, even rolling over by accident, I thought that maybe I could sort out what I wanted from this year. We had a new baby, and we were going to be moving to a new house. I kind of felt like now was my chance to do a few things for myself as well.

After all, it wasn't like I was going to spend most of this year pregnant.

I'd been talking to Judith about work and the things we could do and I'd realised how much more qualified for the business she was than me. Somehow I'd always considered myself, well, a little bit superior to her. I had the business degree, after all.

But she was the one with actual qualifications in Early Childhood Education. And sometimes it showed up that she knew more than me. And that kind of sucked. So item one on my plan was to do a bit of study now that I was around home more and working less. Probably just the one paper for now, not too much that I couldn't manage it along with everything else, but I felt like I could do with exercising my brain.

And I did have that lovely new office.

There was another part to my plan too, but I really needed Eric on board for that one. And I'd been itching to talk to him about it all day, ever since I figured out that was what I wanted, but I just hadn't had the chance.

Three kids is a lot, and it's hard to find any time to have an adult conversation when you're in the middle of them.

When I had the last small person in bed I found Eric was sitting out on the deck. "I don't know what the fuck Bob thinks he's up to" he said to me. "But he was looking particularly evil just then."

I sat down on the ottoman next to Eric. "He's not evil" I said. "He's just nocturnal."

"And particularly well fed" Eric added.

"Well…I got distracted by Sam and that bit of steak fell off my fork."

"Of course it did Sookie" Eric said, patting my leg.

"At least it's getting cooler now" I said.

"Yeah" Eric agreed.

We sat there for a bit longer and I tried to figure out what I was going to say. In the end Eric spoke again "It's kind of hard work, isn't it?" he asked. "With three of them."

"Yeah, it is. They're loud. Well, Sam's not."

"Only when he cries."

"Only when he has a grumpy-cry. I think that's his equivalent of you stomping around swearing."

Eric snorted. "I don't stomp. Everyone else around here fucking stomps."

"Yeah, yeah. You're perfect, I know."

"Well, maybe not perfect" Eric said. "But I was good. Look." He held up the back of one of his hands and I squinted at it in the fading light.

"Oh. You've got one of Amelia's Hello Kitty stamps. Yeah, you were good then. Sam got a really long lecture on why he wasn't getting one."

"Yep, definitely good" Eric agreed.

"So…are you enjoying your break? Hanging out with the kids?" I asked.

Eric shrugged. "Yeah, it's great. When they behave. And no one's injured. Or swearing. Or crying. Or singing the wrong words to songs. It's fine."

"Just fine?"

Eric turned to look at me. "Best thing ever" he said. "You know that."

"Yeah, I do. I wanted to ask you something though?"

"Yeah?" Eric said, his arm drifting around my back.

"Um…well, you know I was talking to Judith last week. About work? Well, I was thinking about when I'd go back to it. It's not really fair to expect Irene and Judith to do it all without me."

"Well, you're paying them" Eric said.

"Yeah, I am. But…I kind of miss it. I like doing it, and I thought that maybe I'd study a bit of Early Childhood Education, through the Open Polytechnic or something. Just so I have some background in it. It might be interesting. And I do have that office."

"You definitely do" Eric agreed. "And if you want to do some study, then fine, go ahead."

"You're sure?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well" I said, "I might have to study in the evenings."

"I can cope with being in charge of the remote for a while I think, Sookie."

"Yeah, OK then." I paused. "There was one other thing."

"Shoot" Eric said, as he started nuzzling my neck.

"That's not conducive to conversation, Eric" I said.

"Mmm" was the only response I got.

"Well" I said, concentrating on forming coherent sentences. "I've got an office in the new place, but you've got an office too."

"Yep" Eric agreed.

"So maybe…I was thinking…if you thought it would work…" I trailed off. Eric stopped nuzzling and pulled back. "Come out with it, Sookie" he said.

"Well, you know how you like hanging out with Sam?" I asked.

"Mmm."

"I was thinking, that maybe you could work from home one day a week and hang out with him some more, and I could do one day of Jumping Beans." I looked at Eric to see his reaction. I could see he was thinking it all through.

"But…feeding him?" Eric asked in the end.

"I think he'd be OK with bottles. I could express."

"You said you didn't like expressing."

I sighed. "Well, it's not a lot of fun, but I could do it. But if you think it won't work, just say so."

Eric looked thoughtful. "We could try it, I guess."

"Well, it wouldn't be until February anyway, that's when we start the classes up again."

"Yeah. We could give it a try then" Eric said.

"You sure?" I asked. I didn't want him to feel like I'd ambushed him with this.

"Yeah" he said. "Yeah, I am. It'll be nice hanging out with just Sam. And he won't be much trouble will he? I mean, it's not like he can fall over or tell random strangers our life stories, is it?"

"No, mostly it'll be nappies and sleeps."

"Well I can handle that" Eric said, fairly decisively. "So we'll do it." And then he went back to nuzzling my neck. I wanted to double check that he was really happy with that decision, but he seemed to have moved onto other things. His hands were quite busy feeling me up.

"Eric" I said, "Are you angling for sex on the deck?"

He looked at me. "Well it might be the last time on this deck" he said. "And I have been a very good boy." He held up his hand so I could see his stamp again.

"And you haven't had sex on the table yet?" I asked.

"No" he grumbled. "But you befriended the neighbour, so I have high hopes we can dump the kids with her one afternoon and try that one out."

"Yeah, I'm not really sure you can ask someone to watch the kids so you can sneak off and have sex. In a room with no blinds where they can see exactly what you're up to."

Eric sighed. "Good point. I'll call the blind person next week. In the meantime, we still have a deck."

"We do" I agreed. "OK, I'll get the blankets, you get the sensor light."

"Fucking excellent" Eric said, as he sprinted inside.

**A/N So like British people, we tend to use loo as slang for toilet. And instead of courses we tend to say paper when we talk higher education, you'd do a paper in Medieval English Literature, rather than a course in it.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	89. Chapter 89

**A/N OK, so this is a bit shorter because some of my writing time was cut into by a snotty toddler trying to climb my leg and make me do 'row, row, row the boat' with her many, many times. She's lovely, but she needs a new friend who isn't me and isn't the cat who keeps running away. But I do so love the fact that you guys are all reading, and that I'm still collecting new readers even at this point in the story when it feels like it's been going for half a lifetime (ask the toddler), that I thought I would get something out. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

At this point in our relationship Eric had spent a long time telling me he wasn't interested in paint and wallpaper. Once I almost thought we might break up when my insistence on watching the end of _60 Minute Makeover _and finding out exactly how the finished rooms all looked, clashed with Eric's deep desire to change the channel and watch the start of some crappy war movie. Somehow me pointing out that watching the end of something I'd already invested 45 minutes in was far more important than Eric missing 15 minutes of something that ran for three hours didn't cut it with him. Nor did my accusation of TV snobbery make the situation any better. It got a bit nasty. And I still ended up missing out on seeing whether the green patterned wallpaper in the dining room really did look OK with all that crystal they had in the chandelier and the white sideboard they'd had to remove a window to get in there.

However, what I hadn't realised was that this total disinterest didn't extend to the house he'd be living in. Stupidly, I'd thought I'd kind of have carte blanche on the décor and I'd been really looking forward to it. The current house had been decorated in a totally piece-meal fashion over a number of years, and there were still rooms that I hadn't really touched in the time I'd been there because they fell into the category of good enough.

So I'd gone into this renovation project thinking how much fun it was going to be to design the look of a whole house from scratch. I'd been surreptitiously buying decorating magazines and storing away my stock of ideas.

But I hadn't counted on the Eric Northman factor. "No" he'd said, when I showed him the exact shade of blue I wanted for the family room, having whittled it down from about three possible choices. I'd just put Sam into his cot and grabbed the colour chart out of the kitchen on my way to join Eric in the living room.

"It's too pale" Eric said. "It'll look all washed out."

I sat down next to Eric on the couch. "No it won't" I argued. "It will be um, relaxing. You know, sort of elegant." I'd spent a long time picking this colour.

Eric frowned. "No" he said in the end. "It won't really go with the couches."

"Well I might know that. If I'd actually picked the couches" I pointed out. Eric did at least look briefly embarrassed at that. Honestly, he was hopeless and I had no idea what else he might have already purchased for the house without my input.

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "But they're coming now, so we need to pick a colour that goes with them, otherwise they'll look a bit shit."

I refrained from pointing out that for all I knew they looked a bit shit anyway. Eric could have bought any old couches and I won't know until they turned up, but so far he hadn't bought anything too crap so we were probably safe.

Well, the house. The house was a big pile of poo when we first saw it and really Eric would have been happier if he'd been able to just buy it and tell me about it later. Although probably in that scenario I would be yet to know about it and I would be having lots of weird conversations with Calvin in which he wouldn't make eye contact any time I asked him how work was going.

"So what colour goes with the couches?" I asked Eric, holding up the little card with the shades of blue on it. "I want to start getting test pots so we can pick a couple and try them out." Although I was pretty sure the one I really liked would be the best, it would probably pay to get a few and see how the light in the room affected them.

Eric studied the card. "Well, that one's nice" he said, pointing at the darkest shade on the card.

"That one's kind of um, bright" I said.

"Which is nice" Eric reiterated.

"Yeah, but for a whole wall?" I asked. I mean, feature walls were nice but sometimes they kind of dominated.

"Well, for the whole room" Eric said.

"Oh" I said, not sure what to say to that and wondering if I had any chance of getting him to sit down and watch a _60 Minute Makeover_ marathon with me so he'd kind of understand where we were going with this decorating thing. "Maybe we could get some wallpaper in there as well…" I said.

"No" Eric said decisively. "Wallpaper in the living room, but not the family room. I just want paint."

"You do?" I asked, wondering when the body snatchers had taken away the Eric who didn't care about interior decorating.

"I do" he said happily. "I have a plan for it."

"Oh" I said again. I thought I had the plans for the interior.

"It'll be great" Eric said enthusiastically, perhaps sensing that I was wavering on the matter. "It's a family room so it's supposed to be, I don't know, bright and interesting."

"Yeah…" I said, feeling my dreams of a nice, cool, elegant pale blue fading into the background. There had been wallpaper too, in my plan. Wallpaper with flowers and birds on it.

"Maybe we could look at wallpaper?" Eric said, sensing my disappointment.

"Well, maybe" I said. "But maybe not the wallpaper I had originally picked."

"Mmm" Eric agreed, putting his arm around me. "I actually had some ideas about wallpapers." Well, of course he did. "I picked up a sample book the other day, but I left it at the house."

"You did?" I asked.

"Yeah" Eric said. "I'll show you next time we go there. You can see the ones I thought will look the best." And then he turned his attention back to the TV as if that was the matter settled.

I guessed in his mind it was.

But apart from the minor territory-war that was going on between Eric and I over the decorating, the house was really shaping up now. Calvin, Hunter and Dixon had worked flat-out through January and things were really taking shape in there now. I could actually see where all the different rooms were going to be and only some of them were a surprise to me.

The kitchen when it had been installed was a bit of a revelation. We'd had to order it before Christmas when I was, literally, up to my boobs in baby almost 24 hours a day so Eric had kind of waved some brochures in my direction and I'd said he could sort it all out with the kitchen people.

When we called in the evening after the first day's installation, I suddenly realised just how many cupboards we were getting in there. There were a lot of cupboards. And they were high. I hadn't really registered how high the ceilings in the house were until saw how high up the wall they could fit cupboards. Huh.

"What do you think?" Eric has asked, as we wandered around checking out what had been done. Eric was holding Sam and Amelia and Felicia had gone next door to annoy Kennedy and probably have a fight over who was going to be allowed to put the bird-seed in Kennedy's birdhouse. I wasn't sure if she was planning on having kids at any time in the near future, but I couldn't help but wonder sometimes if my kids weren't the best contraceptives she'd ever had.

"Well, I like the pantry" I said, looking at it. It was the only cupboard which had actually had any doors hung so far. I opened them up and peered inside. It was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. "God, Eric. It's huge" I said, with my head still half in the pantry.

"Finally!" he replied. 'I thought I was never going to hear you say that to me."

"Ha ha, you're hilarious" I deadpanned, shutting the pantry again. I looked over at Eric and he was grinning at me and Sam was kind of looking from me, to Eric and back again and obviously trying to figure out what the hell was going on. He tried smiling at me too to see if it would get a response, and I smiled back. Satisfied that he was still the most important person in my life, Sam went back to sucking his fingers and wiping them on Eric's tie.

I went back to looking at the rest of the kitchen. "So, those cupboards are kind of high, don't you think?" I asked Eric.

"Not really" he said. "They're meant to be up fairly high."

I walked over to one and waved my hand above my head trying to reach the imaginary door which hadn't been fitted yet. Eric watched my demonstration and then frowned. "I forget how short you are" he muttered.

"I'm really not" I said. "Have you seen me stand next to Judith, or Portia or any of that lot?"

"Well…maybe they're a short family" Eric said.

"Um, Tara? And Debbie, I think I'm taller than Debbie..." I wasn't sure. Maybe I was.

Eric shrugged. "Well they're up there now. And if they were too low, you'd just have a huge amount of wasted space between the top and the ceiling."

"I guess" I said, wondering if would have made any difference to how many cobwebs were going to gather up there. Probably not. I sighed. "You might have to be in charge of getting some of the stuff in and out of the cupboards" I said to Eric.

"Sure" he agreed.

I walked over to where he and Sam were standing. "At least until Sam gets big enough to take over" I said to Sam, who gave me a big, drooly grin.

"Oh no, you can't give me a job and then just replace me" Eric complained. I patted his shoulder. "I think you've got a few years of it yet" I said. "You'll probably be hiring your own replacement before too long.

EPOV

The house was really starting to look like I imagined it now that the real grunt-work of pulling out walls and windows and part of the ceiling had been done. It had been rewired, partially re-piled and now the interior work was underway. And I was enjoying the interiors a lot more than I thought I would. Maybe because it was my own place and this was the first time I'd really given that much thought to the kind of space I wanted to live in, or maybe it was just that I didn't have to listen to any self-important, smug interior designers going on about it all, like I did when I watched one of Sookie's many home-improvement TV shows.

I think Sookie liked my input. It wouldn't have really been fair to leave it all to her after all. And we would have ended up with a rather insipid looking house, in my opinion. Although I realised I may have fucked it up slightly when I saw the kitchen cupboards compared to Sookie. Yeah, they were kind of high for her.

I'd have to get Calvin to make her a step-stool or something.

But it was finally fucking starting to look like a house and not just a pile of rubble, and I found that kind of exciting. I'd never done this before, never bought a whole house and kind of made it into what I wanted, rather than just move in and take it as it came. I don't think it had ever occurred to me that I might change the colour of the walls in the condo I'd owned in Shreveport. It was just a place to sleep and eat mostly.

This however, this was a whole different ballgame. This was the home I was creating for my family. The one we'd stay in forever. So we didn't have to do this whole shitty buying a place and renovating it again. I'm pretty sure it had aged me exponentially.

We finished up seeing what the kitchen installers had done, and locked up the house. Sam seemed pretty interested in what was going on these days and I think he liked the trips to the new house. Although not as much as he liked it when Sookie smiled at him. It was pretty obvious he was totally smitten with his mom and it was hard to blame him for that.

Amelia and Felicia were next door with the neighbour who hadn't turned out to be a psycho and instead had quite a big fan following from the kids. Well the girls liked her. Sam was a bit ambivalent because she wasn't Sookie. I was just glad she put up with them and I didn't have to worry quite so much about Felicia wandering off these days. Annoyingly, they didn't let you microchip kids in the same way I'd had a microchip inserted in Bob's shoulder the last time I took him to the vet's to get his teeth cleaned. Sookie and Bob had both looked fucking grumpy at me over that one but I wasn't risking him running off when we moved and Sookie being distraught for days over it. Plus I'd just have to buy her a new cat and there was every chance I'd pick one who was more of a pain in the ass than Bob, I knew fuck-all about cats after all. So all in all, it was better we keep Bob around for as long as possible.

We walked around to the backyard of Kennedy's house to find Amelia and Felicia dancing enthusiastically to the radio while Kennedy was doing something with some pot-plants. Sookie leaned over to me as we walked closer to where the girls were. "Not sure we should let Amelia watch too many more music videos" she whispered. "Her moves are getting kind of raunchy."

I looked at Sookie to see if she was joking, but she wasn't. I looked at Amelia again. Yeah, there was no mistaking where she'd learnt to dance like that; she was doing a perfect imitation of Sookie herself. I wasn't sure whether they'd both been born with the innate ability to shake their ass and toss their hair at the same time, or whether Amelia's was the result of constant exposure to Sookie as they danced around the living room together, but fuck, you could really fucking tell they were related.

However I was reluctant to point all this out to Sookie because I didn't want her to think she had to stop dancing around the house. I liked it when she danced, and _especially_ when she did the raunchy moves. So I went with making an 'mmm' noise and left it at that.

We managed to pull Amelia and Felicia away from their new best friend, but not without a fair amount of whining. I left Sookie holding Sam and put the girls in the car, but I still had to go back and get Sookie who wasn't really keen on leaving either and was still talking to Kennedy about fuck knows what. From the expression on Sam's face whatever they were talking about was fucking boring, he was gazing off into the distance.

At least Sookie didn't whine when I told her we were all ready to leave. "OK" she said. "Bye Kennedy. Thanks for having the monsters over here."

"Oh yeah, no problem. They're pretty easy to entertain" Kennedy replied, lifting one hand with a dirt-covered glove on it to wave to Sam. He smiled at that.

"Bye you guys. And Eric?" Kennedy called out as we started to walk off.

"Yeah?" I replied.

"Enjoy tomorrow, won't you" she said, before looking back down at her pots.

"Yeah, thanks" I replied, and then I kind of steered Sookie to the car before she thought of something else she wanted to say.

The next day was my first day as a stay at home parent. Well, co-parent, really. Sookie was going to be around as well, but it was Amelia's first day back at school and Sookie's classes hadn't started up again yet, so it was the best day for us to try out the new arrangement.

I'd had a word to Sam about it all and he seemed OK with the concept, although I'm not sure the reality of there being absolutely no boob-time for a whole day had really sunk in. So far in his experience of life, every time something was going wrong for him, nine times out of ten Sookie magically appeared and made it all better.

Sometimes it was hard not to feel just a tiny bit fucking jealous of that.

So while he didn't mind hanging out with me, I think he worked on the principle that the better alternative was always lurking around in the shadows ready to jump in if I fucked it up too badly. But that wasn't going to be the case tomorrow.

We stopped at the supermarket on the way back to the current house so Sookie could pick up a cooked chicken, which she would then manage to turn into this really nice chicken and rice warm salad she often made in the summer. I still liked her cooking, even when she got carried away watching Masterchef and did weird experimental things, it was still pretty fucking nice when someone else fed you.

And I'm sure Sam agreed with me about that. Although he was definitely starting to notice what we were eating now. He'd look kind of longingly at anything on my plate, and I could see that he thought I was getting some kind of special attention from Sookie that he was missing out on.

Well I was, but he'd just have to fucking learn to live with that.

Sookie was sticking to her guns about no solid food before five months though, so Sam was shit out of luck on that front. I guess big eyes and a toothless grin will only get you so far in life. And in the meantime, I was looking forward to my chicken salad.

Amelia, however, was looking for something else. "Where's my blackboard?" she said, stomping into the kitchen. "I want to play schools."

"Oh" Sookie said, looking up from where she was ripping up the chicken. "I packed it."

Amelia sighed and stomped off. Yeah, a lot of stuff was getting packed these days. In fact if you left anything sitting around for too long, Sookie found a box to put it in. Some days I was slightly fearful I was going to come home and find Sam had been moved to one of the many cardboard boxes that littered the place from time to time, until Sookie moved them to the new house. Felicia and I had learnt the hard way, however, that you weren't allowed to use the boxes to build a fort.

But the place was pretty box-free at this point in time. Mostly because it was now officially up for sale. So instead of fretting about what she could pack away in boxes, Sookie was fretting about who was making what mess and when, because although there were officially designated open house times, Maudette seemed to be fond of bringing prospective buyers around during the day when she knew Sookie would be home. Sookie was less than fond of that, although her desire to get the house sold made her put up with it, although her ability to put up with us was sometimes sorely tested. Once again, Felicia and I had found ourselves on the receiving end of the chain of misery when bathtime got out of hand and Sookie complained about the amount of water everywhere.

So the sooner this place was sold, the better.

SPOV

Amelia's first day back at school was a Thursday, which seemed a bit odd, but somehow it always worked like that when they had to regulate the number of teaching days. Still it meant it was a perfect day for Eric to practice being at home with Sam while the other kids were occupied and I was still around. Jumping Beans didn't start up again until the following week, although I had been doing a fair amount of admin work in the last couple of weeks, working through enrolments and payments and making sure our rent was paid for the halls we used, and just generally sorting everything out.

Although Judith was a quite a big help with it all, which was great because I had a lot of other stuff going on right now. There was the packing and the constant house-cleaning, both of which had me going around and around in circles. Literally sometimes when it came to cleaning up the messes the rest of the household were fond of leaving around.

And then I'd been trying to fit in expressing, which was a chore in itself sometimes. But I wanted a bit of time to go to work back, so I had to suck it up. Or suck it out, anyway. And having Amelia hovering around wondering what on earth I was doing to myself didn't make it any the more pleasant.

But she was back to school today, which was going to make Felicia relieved as she'd been a bit worried that she was going to pre-school and Amelia was staying home with me and Sam. That was so completely wrong to her that she'd ended up staying home as well a few days. Those were always the days that Eric's real estate agent Maudette wanted to bring people around to show them the house.

Amelia seemed happy enough when I packed her into the car to drive to school. She had a new uniform, having grown out of the previous year's one, a new purple schoolbag, that was a surf brand and not one with any cartoon characters on it, and half the stock of the Smiggle stationery shop.

Felicia was obviously happy too, well, until she realised Eric was staying home. With Sam. "Daddy no goin' t'work?" she asked me, as we walked to the car.

"Um. He's working" I said. "From home."

"Sam's no workin' tho'" she said, looking back towards the door. "So…what they goin' to do?"

"Well, Sam's probably going to sleep a lot. And just kind of…let Daddy get on with it."

"He has t'be good?" Felicia asked.

"Yep" I said. "That would help."

"Oh. I don' know if he can be" Felicia said, while we ignored Amelia yelling "Come ON!" from the car.

"I think he can" I said. "I have faith in him." I helped Felicia get in the car. I had faith in Eric too, so I'd agreed to run some errands this morning and let him get on with it. How bad could it be? I'd left him a very detailed note.

Shit, I thought. I really hope he actually reads this note.

**Thanks for reading!**


	90. Chapter 90

**A/N So my kids tend to talk a lot. I can't think where they get that from. No, really, I can't. But the toddler is getting quite good at it, and tonight at dinner she said what I'm counting as her first three word sentence "Pasta, mmm nice!" Her father thinks she sounds a little bit like Borat, but I thought it was cute. Cuter than the farting that went on after the two bowls of pasta anyway!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Amelia didn't shut up on the short drive to school. I think that Felicia was quiet because she was still processing the whole scenario of Daddy and Sam being left at home by themselves, to do all sorts of potentially exciting things without her. But I couldn't really tell. Mostly all I could hear was Amelia going on at length about how much she was going to enjoy this year at school and who she was going to sit with and which pencil she was going to use first and how 'everyone' was going to love her new schoolbag.

So really, Felicia and I had no chance at all competing with that.

Parking was at a premium when we got to school. I guess there were a lot of parents who were making sure their kids were OK on their first day, and the walking buses hadn't started up for the year yet, of course. So we had to park a way down the street which made Amelia start stressing about whether or not she'd be late and as a consequence Felicia got lectured at length about not dawdling.

I'm pretty sure that just made Felicia walk slower.

We finally made it to Amelia's new classroom and the noise there was pretty horrific as kids and parents were all talking to each other and catching up. I saw Halleigh walk past with Riley and waved to her. At four months younger than Amelia, Riley was stuck doing another year of Year One, but he didn't seem to mind. Apparently he wasn't particularly interested in school because it involved a total lack of anything to do with _Ben 10_.

Amelia was the exact opposite. She immediately threw herself into the centre of the throng of kids and started working out where the best cubby-hole for her bag was. Even after nearly six years' I was still amazed I'd managed to produce such a confident child. I didn't think I'd ever been like that. I'd like to take the credit for it all, but I suspected some of it was just a fluke of genetics. Amelia had arrived with a startling combination of Judith's ability to talk to anyone whose path she crossed and Jason's confidence that the world loved him. It was just a shame that she hadn't had a little bit more of Bill's charm, or, at the very least, his tact.

Felicia was confident too, although in a totally different way which was somehow displayed by the way she just got on and did things, rather than how she talked about it. The only other person I knew like that was Eric, so she'd obviously picked up something in the years he'd been with us. Which was most of her life when you thought about it.

However Felicia wasn't feeling quite so confident at the moment. "Dis not school" she said to me, plaintively. Yeah, she'd started to feel at home with Amelia's previous class, but this was all different and it was going to take Felicia a while to get used to.

A few familiar faces started to turn up. Maisie arrived and she was thrilled to discover she had the same backpack as Amelia, only hers was blue. The pair of them hugged and jumped up and down and squealed a lot, while I chatted to Maisie's mum Becs about their family holiday in Pauanui and the fact she was pregnant, which was a bit of a revelation to me. I guess Maisie was going to be the one getting a baby this year. I wondered how Becs was going to find having a six year age gap between her kids, but I didn't like to press for the reasons as to why it had happened. For all I knew she'd had trouble getting pregnant or a bad delivery with Maisie that had put her off doing it again. There were all sorts of possibilities I figured, but I had no desire to find out all of Becs' secrets, so I simply congratulated her, asked about her due date and carried on with the conversation, until Becs drifted off to help Maisie find her pencil case in her bag.

Emily turned up, without Tanya who'd dropped her at the gate and gone to work. I was thankful to not have to talk to Tanya, but couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Emily having to sort everything out for herself.

Emily didn't seem upset and immediately went up to Maisie and Amelia and started telling them what a brilliant time she'd had over summer hanging out with her dad's girlfriend and her mum's new 'friend', Michael, who had been having school holidays too, apparently.

Oh crap, I thought. Tanya's got herself a toyboy. I just hoped Emily meant university holidays at least. See, this was why I didn't want to know other people's secrets. It just got weird.

Although I wouldn't have been upset if Debbie found out, given all the things she'd thought about me.

And I realised that Debbie must have shown up at that point because Felicia yelled "Bessian!" and went running off to greet him.

"Hi!" she said. "D'ya haf a good 'oliday?"

"Yeah" Sebastian replied, putting his bag down.

Felicia beamed at him. "I's played golf. I's good at golf."

"My dad plays golf" Sebastian told her.

"I could play wif him" Felicia announced. "Or you? I could play wif you?"

"Well…maybe" Sebastian agreed.

Debbie was wandering around introducing herself to the parents who didn't know her, and saying hello to those who did. I'd seen an email come around about how she was happy to be the class organiser again as long as no one objected, and I didn't want that job so I wasn't about to stick my two cents' worth in. Of course it meant another year of Debbie bossing me, but I could live with that.

"So Sookie" she said, when she got around to me. "You're still OK for Mondays? For mother help?"

"Yeah" I said, "As long as the new teacher doesn't mind me bringing the other two with me."

"Hmmm" Debbie said thoughtfully. Then she looked like something had occurred to her. "Where is the baby, anyway?" she asked me, sharply.

"With Eric" I replied. "He's working from home today."

"Oh" Debbie said. "Really?" she asked, as though I was just making it up and I'd really left Sam alone in a hot car.

"Uh-huh" I confirmed. "We're doing a trial, before I go back to work one day a week."

Debbie looked at me like I was something she'd scraped off her shoe. "With _three_ kids?" she asked. "You want to work with three kids?"

"Yeah, well one day a week from 9 until 2 I want to work." I didn't think it was that much. Debbie obviously did but she decided to hold her tongue. Plus the fact Amelia chose that moment to come over.

"Sebastian's mum" she said to Debbie, "Is he sitting with us this year? Only I don't think he knows he is." She looked at Debbie expectantly.

"Well, really it's up to Sebby" Debbie said, looking over to Sebastian who was looking at the ground while Felicia told him all about her friend Kennedy who had a bird-house.

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Well, he is then. He likes me. I'll tell him." She walked over to Sebastian. "You're sitting with us" she said. "Because you like me, and I'm not mean to you. It's better when you don't cry." Sebastian looked up at Amelia, over at a group of boys who were all shoving each other around, and then back down at the ground before giving a slight shrug. Yeah, tact would have been a good addition to Amelia's repertoire.

The new teacher, who I think was called Mrs Phillips, called the class in and they trooped inside. Amelia had to be reminded to kiss me goodbye, she was so focussed on getting inside the classroom and staking her claim. Felicia yelled "Bye Bessian!" and got a slight nod of the head in acknowledgment, and then they were gone.

Well, except Chloe, who came running up with her mum Danielle trailing behind her. "I'm going to be late!" she wailed, in her whispery little voice.

"No, I think you're fine" Danielle said. "Although I was sure it wasn't today school started."

Poor Chloe was struggling out of her bag and then turned to her mum. "I don't have a pencil" she said.

"Um…" Danielle looked thoughtful, and then she sat in the middle of the floor in the entrance to the classroom and tipped her large, fabric shoulder bag upside down, spilling its contents all over the linoleum floor. She and Chloe hurriedly started looking through everything until they uncovered a small ballpoint pen. "That'll have to do" Danielle said.

"OK" Chloe said, sadly.

"Amelia might have a spare pencil" I said to her. I knew for a fact that Amelia had a lot of pencils, I just hoped there was one there she might let Chloe borrow.

"OK" Chloe said, sounding about 5% happier than before. It was hard to tell with her. She walked into the classroom and I could hear someone yell "Chloe!" so I figured she'd be OK. Danielle was busy packing everything back into her bag, including all the used tissues and half unwrapped tampons, and I just said a collective "Bye!" to all the mums still there and walked out with Felicia.

"Bessian likes me" she grumbled.

"Yeah, he does" I agreed.

"He no like bein' bossed."

"No. Well no one does, really" I agreed.

"Amealya's bossy" Felicia said.

"Well…she just has ideas about things and sometimes forgets that the rest of us might have different ideas." I thought about that statement in light of the whole nature versus nurture thing I'd been talking about earlier, and gave up. That one was too hard to unravel.

"Is Sam bossin' Daddy?" Felicia asked, as we finally reached the car.

"No. No, Sam won't be bossing Daddy" I assured her. "Sam'll be asleep. He had a big breakfast and now he'll be having a big nap and Daddy will be working."

Felicia didn't say anything to that, so I strapped her into her carseat and we set off for daycare.

EPOV

In theory I was supposed to be having a really fucking quiet morning. That's what Sookie had said, in between waving a piece of paper on which she'd written a novel at me. She'd said that Sam would sleep and I'd be able to get a lot of work done.

But that wasn't the case. Because Sam wasn't asleep. Sam was lying in bed, sure enough, but he was fucking yelling the place down. How the fuck he knew that Sookie wasn't here, I didn't know, but he did.

And I was pretty sure he was punishing me for it.

I tried reading another email, but, between the fact I was stuck working in the family room and the sun was pouring in the doors and making me hot, and the fact that all I could hear was the world's fucking loudest baby, I couldn't really focus.

I walked into Sam's room, which wasn't getting the morning sun, so I wasn't sure what he was complaining about. He looked at me tearfully and let out another wail. Yeah, he wasn't fucking sleeping anytime soon.

I picked him up. "You're supposed to be asleep" I said to him. "Mom said she fed you, so you'd sleep now. You can't be fucking hungry." I remembered Sookie saying that, as she walked out the door with Felicia. She'd also said everything else was in the note, but the note seemed almost as long as the note she'd left when she'd gone into hospital to have Sam.

I really needed to talk to her about bullet points.

I didn't think the note was going help me with this one, because Sam seemed to be working off-plan. He clearly hadn't read his mother's note either.

Still, he was a baby. How bad could it be? There weren't a lot of options for what could be wrong with him.

So I laid him on the change table which made him yell and go distinctly red in the face. I wondered at what point babies burst blood vessels. I checked his diaper, but it seemed pretty clean. I changed it anyway, as though that might get me out of having to do it again anytime soon.

If only it really did work that way.

Next on the list was food. I put Sam in his bouncer and took a bottle of expressed milk out of the refrigerator and put it into a bowl of boiling water, pleased I could remember the whole 'no microwaving breastmilk' lecture without having to refer to the written instructions.

Babies weren't that hard to figure out after all.

Sam stared at me and sucked his fingers, probably wondering where Sookie was. "She's out" I informed him. "But she'll be back. Around lunchtime. At which point, we can demonstrate how well we're coping. And the first part of us coping is you drinking this." I held up the bottle and tested it, while Sam looked on in a kind of bewildered fashion. Yeah, that was not part of his plan for the morning.

I grabbed Sam out of the bouncer, and the bottle in the other hand, and went into the living room to sit down. I briefly wondered about getting Sam a bib, but he was probably due to shit through his clothes again any minute so it seemed a waste of time.

I settled myself on the couch, grabbed the remote and tried to get Sam to take the bottle. He gave me his best 'oh, hell no' expression and burst into tears.

Fuck, maybe this wasn't going to work.

"Come on, buddy" I said. "We can't show Mom we're coping if you don't hold up your end of the deal. Remember the deal?" Sam looked at me blankly. "The deal where you helped me out with this and I made sure you got extra boob-time?" I wasn't quite sure how I was going to achieve that, but I couldn't think of any other good bargaining points that might appeal to a four month old.

However Sam seemed keen to renege on his end of the deal, and turned his face away from the bottle. I sighed. "Fine. Have it your way. Be fucking difficult" I muttered. Sam looked kind of triumphant and turned away from me to look at the TV.

He was fucking stubborn like his mother.

I started flipping through the channels looking for something decent to watch now it appeared I was stuck on the couch. Mostly it was shit this time of the morning. Lots of infomercials and weird-ass talk shows and Sookie's beloved cooking and home improvement shows. Sam seemed even less keen on watching any of it than I was, as he was starting to wriggle around a bit.

I kept clicking the remote until we reached the sport channels. There was basketball. Possibly it was a New Zealand team playing an Australian team, but we could watch that I thought.

Sam was fucking mesmerised.

He got very still, and very, very focussed. So focussed, I thought it might be an idea to try the bottle again. Sure enough, as long as I didn't block his view of the TV screen with the bottle he was happy enough to have some milk.

So that was mission accomplished.

Except that when he'd finished his milk and let a huge, satisfied burp, I wasn't sure what to do with him. We couldn't sit here and watch TV all day, as appealing as that idea was. I still had to work.

I tried putting Sam back down in his crib, but he just started yelling again. I guess he was lonely. He was probably missing Sookie and this was his way of telling me to go and get her.

Well, I would, but it would be kind of an admission of defeat, and I wasn't about to give up just yet.

Instead I got him back up and put him in his bouncer which I placed on the floor behind where I was sitting in the family room. I sat back down in the chair and started trying to work, but Sam was still whimpering.

Fuck, this wasn't quite as straightforward as I'd thought it would be.

I sighed, and walked over to the kitchen to find the note. I skimmed a few paragraphs. There was a lot of information in this note, and much of it wasn't relevant to the current situation. I wasn't sure I really needed to know which toys had to be placed where when Sam did tummy-time.

But I did see the point that said he liked being read to. Well, we could try that.

I walked back to the chair and sat down in front of the lap-top. "So, Indira says in this email that they've had a meeting with Barry and Hugo and gone over the findings so far in preparation for making a formal presentation to the board next week. Fuck, I hope Clancy doesn't fuck that up" I said to Sam. I turned around to look at him. Yeah, he knew what I meant about Clancy.

"She says the recommendations are pretty much what we thought they were going to be, and the marketing team there have been earning their bonuses by constantly thinking up new product offerings without any hooks that were going to bring new customers in, so they've ended up with a pricing structure which is all over the fucking place and half the time the front-line staff are simply putting exemptions in place anyway, because no one can correctly identify what product costs what. Yeah, that sounds fucking typical." I turned to look at Sam. He wasn't grizzling and he was kind of following me, so I continued on.

"So the presentation is next Wednesday. Fuck, I kind of wish I could be there, but it wouldn't really be fair on you guys." I paused and tried to figure out a scenario in which I could fly there and it would work out for me there and at home, but I couldn't think of one so I had to shelve that idea.

"They'll be OK" I said to Sam. "As long as Clancy doesn't fucking open his mouth. Indira will be fine. OK, what else does she say? Um, new office is good, but Clancy never fucking takes his turn cleaning the coffeemaker, well, that's not fucking surprising. She says if she can renegotiate the contract for the next six months she might look at buying a bigger place. Yeah, she fucking needs to, her place is a closet. Although I'm not sure about the renegotiating thing. I might need to talk her through that. And…" I paused skimming through the email. "I really need to talk to Indira about bullet points too. Oh, hang on. Something about Clancy and Ginger. What the fuck? Last I heard she wouldn't go near him."

I looked at Sam and he looked back at me. "I don't know, it seems kind of like fucking gossip, do we want to know what the fucking story is behind that?"

Sam definitely looked like he wanted to know. "You're right" I agreed. "It does seem kind of fucking weird. It's fucking _Clancy_ after all. Maybe Ginger's got brain-cancer or something. Something that's fucked up her short term memory so she doesn't remember what a total douche Clancy is." I sent a quick reply to Indira asking her what the fuck was going on there. While we waited for her response, I entertained Sam by reading him a couple of emails from Jake Purifoy, telling him what my response was, and then we read an on-line article about the state of the New Zealand economy together.

Yeah, Sam was pretty easy to entertain really.

After a while a new email from Indira appeared in my in-box. "She says that his cat had kittens and he gave her one after he mentioned it when they had a meeting with Hugo, and she said she loved cats. So since then they've been hanging out a lot although Ginger insists it's not serious and Indira thinks she might be stringing him along until someone better turns up and she's not sure about having to deal with Clancy's broken heart when the shit hits the fan. Yeah, fuck. Good luck to Indira with that one. I don't really have any advice for her. What about you?" I looked at Sam; he'd fallen asleep in the bouncer. Yeah, Clancy's love-life was pretty fucking boring.

I sent Indira a quick note to say it was probably best to just keep out of it, and then I got on with doing something else.

I'd been working for about an hour when my phone rang. It was Maudette; apparently she wanted to bring someone through the house in about an hour's time. I figured I should let her do it; we really needed to fucking get this place sold as we were moving in a few weeks, if everything went OK with the new house. We had some fucking huge bills about to hit and I really wanted the cash from this place to pay them with.

Bathrooms weren't cheap.

Sam woke up so I changed him and tried to get him to drink some more milk, but he was over the bottle for the morning and just yelled at me. Yeah, I think at that point I was supposed to produce Sookie for him, but it wasn't going to happen.

We got in the car and drove to the new house so Maudette could show our house in peace and Sam and I could check on what was happening with the bathroom installation. Calvin was managing it all for me, but it didn't hurt to show my face around there occasionally and just check it was all going OK.

The plumbers seemed to have it under control when we got there, and Calvin was busy working in one of the bedrooms, replacing some of the drywall. "Hey, Eric" he said, as I walked in. "You're not at work?"

"No, I'm working from home, but we came to check out the bathrooms. I stuck my head in, and it looks OK."

"Yeah, they reckon they'll get the sinks in there tomorrow."

"Well, that'll please Sookie. They were her idea" I said.

Sam was watching us curiously from his place in the capsule. He liked coming here, well, I thought he did, anyway. He always seemed interested in what was going on.

Calvin and I talked about the house for a while, and Hunter wandered in and out a few times. He seemed more subdued than usual. "What's up with him?" I asked Calvin, as he left the room again.

"Oh, his girlfriend dumped him, apparently."

"Ah" I said. That explained it. It didn't seem to be affecting his work though, so I wasn't about to go into details with the poor fucking kid. As it was, I felt like I knew far, far too much about Clancy's relationship as it was.

Hunter came back in the room. "I'm going to get lunch" he mumbled, before leaving again.

Sam was getting kind of restless and I remembered there was supposed to be something about tummy-time, so I got him out of the capsule and put him on a fairly clean coversheet on the floor. He looked a bit bored.

I pushed a hammer over to him so he could look at it. That made him happier.

I could hear the plumbers talking to each other about how the shower was being installed and I wandered out to see how that was going, and make sure they weren't doing anything we hadn't discussed. When I got back to where I'd left Sam, he wasn't exactly where I'd left him. He seemed a lot closer to the hammer.

He was still on his stomach though, so he couldn't have rolled. He rolled onto his back quite frequently now, and occasionally he'd managed to roll from his back to his front if he really wanted get Sookie's attention. I just wasn't quite sure what he'd done.

I moved the hammer a bit further away again and went back to chatting with Calvin.

Hunter came back in and handed Calvin a pie. "I got you one too" he said, handing me a rather greasy looking paper bag. "Thanks" I said. Hunter just nodded and started eating his.

Calvin got off his ladder to eat and I sat on the floor next to Sam. It was only when Sam hit my leg that I realised he'd rolled over to me. He was lying on his back staring at the pie in my hand.

I looked at where he had been lying, and I looked down at where he was now. Yeah, he'd rolled over a couple of times to get here. Huh. I felt like that deserved some kind of reward.

I sat him on my lap and dipped my finger into the gravy in the pie, and then put it into Sam's mouth. Yeah, that got me a fucking big smile, nearly as big as the smiles Sookie got. I was pretty sure a bit of gravy wasn't going to hurt him, so I did a few more times.

Meanwhile Calvin was trying to cheer Hunter up. "I wouldn't get yourself too cut up over it all" he said. "You never know if it's for the best. My last girlfriend dumped me the day before I met Jude."

"Where'd you meet her?" Hunter asked.

"In a nightclub in Brighton. When we were living in the UK. She tripped over right in front of me and I stopped her falling over. Fuck, I thought I was in there. But she didn't talk to me again for the rest of the night. She just sat in the corner with her mates. I had to basically follow her out into the street to ask her out. I'm fucking glad I did though."

"So, what?" Hunter asked, between bites. "I should just stand around until some chick falls over in front of me?"

"No, just don't get so hung up over Maddy. For all you know it was the best thing to happen to you this year" Calvin said.

"It's fucking January" Hunter mumbled.

"Well, its February next week" Calvin said with a shrug. "I don't know. You got any advice, Eric?"

Oh fuck, I thought. No, don't fucking ask me. I shrugged. "I just…well, you can figure it out. I'm sure you can."

Hunter didn't look particularly impressed with that piece of advice, but fuck. It was his life. I went back to giving Sam tastes of the gravy out of my pie. I was far better at that than offering advice to the lovelorn.

"How'd you meet Sookie, though?" Hunter asked after a minute. "You know, if Calvin met Jude in a nightclub and ended up moving here, how'd you meet her?"

"At work" I said. "I was sent here for work." That was true, utterly fucking true.

"Well I'm not likely to meet any girls around here, that's for fucking sure" Hunter grumbled.

"You'll be back at Uni in a month" Calvin said, screwing up the paper bag his pie had been in, and picking up his water bottle to take a drink. "There's bound to be girls there."

Hunter snorted. "Yeah, but…I don't know. I liked Maddy. Well…she liked me. No one else ever has." He stopped and ate the last mouthful of his pie. "How do you…you know. How do you get girls to like you?" He looked at Calvin, then at me, and then back at Calvin, who looked like he was considering his response.

Fuck, we were wandering into dangerous territory here. This was not advice I wanted to be giving out.

Calvin shrugged, and put his water bottle down. "I don't fucking have a clue" he said. "They're kind of a mystery. I mean, I thought stopping Jude ending up face first on a sticky nightclub floor would kind of work, but honestly, she still acted like she was doing me a huge favour by going out with me. Maybe she was." He turned away and climbed the ladder again.

Hunter looked at me. Fuck. I looked at Sam and tried to impart the idea that he should never, ever ask me this kind of shit because I was bound to fuck it all up. I tried to figure out what had worked with Sookie. All I could come up with that persistence counted, but that sounded kind of...wrong, and slightly stalkerish. I quickly discarded the idea of saying don't take no for an answer, because that really sounded really fucking wrong.

What had fucking worked anyway? I had no clue. Nothing. I'd done pretty much nothing other than just hang around.

"Um…just be yourself" I said, and as I said it I realised that was exactly what I'd done differently with Sookie. I hadn't put on any act to win her over, and I hadn't been worried about how I was going to get away from her before it got too serious. I'd just stayed, and hoped it would work out in the end. And it had, despite the fact I'd done my best to fuck it all up on several occasions. But Sookie had taken the bad with the good and just…well, just fucking loved me anyway.

That was pretty awesome.

"Yeah" Hunter snorted. "Like that'll fuckin' work." He turned on his heel and left the room. Fuck, I guess at his age it seemed like you had to be something you weren't, but he'd learn. Probably.

I talked to Calvin a bit more, while Sam and I finished up the pie, and then I packed Sam back into his capsule and we headed home. I just hoped that Maudette had had enough time to show her clients around.

Once home I put Sam back in his bouncer and sat down in front of the laptop, just in time for Sookie to walk in the door. Sam's face lit right up as she walked into the room, carrying several shopping bags and one of my suits she'd collected from the drycleaners. "Hi" she said. "Everything OK here?"

"Yep" I said. "Everything's great. Sam's slept, and I got him to have one bottle earlier and he was awesome at tummy-time because he can now roll to get places."

"Really?" Sookie asked, looking at Sam. "That is awesome. You're very clever, aren't you Sam?" She bent down to smile at him and he waved his arms in approval.

"Was he rolling to get the red bear?" she asked, straightening up. "Or the stacking blocks?"

"Um…something like that. He rolled into me at one stage."

Sookie frowned. "Yeah, you're not usually hard to spot. He must have been coming for cuddles."

"Uh-huh. Probably" I agreed.

Sookie walked into the kitchen. "I brought Subway back for lunch, you haven't eaten?"

"Not really" I said. It wasn't a big pie. And I had shared it.

"OK, well I'll just feed Sam and then we can eat. God, I'm just glad that Maudette wasn't coming through today, the kitchen's a mess. There are still breakfast dishes out." She started putting things in the dishwasher.

I looked at Sam. Thank fuck he couldn't talk yet.

"So you had a good time? With Sam?" Sookie asked, looking over from where she was wiping the counter-top.

"We had an great time, didn't we Sam?" I looked over at him, expecting an enthusiastic response. What I got was an enthusiastic and fucking noisy diaper-filling noise.

"Great" Sookie said. "Well you change him and I'll put lunch out."

Fuck, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to give him that gravy after all.

**A/N So our school years (for Primary schools) run from the end of Jan/beginning of Feb, through to mid Dec. It depends on the school as to how you get advanced from Year One to Year Two. Amelia with a March birthday managed to make the cut-off that she'd done enough semesters in that first year to go up a year, but she'd be with kids who were older and had started in the previous school year. Riley, being four months younger is doing another year of Year One. I know, it's confusing and kind of arbitrary. **

**Pauanui is a very popular holiday destination, property there is quite expensive. It's pronounced Par-wah-noo-ee. Approximately, anyway.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	91. Chapter 91

**A/N So not too much to report today, the toddler had a busy day trashing the living room and figuring out how the remote works, but other than that it was all pretty standard. But the story, is, I think, finally starting to wind down. I'm hopeless at predicting numbers of chapters, but I think there's maybe two to three more, and then I'll write a couple of things that will fill in the time until all five kids are around, and probably include those in this story as well to make it easier to find. So they'll be bonus chapters. But if there's anything you particularly want me to write about, then let me know, because it's surprising what ideas I can come up with from your comments. So thanks for reading, and reviewing because that's what keeps this story going.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

The bad thing about owning two houses at the same time is that you're fucking haemorrhaging money, especially when you're paying to renovate one of them. The good thing is that when it comes to moving day, you don't actually have a lot to move.

In the final couple of weeks before we officially moved to the new house, most of our stuff moved ahead of us, thanks to Sookie.

She'd been slowly but surely taking all our belongings to the new house and installing them there. Well, I fucking hoped that's what she was doing with them. She'd emptied out most of my half of the closet and I had yet to check whether everything had actually made it to the new closet. There'd been some muttering about rag-bags and charity bins as she was carrying stuff out to the car.

I also probably needed to check that I was actually getting half the closet in the new place. I didn't really have a half of the old one, but I'd always kind of figured that was because my stuff went in there as an afterthought and Sookie was here first. But the new closet was a lot fucking bigger and there was no reason I couldn't have half the space.

Unless, of course, Sookie had thrown my stuff in the trash and I needed a lot less space than I thought I did.

SPOV

I quite enjoyed it once I could start moving things into the new house. The wardrobes were installed and I spent a morning putting clothes and shoes into the one in our room, while Sam rolled around on the bedroom floor, testing out the new carpet. Now that he was rolling, you really had to keep an eye on him. I'd never had a kid who did this before, although I'd heard about it, and even seen at Jumping Beans lots of babies who did roll as a means to get somewhere. Both Amelia and Felicia had rolled a few times and left it at that until they could crawl. In fact Amelia could crawl and would still wail piteously whenever she ended up on her back. For some reason she thought she was helpless, like an upturned turtle or something. And Felicia hadn't really been all that interested in moving at all until she got some intensive coaching.

But Sam, well Sam was off. He just didn't have any way of stopping himself sometimes, so he'd career into walls and furniture and people's feet. He always looked really pleased when he found someone.

Felicia wasn't so pleased when it was her. "No!" she wailed, the first time she saw him roll like that, around the family room floor. "Sam's movin'! That's no'right!"

Eric, who was trying to read the paper, had just shrugged. "It's OK" he said.

"No!" Felicia argued. "He's a baby. Baby's no move. Baby's jus' stay still!" She yelled the last part at Sam, who twisted his head to look at Eric, as though he might have the final say.

Amelia, who had been sitting at the table cutting up the part of the newspaper that I hoped Eric had already read, sighed loudly. "You moved" she said, with a great deal of sadness.

"I's not a baby!" Felicia retorted. "I's gonna be three soon."

Amelia looked at her. "Yes you are" she said, obviously trying to break the news to her sister as gently as possible. "You're only little. _I'm_ a big girl. I'm in a new class and everything."

"I's gonna be a Tui when I'm three!" Felicia wailed, having forgotten her original complaint about Sam. Now she was just trying to defend her position to Amelia, and, in Felicia's mind, going up to the three year old's group in pre-school made a huge difference.

"Yeah…" Amelia said. "But those are just three year olds, like you."

Felicia frowned, but she could kind of sense defeat when it was staring her in the face. It was obvious she wasn't going to change Amelia's point of view, and she'd had no luck convincing any of us that Sam shouldn't be allowed to move around, so in the end she sidled up to Eric and demanded "Frow me!"

"Um, OK Leesh. In a minute" Eric said.

"OK" she agreed. "'cos babies don'get frown, do they?"

Eric looked at her. "Well, not until they're bigger they don't."

Felicia sighed. She'd wanted a definitive answer. "Frow me anyway" she muttered in the end, and Eric stood up to go outside with her, which was probably a good thing as he missed Amelia's reveal of the lovely paper chain she'd made with most of the business section of the Herald.

I'd been hoping to get in and give the new place a really good clean before we moved, as well as start moving stuff over there, but that part of the project was a bit more difficult than I'd anticipated while there were still people working in the house. Calvin would kind of ignore my attempts to clean up and carry on with what he was doing anyway, which usually involved making a mess. Occasionally I'd get a 'sorry, Sookie' out of him, but he was mostly pretty unrepentant.

Hunter was the worst. He seemed to take it personally. We got stuck in the ensuite together one afternoon while he fitted some shelving to the walls and he was less than impressed with my attempts to clean a few surfaces.

"I'm not making that much of a mess" he grumbled, as he drilled another hole in the wall.

"Well…it's OK because you're working" I said, wiping the double sink down. I loved that sink. It was so new and shiny. Well, everything was new and shiny really. I never wanted anyone to use the toilet in here.

"Yes I am" Hunter said, a bit tersely. "So you can't clean in here while I'm working."

"I'm just giving it a little clean" I said, standing back to look at the countertop around the sink. Eric had picked it and originally I'd thought it was going to be way too dark, it was almost black. But actually, it kind of looked OK with the big white hand basins perched on top.

"The skylight's good in here" I said to Hunter, hoping that might cheer him up a bit.

"Mmm" was the only reply I got from him as he screwed a bracket into the wall.

God, he was hard work to talk to sometimes. I thought teenagers were supposed to be bad but he was 20. Surely by that stage he should have grown out of it.

"Do you want me to pass you the spirit level?" I asked him.

"I'm alright" Hunter said, reaching for it himself.

"You're a tiny bit grumpy" I said. "And really, I'm only in here cleaning while Sam sleeps and I can get some stuff done. We move at the weekend. And there's people all over the rest of the house."

Hunter sighed, but didn't say anything else.

"Are you all enrolled for uni?" I tried.

"Uh-huh" Hunter said, picking up the drill to make another hole in the wall. I started cleaning the shower door down and waited.

"What's Maddy studying?" I asked when the drilling had stopped.

"How to be a complete bitch" Hunter replied, not looking up from what he was doing. Oh. I could see the problem

"Did you break up?" I asked.

"Uh-huh" Hunter confirmed. God, it was like pulling teeth. I briefly wondered if Eric had been giving him lessons in how to avoid answering questions.

"That's a shame" I said, figuring I'd leave it at that. I'd only ever seen her once so my feelings on the matter were really neither here nor there.

I stepped inside the shower, thinking I'd give all of it a good scrub. It wasn't particularly dirty of course, but it was big. I twirled around. Yeah, it was like a small room. I'd never really seen a shower like it before. There was a little built-in seat and everything.

It occurred to me that Eric spent a lot of time thinking about sex.

While I was pondering the implications of that thought, Hunter spoke again. "There's this other chick" he said.

"Chick?" I asked, still kind of mesmerised by the multiple showerheads I was staring at. For some reason they made me feel conspicuously affluent, which was not something I was really accustomed to feeling at all. Were we about to start living beyond our means, I wondered?

"Well, you know. Girl" Hunter said. "She's doing architecture too."

"Oh, well…that's nice" I said. I wasn't sure what else to say. I started wiping down the down the back wall of the shower.

"Yeah…"Hunter said, slowly, while checking that the second bracket was level. "I just…I think I might ask her out."

"You should" I said. He definitely should, he was only 20. I thought he should really date lots of people. I didn't necessarily regret my years with Bill, but I kind of wished that maybe I'd gone out with a few more people. Maybe not slept with them, I didn't fancy myself as that kind of girl. But I kind of wished…well, I kind of wished I'd broadened my horizons a bit. Although I figured it was silly to regret anything when I'd ended up in a pretty good place.

With a really enormous shower.

But of course when I'd been Hunter's age my parents had drowned and I'd spent a few years dealing with that, and it had been nice to have Bill around all through it. He was familiar. He was safe. He wasn't going anywhere, or so I thought at the time.

I straightened up from where I was crouching to wipe the bottom of the shower wall. Yeah, I thought, if I can live with Eric's choices I can live with mine.

"But…" Hunter continued, "But what do I do?"

"Do? Um, movies? Movies are good." Bill used to take me to the movies a lot.

"No, I mean…" Hunter sighed. "Should I, I don't know, do I have to do anything? Better? Than I did with Maddy?"

Oh, OK. He wanted to know what girls wanted. I tried to think about what worked with me. "Just be nice" I said. "Girls really like it when you're nice to them. You know, actually talk to them and show an interest." Bill had been nice. Eric had been…a bit hopeless and lost, but mostly he'd been nice. Nice enough to put up with kids all over him and trailing me around Pak N Save anyway.

Hunter just sighed at that though. "Yeah, that doesn't work" he said, and he sloped out of the bathroom, leaving me alone in the enormous shower. Oh well, I thought, he'd learn sometime.

But with all the work still going on I didn't really get a chance to give the new house a thorough clean until the night before official move-in day. I'd packed the car with cleaning supplies, told Eric he was in charge after he arrived home from having a beer with Calvin, Hunter and Dixon to celebrate, and driven over to the new house.

It was kind of fun cleaning a completely empty house with brand new fittings. Sure there was dust for Africa and a ton of smudges from where Calvin and the other workers had touched things, but it was manageable. And when I cleaned it, it actually stayed clean for more than five minutes.

I was just finishing vacuuming the family room and contemplating the fact that the blue Eric had picked did look kind of good in here, but all the same I was glad I'd talked him out of the red in the living room, when Eric walked into the room and flopped down on one of the large, sectional sofas he'd ordered. He seemed to take up a lot of it and it was a good demonstration of exactly why he'd bought furniture that was so damn large in the first place.

"Um, hello?" I said, switching off the vacuum cleaner.

"Yeah" he said. "I came to help."

"Oh, um…the kids?" I asked. I hoped they weren't all here too; the place was looking pretty tidy.

"They're all asleep. I got Halleigh to come and sit at our place."

"Oh, OK. Cool. Well you can um…" I tried to think what Eric could do. I looked up, but there weren't any stray cobwebs lurking around up there. All I could see was the gleaming white ceiling and crown moulding, and even the hanging light hadn't had enough time to gather any real dust.

"I might look around and see what needs doing" Eric said, and he pushed himself off the couch and wandered off.

"OK" I said to his back, and I switched the vacuum back on.

I finished vacuuming the hallway as well, Eric sort of wandered into a view a few times, going in and out of the rooms, and muttering things like "I hope the beds arrive tomorrow" and "I'm not sure that border in Sam's room is really straight". I just left him to it and carried on to the living room.

By the time I was finished I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. The place looked good. As good as it was ever going to look, probably. I realised I should probably go and get Eric's phone off him and take some photos so I could remember the house like this always.

Instead I unplugged the vacuum, ready to take it back to the old house so I could vacuum it after the bulk of our things had been moved. The plan was that the next day we had some stuff arriving new, like the beds, and then we had movers for all the furniture and whiteware we were bringing with us. Sunday we were hiring a truck and Calvin and Eric were going to move the trampoline and the playhouse, and anything else we hadn't managed to get on Saturday.

And then that was it. No more living in Merton Street. We'd had an offer on the place which had gone unconditional that day, and it was two weeks until settlement date.

I tried to feel sad, but I didn't really. Maybe a little bit wistful, but not sad. Mostly, I felt excited.

I found Eric in the kitchen, admiring his table which had finally been allowed to emerge from under its coversheet and take pride of place. It was a big table, and we hadn't got around to buying any chairs for it yet, but it did look good in my nice yellow kitchen. I'd put my foot down on that one and Eric had conceded defeat pretty quickly.

"The blinds look good" Eric commented. I had a look at the windows and discovered he'd drawn them. They did look good; they were a kind of gold and green leaf pattern.

"Yep" I agreed. "It all looks good in here." I gazed up at some of the cupboards. They looked good too. Just kind of high.

"So tomorrow's the big day" I said brightly. "I'm surprised you got Amelia to go to sleep, she's been buzzing about it for days. I think it's because it gives her something to talk about at school. Maisie might be getting a baby now, but babies are so _last year_. This year it's all about a new bedroom, with purple walls." Well, there was one purple wall, she was almost as bad as Eric when it came to picking out colours, anything bright and dark and she wanted it. Badly.

Eric wasn't really joining in the conversation, though, I noticed. "So I guess we should head home and relieve Halleigh" I said to him. He just stood there, looking at me, leaning against the kitchen bench with his arms folded.

"But the house is empty, Sookie" he said.

"I know" I agreed. "Maybe I'll take some photos first, give me your phone for a sec? I want to remember just how clean and shiny it all is. Honestly, the toilet in our ensuite is sparkling at the moment." I held my hand out for the phone but Eric didn't hand it over, which was annoying. He just kept looking kind of past me at something.

I turned around and followed his gaze and realised he was looking at the table. "Is that one of the new towels from our bathroom?" I asked, looking at what he'd placed on there. "What do you think of the colour?" I'd had to buy a lot of new manchester for this house, including sheets for the ginormous bed we were having delivered as none of my existing ones were going to fit it.

Eric came over to me and put his arms around me and I started to get the impression that he really didn't care about the colour of the towels. "So you came here for sex, huh?" I asked him.

Eric just nuzzled my neck and didn't really reply to that. "I hope you at least brought a condom" I said to him. "Because I didn't remember to pack contraceptives along with the rubber gloves, vacuum cleaner and Spray'N Wipe."

Eric reached around and pulled a condom out of the back pocket of his jeans and showed it to me. "Boy, you really do think I'm a sure thing, don't you Eric?"

He shrugged. "But we have the house to ourselves. For maybe the only time. Ever. And the table is just sitting there." He made a sweeping motion with his hands as though he was performing some kind of product demonstration.

"And it's crying out for someone to have sex on it?" I asked.

"Well…I think it's important to test it out, Sookie. Make sure it's as sturdy as they said it was when they sold it to me."

"Fair enough" I agreed, as I backed up towards the edge of the table and Eric came to stand in front of me. I have to admit, it was a really good table. And I'm sure we'd enjoy it for lots of other occasions too.

EPOV

Thanks to the work Sookie had put in ahead of time, moving day actually went pretty smoothly. It was mainly some larger pieces of furniture and everyone's last personal items that needed to go. Consequently Amelia had a bag full of Barbies and books and stationery that she was taking with her, Felicia had Sockie and her T-Rex, Sookie had Sam and I had the coffeemaker.

I didn't see a lot of Sookie on the day of the move, and when I did she seemed to have a vacuum cleaner in her hand, or, at one stage I did find her putting sheets on our new bed which had been delivered and she was muttering about how she was never going to be able to hang them on the washing line, so I backed out of the room and left her to it.

We had at least had a chance to spend some time together the night before. Well, we'd been alone in the new house and I'd finally convinced her to have sex on the new table. We had blinds now, so it seemed a shame not to see if we could make it work.

We could.

By the end of moving day, everyone was feeling tired and cranky. Sam decided he hadn't seen enough of Sookie and got fussy, Amelia and Felicia had spent the afternoon playing with Kennedy's new dog, some kind of weird little terrier thing, and then spent an hour or so whining that they wanted their own dog. No amount of Sookie telling them that Bob would hate it would shut them up. Bob was currently enjoying what Sookie euphemistically called 'his holidays' at the local cattery, so in the girls' minds he was gone and they were replacing him as soon as they could with something that would actually fetch a ball.

Well, maybe we could get a dog.

So we had pizza for dinner and then tried to get the kids to go to sleep in their new rooms. "Dis my bed?" Felicia asked, as I tried to tuck her into her brand-new bed that had arrived along with ours that afternoon.

"Yep" I said. "It is." She looked even smaller in this one than she did in her previous one, as it was slightly larger.

Felicia frowned and patted around on the mattress. "Feels funny" she said.

"No lumps" I said to her. I'd fucking hated those lumps when I'd had to sleep on them.

"Is too flat" Felicia said. "Sockie no like it."

"Um...well, I'm sure Sockie will get used to it. Maybe you should just try sleeping on it?"

Felicia just looked at me and chewed her bottom lip. "I don' know" she said. "Sockie migh' not sleep."

"Well…I think if Sockie just lies down then he might be able to. But if not, he can come and get me."

"Promise?"

"I do. "Night Leesh" I kissed her forehead as she lay down in bed. Sookie appeared in the room and helped Felicia snuggle right down, before saying goodnight herself. "One down" Sookie muttered as we left her room and walked into Amelia's.

"It's dark in here" Amelia complained.

"Well, the curtains are thicker. And the walls are kind of purple" Sookie explained.

Amelia sighed. "It doesn't feel like home" she said. "It feels weird, like when I sleep at Aunty Jude's."

"I know" Sookie said, sitting down on Amelia's bed. "But it'll feel like home soon."

"Is Bob here yet?" Amelia asked.

"No. He's on holiday still. We'll get him back Monday" Sookie replied.

"Oh. Can I get a dog? I want a Westie like Kennedy's got."

"No" I said. Well, I didn't want one of those yappy things she had. But maybe we could get a real dog.

Amelia sighed and lay down in bed. "Will I remember where I am in the morning?"

"I think so" Sookie said, "But we're right down the hallway if you need us."

"OK" Amelia sighed. We both said goodnight to her and I headed out to give Sam his bottle. He seemed less worried about the fact he was in a new house and more than a little impressed with the new TV we had in the family room. There'd been a fair amount of sighing from Sookie when I'd set it up that afternoon, but it was totally worth it for moments like this.

"What are you watching?" Sookie said, as she stuck her head in the doorway.

"Um…basketball. Sam likes it."

"Of course _Sam_ likes it" Sookie muttered, as she left again.

Sam didn't give me twenty questions about his new room either when I put him to bed, and he was still sleeping in the same crib, so I figured he was good. Felicia wasn't though; she came wandering out of her room as I walked out of Sam's.

"Daddy!" she wailed. "I's forgot dis is de new house."

I picked her up and gave her a hug. "It's not scary" I said. "It's just different."

"Yeah" Felicia said quietly. I took her to the bathroom and tucked her back into bed. When I came out of her room Sookie was in Amelia's room explaining that the tree outside her bedroom window was not an evil witch and it was actually OK to go to sleep.

It felt like it was going to be a long night. But eventually it all went quiet and Sookie and I could crawl into bed. She'd still been unpacking boxes late into the evening and looked tired.

"So how's the bed?" I asked, getting in beside her.

"Big" she said. "I might even get a bit of room while I sleep in this bed."

"Mmm" I said, sliding over to where she was lying on her side and putting my arms around her. "You might be lonely though."

"I might be able to cope" Sookie said. And then we heard the patter of tiny feet down the hall.

"I no sleep" Felicia said, coming into the room. "My bed's funny." She attempted to climb up onto my side of the bed, but didn't get very far. "Is too big!" she wailed, so I rolled over and helped her up.

"I sleep here den" Felicia announced, making herself comfortable.

"I don't know…" I started to say, but Sookie interrupted me. "Yeah, fine. There's enough room for you to share."

Well I didn't know that there was. This bed was bigger, but Felicia sprawled. I sighed, reached over and turned off the light and lay down, just in time for Felicia to attach herself to me like a limpet. I wasn't sure I really wanted to sleep with Sockie jammed in my face, he was a bit gross and chewed these days, but it seemed I didn't have a choice.

And then Amelia walked into the room. The flashlight she was carrying shining right in my face gave that one away. "I don't want to be alone either" she shout-whispered.

"Fine. Hop in" Sookie mumbled. So Amelia climbed over Sookie's head and wedged herself between us.

"This bed feels funny" Amelia whispered.

"It's new" Sookie told her.

"S'very flat" Felicia said.

"And that's a good thing" I reminded her.

"Where's Sam?" Amelia asked.

"In his bed" I said. "By some complete miracle." Yeah, that was a mistake.

"Why?" Amelia asked, suddenly interested. "What's a miracle?"

"Um…it's something special that's happened" Sookie said.

"Like a special cuddle for making a baby?" Amelia asked.

"No" Sookie replied quickly.

There was silence for a moment, although a fair amount of shuffling from both the small bed-intruders. "Mum, you said the special cuddles happen in bed, are you going to do it in this bed?" Amelia asked.

"Not tonight, now go to sleep" I said.

"So…another night?" Amelia asked.

"I's doin' snuggles" Felicia said.

"That's different, Leesh" Amelia said. "This is grown-up stuff."

"You's not a grown-up."

"For making _babies_" Amelia elaborated.

Felicia sat straight up in bed. "I no want another baby. I's got Sam!" she said, sounding worried.

I patted her back. "There isn't another baby, Leesh. Now lie down and go to sleep if you're staying here."

She lay back down and there was silence for about ten seconds. "I like Sam" Amelia said.

"Me too" Sookie said sleepily.

"I like Daddy" Felicia said.

"I like you too, Leesh" I said to her, hoping everyone would shut up soon.

"And me?" Amelia asked.

"And you" I confirmed.

"And Sam?" Amelia asked again.

"Yep" I agreed.

"Do you want me to go and tell him you like him?" Amelia asked.

"Only if you're then going to go back to your own bed and stay there" I said. There was a short silence while Amelia processed that comment. "But I want to sleep here" she said in the end. "Like Leesha is."

"Then you have to go to sleep" I said to her. "So no more talking, everyone understand?"

"OK" Amelia said, and Felicia echoed it.

"Tomorrow" Sookie said, "I think we might need Calvin to look at the door to the wardrobe in Sam's room. It isn't sitting quite right."

"OK" I agreed. And maybe I'd get him to fit a lock on the bedroom door while he was at it.

"I'm hot" Amelia said. "You guys are making me hot."

"Go to sleep Ames" I said.

"You're grumpy" she huffed. "That's no fun." But eventually, they did all fucking go to sleep.

**Thanks for reading!**


	92. Chapter 92

**A/N So instead of telling you about the toddler, I can tell you about my daughter. She asked the other day why Daddy had been digging in the garden and he flippantly replied he was looking for gold. Yeah, she just threw up her hands and said. "Well, that's not right! There aren't any pirates! Do you _see_ any pirates in New Zealand, Daddy? No. So there's no gold!" So she had some kind of logic going there, and Daddy has learnt his lesson if he doesn't want to be lectured again.**

**The toddler just gave her a sister a WTF? look all the way through her tirade. And this is what passes for entertainment in my house!**

**But here we go, this chapter may answer at least one burning question. Enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine!**

SPOV

By the time we'd been in the house a few weeks, things were starting to settle down. For one thing, Felicia had finally stopped trying to climb into bed with us every night. She was little, but she seemed to take up a huge amount of the new bed because there was a chain reaction whereby she tried to sleep on Eric, he tried to move away from her, and I got pushed out of bed or slept on by Eric. And if I got up to feed Sam, who still usually fancied at least one round of food and cuddles in the middle of the night, I would get back to find the pair of them had spread and there wasn't any space left for me.

Eric would wake up in the morning muttering about how maybe we needed to look at getting an even bigger bed. Yeah, that wasn't happening. I had no intention of buying a bed so big I'd have to stitch sheets together just to have ones that fitted it.

But eventually Felicia had decided that her own little flat bed wasn't so bad after all. Although it wasn't so little really, it was a king single. Eric didn't seem to be able to buy beds that didn't have the word king in their size description. I'd had to buy new sheets to fit that one as well. Quite a lot of sheets as he'd replaced Amelia's bed at the same time with the same model as Felicia's. They came with a pull-out bed underneath and the salesperson at the bed shop had spied Amelia and Felicia bouncing on their display beds and seduced Eric with promises of hassle-free sleepovers.

Amelia had been asking to have someone for a sleepover ever since.

I was slowly getting used to the new house. I'd rearranged the cupboards in the kitchen a few times but I still had stuff that Eric had to get in and out of them for me if he was around. So far he hadn't seemed to mind too much.

And more than anything else, I was starting to feel like myself again. Going back to work that one day a week had been good for me I thought. And even though my work often revolved around coupling climbing equipment together in interesting combinations and singing songs about the weather and letting 20 toddlers go mad with a bag of full of bouncy balls, it was nice to be outside the house for a bit, even if it was a rather splendid house we lived in now.

EPOV

The new house was rather fucking excellent, if I did say so myself. I was kind of pleased with how it had all turned out, although there was the odd thing we had to get Calvin back in to look at after we moved. I think he was pleased the house was finished too. He was currently working next door, putting a deck on Kennedy and Danny's house, while trying to find another job as builder and project manager for a house renovation. Although apparently Judith was a bit pissed that he still hadn't put an ensuite in their place. But as he pointed out, they don't pay you to work on your own house.

Quite the opposite in fact.

There were a few things I might have changed, though, if I was starting from scratch again. One of them would be that I wouldn't let Sookie insist we get a special fucking glass panel made for the bifold doors onto the deck, which had a hole in it for a catdoor. Yeah, I would have said no fucking catdoor and if Bob can't use a key he can fucking live outside.

Three days after he came back from his 'holidays' I was walking into the kitchen to start the coffeemaker when Bob arrived in the catdoor, with a fucking enormous rat in his mouth.

We really didn't fucking need the housewarming gift. I'd just paid a small fortune to have someone come in and rid the place of rats and we didn't need to replace the population. Where the fuck had he found that rat, anyway?

Bob just stood there and eyeballed me while holding the rat in his jaws. It was probably too much to hope that he'd actually fucking killed this one. He'd somehow missed hunting 101 where they taught that death-grip that cats were supposed to be designed to deliver. He operated more on a catch and release type program.

"Go outside, Bob!" I said, pointing at the catdoor. Bob didn't go out, instead he crouched right down in what I guessed was preparation for releasing his new friend.

Fucking Bob.

"Outside!" I tried again, as I took a step towards him. I saw his eyes flick towards me, evaluating what move I was going to make, and then he crouched down further and looked to the side.

If the door had been open then I could have picked him up and thrown him back out, rat and all. But of course it wasn't, and I couldn't figure out how to get it open without giving him time to let that rat go.

So instead I made a grab for the rat's tail. Only for some reason Bob didn't immediately release his catch. Instead he fucking growled at me.

I tried tugging on the rat's tail and Bob refused to let go and growled again. Fuck, now I was stuck in a tug of war over a rat I didn't really want in the first place. "Give it up Bob" I said, but he just held on and growled some more.

I was contemplating trying to reach around with my free hand and open the door so I could push Bob out, when Sookie appeared. "Oh Bob" she said. "Thank-you, but let it go now." And he fucking did. And all of a sudden I was the proud owner of a screaming rat who was no longer being subdued by the huge jaws clamped down on his neck, so he was out to get the person holding his tail.

"Uh…fuck!" I said, as the rat tried to either bite me or wriggle out of my grasp. Or both. I held it at arm's length and tried to open the door with the other hand. "Don't drop it!" Sookie said, coming over to help with the door.

"I'm not fucking Bob!" I said to her. If he could be relied on to not just let these things go then we'd have been OK in the first place.

Sookie pushed the door open and I stepped onto the deck and pulled my arm back to throw the fucking thing away from the house. "Not into next door!" Sookie cried. "It might bite Max, and he's just a puppy."

"It might fucking bite me" I said between clenched teeth, not really caring that much about Kennedy's dog about now. In the end I tossed it straight out, so it landed in the middle of our lawn. And just lay there. Fuck. I was going to have to go and move it again.

I tried to remember where we'd put the shovel. And I wondered if I'd have to hit it with the shovel a couple of times to make sure it was dead. And then I wondered what the consequences would be if Amelia decided to arrive at that moment and saw me beating an animal to death with a shovel in the backyard.

But then the rat got up and kind of shook itself, and started to move off towards the back fence. I wondered if that was better or worse. It would be nice if it was no longer my problem, but if it just went home it was likely to come visiting again. Fucking Bob.

I looked at Sookie and she was watching it go. "I wonder…" she said, but then she stopped. I turned back to look at what she was staring at. Out of the shadows the most enormous orange and black cat I'd ever seen crept out, pounced and grabbed that rat. Yeah, that was a fucking big cat. He turned to look at us with yellow eyes, and then slunk off again.

"Um…well. I guess that's a neighbour's cat?" Sookie said. "Or maybe it's a stray? I hope not."

I hoped not too because I could see where that would lead and one fucking rat-catching cat was enough. "No, I'm sure it had a collar on" I said, putting my arm around Sookie and trying to lead her into the house.

"Really?" Sookie asked and I nodded. We walked back inside and shut the door. Bob was sitting beside his empty bowl looking annoyed that it was taking us so long to get to his breakfast. Sookie walked over to him and I went to wash my hands at the kitchen sink. God knows what germs that rat was carrying.

"Oh, Bob" Sookie said, patting his head gently. "No rats please. And watch out for that other cat, I don't think he's nice."

"How the fuck can you tell that, Sookie?"

"Oh, he just looked a bit tough. I think he might beat Bob up. Don't get beaten up Bob, OK?" Sookie kept stroking him under the chin.

"Because we can't afford the vet bills" I muttered.

"Don't say things like that!" Sookie admonished, going to the pantry to get Bob some breakfast. Felicia came wandering in, looking a bit sleepy and carrying Sockie. "No one's in da bed" she grumbled.

"That's because you took up all the room" I told her.

Felicia frowned. "I's jus' little." Yeah, she had no idea how far she could spread at night.

"Mmm, but you spread a bit" I told her.

"Wha's spread mean?" she asked.

"Take up a lot of room" Amelia supplied, walking into the kitchen. "He takes up a lot of room." She pointed to me.

"We were discussing Felicia" I told her, while trying to get past Sookie to get to the coffeemaker. Yeah, we might have to move that because she had blocked me completely, although I had to admit, the view of her ass as she bent over to get something out of a drawer was kind of rewarding, but all the same. I really needed coffee about now.

Sookie finally moved when she heard Sam yell from down the hall. I started on the coffee while Amelia and Felicia hung around, waiting for their toast to pop up. "Why don't we have any chairs yet?" Amelia asked, looking at the table.

"Because your mother won't…" I stopped when Sookie walked back in with Sam in her arms. "Coffee?" I asked.

"Yeah, go on" she said. "If I feed Sam now most of the caffeine will be out of my system by the time I feed him again. I have to say, I kind of like these longer gaps between feeds." Sam grinned broadly at that, probably in the hope he might get a piece of toast as well. Or at least a taste of jam off someone's finger.

Sookie headed off to the family room to feed Sam and I made coffee and put peanut butter and jam on toast. Amelia sighed when I handed her the plate with her toast on it. "I like _triangles_, not squares" she said.

"I's like squares!" Felicia said happily. Yeah, it didn't matter how much she disturbed us during the night, she was still perky as fuck in the morning. It didn't seem fair somehow.

Sookie arrived back in time to put Sam in the highchair and start drinking her coffee while she sent the other two off to get dressed. Felicia was a bit hit and miss at actually finding her clothes and putting them on, but at least Amelia had a uniform which cut down on her fashion crimes.

"So what have you and Sam got on today?" I asked.

"Oh, well. We have to go to the fruit shop. Nothing lasts in this heat, although I'm going through apricots like they're going out of fashion. And…so I don't know whether to walk there or not. Depends on how hot it gets. Sam likes the view from the pushchair I think, now he's sitting up in it, but if it's so hot I have to put the sunshade over him, it's kind of wasted. So yeah, just errands in Mt Eden. I want to go to the chemist as well and fill the prescription for the mini-pill the midwife gave me, because it will take a while for that to get sorted and running. I'll let you know on that front. And yeah, I guess if we're up the road we could bring you lunch, are you in the office?"

"I'm seeing a client around ten, but I should be done by lunchtime." I finished my coffee and rinsed my cup contemplating how nice life would be without having to use condoms. Fuck, they were annoying. And it had meant that I'd had to really shelve any attempts to try to actually have sex in the shower. We'd messed around in there a few times, but I'd been stumped on how to get a condom in there. And there wasn't a lot going on in our bed at the moment thanks to the small guest who was almost permanently stationed in there. Fuck, I hoped Felicia got used to the flatness of her new bed soon.

"OK, well I'll give you a call when I leave, I guess" Sookie said. "It'll kind of depend on how Sam sleeps this morning and how grumpy he is." She didn't say anything else, because the sound of a rather fucking vicious cat-fight in the backyard interrupted it, and Sookie pushed me out the door so I could break it up. It was only after I yelled "Fuck off!" at the shapes at the bottom of the garden that I paused to hope that everyone else in the neighbourhood was actually up and around at this time of the morning.

It took a couple of weeks for Bob to settle down. In the meantime we had several fieldmice, including a baby one that Sookie decided was really cute and she carried it around in her palm for a while before I could persuade her it was really going to be OK on its own and she put it outside on a fence. We also had a series of rat body parts left for us on the lawn, but I suspected Bob's new friend might be the one to blame for those. Or nemesis I guessed it was really, judging by the noises we heard at night, which made Sookie fret terribly that Bob wasn't fitting in to his new neighbourhood.

I thought he was fitting in rather too well.

SPOV

We were starting to get through the inevitable settling in period with the house. It had taken a bit of adjustment for everyone, Bob included. He had some really nasty cat who kept picking on him and I kept trying to tell Eric it didn't matter how many lectures he delivered, I didn't think Bob really started the fights. It wasn't his fault he got ambushed at the bottom of the garden, but Eric was kind of adamant that if Bob stopped hunting he'd stay in much better shape.

Poor Bob had also been a bit taken aback when he'd first seen Kennedy's puppy, Max. Max was a seriously cute ball of fluff and it was hard not to fall in love with him, unless you were Bob. Bob scared the crap out of Max though, so at least there was one neighbourhood animal that realised Bob was in charge.

Felicia's birthday party was the first big occasion we had at the new house. I seemed to spend a lot of the time giving people guided tours through the place, which made me feel a bit self-conscious, but it was what everyone seemed to expect. And most guests there had either renovated themselves or were thinking of doing it, so they were all keen to see what choices we'd made.

Of course the fact I had so much time wandering around the house while Judith muttered enviously about three full bathrooms, Lorena expounded on how cold villas were, Tara complimented me on my choice of colour for the family room, and Halleigh asked what kind of insulation we'd had put in, was because I'd been demoted from providing much of the food for the party. Felicia had insisted that she'd wanted Subway and an ice cream cake like she'd had the previous year, when I'd delegated the party-planning to Eric on account of morning sickness.

It was odd to think that it was only a year ago that I was feeling that horrible all the time. The weird thing was that I'm sure it was a lot worse than I could remember it being. At the time, the weeks of morning sickness, or all day sickness really, just dragged on, but when I looked back now, it was such a blip of time and then it finished.

And now I didn't even know anyone who was pregnant. It seemed odd, over the last few years it felt either I'd been pregnant or someone else had been pretty much all the time. Judith kept talking about it, mainly because she talked about everything that was going on in her life and didn't have many boundaries, but I guessed in our line of work we were confronted with a lot of pregnant women bringing their older kids along to classes. Judith was keen on having another baby, but didn't want to rush into it while Calvin was trying to start up his own business project managing renovations like ours. I think he was getting quite a bit of help from Eric on that front, which made Judith happy as she was a bit nervous about it all. I hoped it worked out for them.

So probably Kennedy was my only hope in the baby department, but she kept saying she'd got a puppy instead and was in no hurry. Yeah, my kids were working wonders as contraception. Now we were moved in, it was difficult to keep Amelia and Felicia away from her place and I just had to suck it up every time I got another rundown from Amelia about how amazing Kennedy's bedroom was and how she had all these cool things for making your hair curly or straight and how she had a whole shelf of perfumes in her bathroom. It was seriously hard to compete with when you were just boring old mum.

Sam still liked me though, although he seemed to appreciate Eric a bit more now they were hanging out one day a week. Probably because Eric kept sneaking him food. And it kind of became a bit obvious when Eric developed a sudden interest in having mashed avocado in his sandwiches. Eric defended himself by saying he'd seen on the internet, where else, that avocado was the best food to start with because the fats were similar to breastmilk and offered to show me the research, but honestly, I gave up. Sam's happy little green face didn't suggest that he was being irreparably damaged by the early exposure to solids.

And I was just going to turn a blind eye to how much of the ice cream cake Eric was currently letting Sam lick off his fingers.

"So does it feel like home yet?" Tara asked, drifting over to where I was standing on the deck.

"Yeah, kind of" I said. "The kitchen layout's still not quite right, and we can't agree on what chairs to buy for the table, and the garage people can't fit us in until next month, but I think it's OK. I'm getting used to it."

"But…it feels kind of homey" Tara said, looking back in towards the house.

"Yeah, it does" I said.

"And you've got so much room now. There's that entire empty room for you to put the next kid in!" Tara said brightly.

"Fuck off" I muttered, and Tara laughed. I liked having a spare bedroom, even if it was a tiny one. I wasn't giving it up in a hurry.

"You say that now…" Tara said, trailing off and just raising her eyebrows at me.

"What?" I asked, a bit grumpily. I wasn't sure what she was suggesting. I was the one who was great at remembering to take my pill; she was the one who sucked at it. And I was a 36 year old responsible mother of three; I wasn't dumb enough to take any risks.

Although I did have to admit, that getting into the routine of taking it again wasn't all that easy when I had three kids, a cat and a large and single-minded coffee-addict all breaking into my morning routine. If you could even call it a routine these days. Mostly it was just head down, get through it.

"Well. Look at them" Tara said, inclining her head towards where Eric was standing holding Sam. They were hanging out with the other blokes or guys or…whatever the heck Calvin classed himself as. South Africans could be a bit odd. Sam was wearing a t-shirt that read 'My Mom Rocks!', the large blue sunhat that went under his chin and made him a bit grumpy, but he was stuck with it as he basically had no hair yet, and a large amount of ice cream stuck to his face. Whatever they were all talking about together, and from the way Andy was gesturing with his beer bottle, it might have been anything from the last person he arrested to how he water-blasted the driveway the previous weekend, Sam was enjoying it.

And so was Eric. He looked really, really happy. Even when Felicia stormed over and demanded his attention and he had to hand Sam over to Calvin for a while, he didn't seem to mind. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Eric really liked being a dad. Admittedly, sometimes when I was in a particularly bad mood I liked to torture myself with the thought that that's the only reason he was with me, but the longer he stuck around the less and less I listened to my inner misery guts, and most of the time now I barely gave her the time of day.

So I watched Eric with the kids, and thought about how much he loved them, and how much he'd enjoyed it since Sam was born, and then I really had to shelve that line of thinking because Lorena needed an escort to a bathroom. Apparently we had too many and she couldn't remember where any of them were.

EPOV

It was fucking hot at this time of year. Everyone was feeling it. The girls were kind of listless and even their fights lacked energy. I'd give Sam a bottle and by the time he was finished he'd be stuck to me by a layer of sweat that managed to permeate through any clothing we were wearing, and it wasn't much better if we'd both just decided to forego shirts. Bob mostly gave up fighting and hunting and settled down to try to find the coolest spot he could find.

Sookie started taking a lot of showers.

When we were getting the place renovated she'd spent a long time telling me what a fucking idiot I was for putting such a big shower in when we clearly didn't need one quite that big. Me pointing out the problems with the old shower, such as the fact we couldn't both fit in it without something being knocked over, didn't apparently count. I was 'being silly' and 'going overboard' and whole heap of other things I couldn't even remember after a while, they all just blended into each other. The upshot was, the shower was a stupid idea and it was all mine.

Except that now she was used to it, Sookie fucking loved that shower. We'd had a gas hot water system installed, so it never ran out of hot water, and you could set the temperature the water was heated to at the press of a button. Yeah, that fucking impressed her.

The trouble was catching her in the shower. She had a nasty habit of waiting until I was giving Sam his bottle and putting him to bed, and then disappearing on me. And when I found her again she'd have wet hair and be marvelling at how great it felt when you turned on both sets of jets so your back was getting warm water as well.

Yeah, it was fucking great. But it would have been better if we were in there together.

But tonight I thought that maybe I'd been fucking quick enough. She was still in there; I could hear the water running as I walked into our bedroom, which, thankfully, was so far devoid of any kids.

I locked the door thinking it would be nice to keep it that way, although Felicia was better now she was officially three and a 'big girl'. It was fucking weird to think she was nearly as old as Amelia was when I moved in, and Sam was now only a couple of months younger than Felicia herself had been. You just blinked and they grew up on you.

I walked into the bathroom in time to see Sookie shut the water off. Fuck. "I could join you?" I offered, pulling off my shirt.

Sookie looked at me and sighed, then reached out of the shower and pulled a towel off the rack. "No, you go ahead" she said. "I'm kind of exhausted after today. Sam was incredibly cranky. The heat gets to him, and even with the fan going in his room he struggled with his naps. And of course when he isn't cranky he's on the go now, so there's no rest." She gave me a significant look. Yeah, the fact he was now commando crawling everywhere was totally my fault in Sookie's eyes. I didn't see how I could be personally responsible for the fact that Sam had decided that rolling around was a lot of effort and there had to be a better way to do it. Sure, I might have put the remote on the floor and told him he could pick a channel if he could get to it. And we may have used the long hallway we had now for the odd crawling race, but other than that it was all Sam. Not me.

And yet I was the one missing out on shower-time.

"OK" I said, taking off the rest of my clothes and throwing them in the hamper before I stepped past Sookie into the shower. It was a good shower, but it would have been better if it had Sookie in it.

Sookie spent a while hanging around in the bathroom putting on some kind of lotion. I hoped it was one of the nice-smelling ones. And then she disappeared into the bedroom.

I finished up and dried myself off as best I could in the humidity, and then I dumped the towel and followed Sookie into the bedroom. It was really too hot for clothes, unless Felicia decided to bang on the door and demand entry. In which I didn't so much need boxers as a fucking cup, because she kicked almost as much as Sookie did and her legs weren't long enough that her heels were digging into my shins.

Sookie was sitting up in bed, absorbed in some book. She barely even looked up, which was fucking annoying. It was kind of sad when I couldn't even compete with one of her ridiculous novels.

"Good book?" I asked, getting on the bed next to her.

"Mmm" she said, without lifting her eyes from the page.

"Must be really good" I said. "Lots of porn, I take it?"

Sookie sighed. "There's no _porn_, Eric. You're such a snob about my books. What makes yours so much better, anyway?"

I shrugged. There were a lot of things that made my reading matter more entertaining that most of what Sookie read, but I wasn't dumb enough to sit here and list them. I was still hoping for sex. For one thing Sookie was wearing some kind of slinky nightgown thing that barely contained her boobs, and she'd actually decided not to wear a bra to bed. I did like the nursing bras that opened up, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen Sookie not wearing one. It was fucking fantastic.

I looked at the cover of the book she was reading. _A Dangerous Artifice_ was written across a picture of two people kissing in silhouette. Yeah, it was pretty fucking lame.

"So what's this one about then?" I asked. "If, you know, it's not just porn?"

"Stuff" Sookie said.

"What kind of stuff?"

"Stuff. You know."

"No, I'd only know if I'd read that one. You'll have to tell me."

Sookie sighed again, but lowered the book. "OK" she began. "Well there's this woman, Lyris Templeton. She's English. And years ago her sister, Honor, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while working in Italy, so Lyris has always wanted to find her, but, you know, she was poor. So anyway, she gets this mysterious inheritance from an aunt she didn't know existed, so she uses it to hire this ex-CIA agent who specialises in tracking missing persons. And he's called Tray Carling…" Sookie paused. "I like the name Tray" she mused. "It seems, I don't know, kind of American, don't you think?"

"I don't think I've ever met a Tray" I said. Maybe I had, but I certainly couldn't remember.

"OK, well, anyway. So she hires this guy, who's a real arsehole…" I interrupted her. "I thought he was American?" I asked.

Sookie frowned. "He is" she replied.

"Then he's an asshole, Sookie."

"Oh, yeah, yeah. Whatever." Sookie waved one of her hands at me in a dismissive gesture. "I thought you wanted me to tell you the plot?"

"Sure, go on." I hadn't really wanted a rundown of the entire plot; I'd kind of hoped she might skip to the good bits. Maybe this one really didn't have any porn in it.

"So she hires Tray, and they don't get on at all at first. She thinks he looks down on her because she's poor. Although she lives in a nice bit of London, I have to say. The author kind of fudged that fact. But Tray goes off to see if he can find what happened to Honor in Rome, and meanwhile Lyris, who's a specialist in Italian art, is working for this guy called Mason Kilpatrick. He's a self-made Scottish millionaire, and an art collector, and she's appraising his collection. So she goes up to his estate outside of Edinburgh and he kind of seduces her, because he's older and they have the same interest in art. And she thinks it might be the real thing, except that she overhears him on the phone and he sounds as though he's involved in something really dodgy. Lyris flees back to her little flat in London, and Tray turns up from Italy to tell her what he's found out about Honor, and it looks as though Mason might be involved in her disappearance, but Lyris doesn't know whether to believe Tray or not, because Mason had said that he'd been forced to leave the CIA because he was an alcoholic and he'd been negligent during an operation and an informant got killed because of him. So she doesn't know who to trust now. And that's kind of where I'm up to."

"Um. OK. Sounds, um, riveting…" I said. It sounded kind of muddled and without much basis in actual reality, but it was her choice to read it.

"Now you're being all snooty and condescending" Sookie said, huffily, clutching the open book to her chest. That wasn't fair, because it blocked the view I'd had of her boobs.

I reached over and tried to take the book from her. "No, I'm not" I said, as I managed to prise it out of her hands. "I'm really very interested. So let's see what's happening now, OK?"

Sookie reluctantly let go of the book and I pulled it over so I could look at the part she'd been reading. "So…no porn, huh?" I asked.

Sookie blushed slightly. "It's not porn!" she argued. "It's…relationships and stuff…"

"Yeah, there's definitely some stuffing going on there" I said, reading a bit further on.

"Just shut up, you. It's totally in character. She's a lost, lonely young woman who's confused about who she can trust so she's surrendering herself for just one night…"

"By fucking a guy she just met who may or may not be a traitor to his country?"

"Oh, trust you to focus on that bit. She's just…looking for a connection to someone."

"Yeah" I replied. "But letting some guy connect with her up against her living room wall…I hope that wasn't an expensive painting they knocked off. _Lyris knew it was wrong, she'd only left Mason's bed that morning for one thing_…Am I allowed to say yuck, Sookie?"

"No. You are not. And you can stop reading now please." She crossed her arms, but that just pushed her boobs right up and almost made them spill over the top of her nightgown. I wondered what I'd have to do to get her to cross her arms even higher.

"OK" I said, and then I continued reading. "_But as she turned away from Tray to walk into the kitchen she felt his presence behind her, shadowing her steps. She never made it through the kitchen door, but instead found herself facing the wall beside it, Tray's hot breath warming her ear. Neither of them spoke as they savoured the sudden rise in temperature in the flat, despite the chilly autumn air. _

_Lyris' skin felt hot and prickly and her clothes overwhelmingly restrictive. She held her breath, waiting to see what Tray would do next. The waiting was unbearable, and she became afraid that he would turn on his heel and leave her flat and she would be rejected for the broken and pathetic thing that she was._

_But instead Tray lifted his hands and stroked down the sides of her arms, as though he were soothing her. Then he stroked up her sides, from her hips to the sides of her breasts. Lyris wondered what he was thinking, wanted to turn around and see his beautiful dark eyes, but was too afraid that if she broke the spell they were both under he would disappear like a lover in a fairy tale…" _I glanced over at Sookie and waited for her to comment on how ridiculous all of this was. But she didn't. Instead she was just watching me. And I noticed that her breathing was slightly faster now. Any minute now one of her nipples was likely to pop out over that neckline. Yeah, that would be fucking awesome.

I looked at Sookie's face. Her lips were parted slightly and her eyes hooded. She smiled; looking a little embarrassed, but then seemed to be waiting for me to continue. Fuck, I thought, this is really working for Sookie.

I was definitely getting her a Kindle for Valentine's Day.

I skimmed down the page a bit. "_Tray moved his hands away from Lyris' nipples, which were now hard, stiff peaks, and she moaned at the loss of contact. He reached down and started lifting her skirt above her hips. She waited for him to say something, anything, but somehow the intensity of the moment was enhanced by the wordless agreement between the two of them that this was a one-time thing. Tomorrow they would resume their working relationship and never speak of it again._

_When Lyris' skirt was bunched around her hips she heard the unmistakeable sound of a zipper being lowered, and then, in one quick movement, Tray pushed her panties to one side and thrust in, the pressure of his hips sending her slamming against the wall. Lyris had never felt so alive, so complete, so wonderfully, wonderfully free. She forgot Honor, forgot the years of struggle, forgot the shame she felt at her mother cleaning houses to send her to the best university, forgot everything apart from Tray's movements as every thrust pressed her body further into the wall, her hard nipples grazing the flocked wallpaper. Tray groaned. "Oh, Lyris" he moaned. "You feel so good. So right." And it did feel right. It felt right and it felt like nothing Lyris had ever experienced before. Even Mason's prowess was nothing compared to the raw, animal need that Tray had awakened in her…"_ I paused again. This shit was boring the hell out of me.

But it was really doing something to Sookie, who had slowly been pressing herself further and further against me and had begun running her hand along my chest and my stomach, and that hand was starting to drift lower. And lower.

Thank fuck for that, because I was over that book. However I just hoped Sookie didn't think I was going to fuck her face-first against the wall. For one thing, the paintwork was new. Not to mention the difference in height was never going to make it a viable option.

But we did have a lovely new child-free bed that was just begging to be used.

"So, the book's OK, really" I said to Sookie, setting it down on the nightstand.

"Uh-huh" she agreed, as she reached down to circle my cock with her hand. I was actually starting to feel kind of fond towards that book. It appeared it had been doing a lot of my work for me.

It didn't take much persuasion to get Sookie to remove the nightgown she was wearing, or her own panties. Naked was so much better. Even in this heat where the danger of sticking together was fairly high.

We could always have another shower afterwards.

Sookie was very, very fucking turned-on. I kissed her breasts and tongued each nipple in turn, as she arched her back towards me. Fuck that was good. And when I touched her she was wet. Really fucking wet. It didn't take much for her to come against my hand, gripping my shoulders as she did so.

I moved so I was lying over her and was about to enter her, when she suddenly moved away. Fuck, that was the problem with the new bed. It gave her more room to escape. For a moment I couldn't figure out what was happening, was this a condom thing? Because I didn't think we really needed any lube tonight.

But she rolled over onto her stomach. Well she was half on her stomach, kind of angled towards me on the bed. I got the message. Fuck, that scene really had got to her. She glanced back over her shoulder at me and I moved forward to enter her, her back to my chest, one of her arms pressing her away from the mattress so I could reach a hand around and grope her boob.

Except that she grabbed that hand and moved her to her clit. Yeah, fuck. Sookie was on fire tonight. Those porn books are really fucking awesome.

SPOV

I had just intended to have a nice early night and read a bit of my book. Except Eric had other plans. I assumed his first plan had been to gate-crash my shower, but he was out of luck there. The new shower might have been large enough for both of us, but it didn't mean I always wanted to share it. Sometimes it was nice to have that alone time.

And then he decided to steal my book from me as well, but not after making fun of it. He was such a snob about the books I read, but sometimes I just wanted to switch off and read something…well. Something kind of smutty.

But somehow when Eric reads these things aloud they always sound better. Much better. Way hotter, anyway. I think it's the accent. And then it was all on. All of a sudden I was kind of hyper-aware that not only was someone reading the smutty bits of my book aloud to me, but the person reading it was actually the large, naked man I really liked having sex with. So I figured that was a good sign.

And the sex was great. Amazing, actually. I was getting right back into the swing of things now. I kind of known that I would, but it still felt wonderful knowing that I had reached that point, that I was slowly getting past the stage of being mother-permanently-attached-to-a-baby, and back to just Sookie. Sookie who liked to have sex.

It was only after Eric had pulled me onto my hands and knees and he'd come with a "Fuck, Sookie!" that I suddenly had a thought.

"Um" I said to Eric. "Condom?"

Eric, who had rolled onto his side on the bed, looked confused. "What?" he asked. "I didn't read that bit of the story…"

"No" I said, turning around to sit facing him and getting a bit agitated. "Us. You didn't wear a condom, Eric."

Eric still looked confused. "But…you're on the pill again" he said. I could almost see his brain trying to figure it all out. I guess that orgasm really did take it out of him.

"No" I said. "What I said was that I was going to get the prescription filled, and I'd let you know about when it was working. It doesn't work until you've taken it for a couple of weeks. And I missed some. Because everyone distracts me in the mornings. I only have, like, a two-hour window in which to take it. And I have no routine!" I glared at Eric.

"No, I don't think that's what you said" he argued.

"You just don't listen to me!" I hissed.

Eric sighed and lay back on the bed. "You're just noticing now there was no condom?" he muttered.

"They're supposed to be your department" I said to him.

"Why me?" he asked, getting a bit annoyed.

"Because…it just is. I worry about having to take a frigging pill at the same time every day; you can remember to put a condom on."

"But I didn't think I had to put a condom on Sookie. And you didn't say anything to remind me."

"Eric! Do you really want me to stop sex and nag you? Because I fucking will next time!"

Eric looked at me for a moment. "I think you're over-reacting" he said. "It was just one time. And anyway, you're still feeding Sam."

"I'm not feeding him exclusively" I countered. "And it's no guarantee anyway."

"But…" Eric said slowly. "Period. You haven't had a period. Have you?"

"No. But the problem there is that you ovulate _before_ you get the actual period."

Eric looked doubtful. "Really?" he asked. "Because when we were trying you counted from your period to get to when you ovulated."

"Seriously Eric?" I asked. "You want to argue with me about my menstrual cycle to get yourself out of the shit?"

"Why am I in the shit?" Eric asked, suddenly defensive. "You were there too."

"But you're in charge of condoms. And you didn't listen to me about the pill. So it's totally on you, this one."

"Yeah, I don't think you can pin it all on me, Sookie. You were right there with me, and I seem to remember you were the one who was fucking asking me to fuck her."

"How, Eric? How did I do that? You're the one lying there naked reading me smutty books."

"Yeah, exactly. _Your_ smutty book. The one that got you all horny before I ever came into the room. It's hardly my fault you decided to jump me."

I was livid now. Absolutely boiling. "Jump you?" I said, and it sounded a bit screechy, even to my own ears. I took a deep breath. "I'm going for a shower" I said, and I walked into the bathroom.

After a while under the cool water I calmed down a bit. Maybe Eric was right and it wouldn't be so bad. I was still mad with him, well. Maybe I was just grumpy now. He made me grumpy, he really did.

Eric climbed in the shower just as I was thinking about getting out. "You OK?" he asked.

"I'll live" I mumbled. "I just can't believe…" I trailed off. I'd always been so incredibly on the ball as far as contraception went. Always. Stupid bloody Eric.

"I know" Eric said, pulling me in for a hug. I kind of hoped he might say sorry, but he didn't.

"I could take the morning after pill" I said, as we broke apart. "But it might dry up my milk."

"Don't" Eric said. "Sam'll never forgive me. I'm already public enemy number one because of the bottle."

I laughed. Maybe it would be OK. "We'd have to be really unlucky, wouldn't we?" I asked, as I watched Eric reach for the showergel.

"Yeah" Eric said. And then very quietly, so I only just heard it over the sound of the water he added "Or very lucky."

**So there it is. And for those of you who wanted to read more of _A Dangerous Artifice_, yeah, I'm afraid that one's all me! Sorry Eric!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	93. Chapter 93

**A/N So the toddler is getting kind of sneaky now. I know that if she runs into the kitchen, steals the tea-towel, and runs out again, it's because she wants to make puddles on the coffeetable with her sipper cup, but wants to hide the evidence of what she's doing. I am slightly worried about what she'll be doing in fifteen year's time if this is anything to go by.**

**But I hope everyone is feeling more enlightened now that they know how Tray came about. And now we see the aftermath of that night. Well, part of it anyway.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It was Judith who first gave me the idea, only I didn't realise it at the time. We had a break between classes and she'd made the tea while I gave everything a good clean with the anti-bacterial solution. I walked into the kitchen and took the cup that Judith handed to me. "I hope that does it" I said. "Honestly, they're really germy at the moment."

"Mmm" Judith agreed. "It's the humidity that breeds all the bugs. Thomas' nose has been snotty for weeks."

"Kids are horrible breeders of germs" I said. "I don't know what mine have brought home recently, but I've felt really blah for ages." I yawned. I was feeling dead on my feet, all these months of getting up to Sam had really taken their toll on me.

"Nothing's worse than a constant snotty nose" Judith said.

"Yeah…although I haven't had that" I said. "It's more just…blah. Like I feel a bit sick all the time. Maybe it's just that I'm really mucus-y and don't know it."

"Hmmm" Judith said, and then she looked at me over her cup. "You wouldn't be…you know?" she asked.

"What?" I said, looking out into the hall we used and thinking I must remember to put out some of the toys for enrichment, as we had the babies in next.

"Um, well…pregnant?" Judith asked.

"What?" I said again, wondering who we were talking about.

"Well, it does happen. I mean you know Calvin's only eleven months older than his brother, eh? But I guess they used a lot of formula back then. And Maryelizabeth is a nutbar. Oh, but my friend Taryn, she had a miscarriage last year and then she got pregnant straightaway. Although I don't know if miscarriages are different to actually having a baby. Isn't it weird how your body just snaps back and knows it needs to get pregnant again?"

"Yeah" I said absentmindedly. It was weird. It had also happened to me, after I'd miscarried before I got pregnant with Felicia. But then my phone buzzed with a text from Eric so I didn't really think about it anymore.

"He says they're definitely coming but he's running late because Sam wanted seconds of banana custard, although why on earth he was having banana custard for morning tea I don't know. I sometimes worry that's all he eats when I'm not around" I said to Judith, reading the screen on my phone.

"At least Eric can find the banana custard" Judith commented, as she ate a bite of one of the sandwiches she'd brought from home. "If I don't leave carefully planned snacks out for Calvin, he gets a bit lost. And then he phones me."

I snorted. "That's only because he likes it. I'm sure the ratio of banana custard bought compared to banana custard consumed suggests there's more than a seven month old baby eating it." Although as I said that I realised I'd have to stop at the shops again on the way home because I'd forgotten to buy banana custard, along with a whole bunch of other stuff, when I'd gone to the supermarket the day before.

I unpacked my sandwiches and looked at them. For some reason I felt a bit queasy at the thought of eating the brie and chutney sandwiches I'd made that morning. Well, queasier than I felt already.

I just really wished I could get this bug out of my system. I didn't have much time to dwell on it though, as people were arriving for the babies and crawlers class that was starting soon.

I'd talked Eric into bringing Sam along this morning. Well, I'd been trying to get Eric and Sam to come along for a while. It seemed like a reasonable perk for having a mum that did this sort of thing would be free classes and it would be good for Sam to see that not all the other kids in the world were scary big girls like his sisters, but Eric had ummed and aahed and only finally relented now. I think he was scared more than anything, although how a roomful of other mums could be scary I couldn't imagine.

They would love him, perhaps a little bit too much. I'd seriously be surprised if Eric didn't get at least one phone number shoved into the nappy-bag while he was here. I was just counting on Sam to fight them all off for me.

People were filing in and writing their names on the sign-up sheet. I got out the soft-toys and things that made noises for those babies who weren't crawling yet and then wandered around greeting everyone.

We were just about to call everyone over to start, and Judith was busy putting out pairs of small bean shaped bean-bags in a semi-circle, when Eric walked in looking a bit flustered.

"You're here. Great!" I said, as he bent down to kiss me lightly on the lips. That made all the women in the hall look, and I noticed a slight rise in the volume of the chatter. The one other dad that was here just looked kind of thoughtful, like maybe he wasn't getting the full service from Judith and me.

"We went to Mt Eden first" Eric said, grumpily, while Sam gave me a happy smile and tried to grab a handful of my hair. He really liked my hair. If I carried him anywhere he held onto a great fistful of it and couldn't be persuaded that I wasn't really going to swing him through the trees like our pre-historic ancestors might have done.

"Why?" I asked, wondering if Eric hadn't packed nappies or something and there'd been an emergency on the way here.

"Because you said that's where you'd be today" Eric said, frowning. "You said this morning 'see you at the War Memorial Hall', except that's not where you are. You're in a Presbyterian Church. In Mt Albert."

"Oh, yeah" I said, thinking it through. I really was feeling the effects of not sleeping enough. The heat wasn't good and it was making me sluggish. I'd slept through Sam crying at 2am this morning and it wasn't until I registered Eric's voice saying "See? Mommy's fine, she's just asleep, but I think she'll wake up any minute now…" and I sat up to see the pair of them sitting on the bed looking at me accusingly, that I realised I was needed.

I was probably getting too old for all this night-feed nonsense.

"Oh, sorry" I said. "I wasn't thinking. But see! You do listen to me sometimes, obviously to figure out where I was. You did figure it out didn't you?" All of a sudden I wondered whether my car had a GPS tracking device or something that I didn't know about.

"Well, I had no choice really" Eric said, grumpily. "I'd promised Sam he'd see you."

I smiled at Sam and took him from Eric so Eric could sign in, but instead he dropped the nappy-bag, the brown satchel that I'd bought him as a Christmas present and which was much more masculine than mine, and just stood around surveying the room.

"Um…sign in there" I said, pointing to the sheet.

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah, so we know you guys were here."

"But you know I'm here" Eric said.

I sighed. "It's an OSH requirement, in case of evacuations" I said to him. "So we don't leave anyone behind."

"But…surely if the place is falling down, I'll be getting you out anyway?" Eric said.

"Yeah…you would think that, but just sign the damn sheet, Eric." I didn't know why he had to argue every point with me. I wasn't in the mood, I felt blah and I was tired and generally cranky.

Eric wrote his name and Sam's down, and then started to wander off to where my stuff was to stow the nappy-bag. "Hey" I said to him. "You forgot something for a start."

"What?" Eric asked, looking around.

"Your son. Remember I'm working, you're the parent."

"Oh. OK" Eric said, coming back to take Sam off me. It was easier said than done as we had to try to disentangle his hand from the end of my ponytail. I realised I had a headache. That was probably tiredness too. And the ponytail-tugging hadn't helped at all, I was sure of it.

I shut my eyes and rubbed my forehead. "You OK?" Eric asked.

"Headache" I said. "I probably need some water. And more sleep. Can you remember that, Sam? Sleep is good."

"Sleep is awesome" Eric said. "Is this class all about sleeping, by any chance?"

"No, but with any luck Sam'll expend so much energy he'll have a really long nap for you this afternoon and you can get some work done."

"That would be fucking excellent. I have to send a rather detailed email to Clancy telling him what a dick he is."

"OK…so that's work-related?" I asked.

"Of course it is" Eric replied. I shrugged. It was hard to tell, he seemed to spend a lot of time telling Clancy what an idiot he thought he was, but I suspected it was out of a kind of affection for him. Or not. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Eric.

"Has he found homes for all the kittens now?" I asked.

Eric sighed. "I think he finally got Indira to take the last one, she'd resisted as she didn't want to be a mad cat lady, but her new place allows pets and Clancy just kind of dropped it off and left."

"Oh. OK." I was glad it had a home, even though I'd never seen it. Eric had refused my request to get Clancy to send photos over so I could see them. I just wanted one tiny look at the drawer full of kittens. He was a big meanie sometimes.

"Kittens cannot be Fed-ex'd across the planet, Sookie" Eric said, and then he stopped and looked around. "So what do I do?" he asked.

"Go over there" I said, pointing to where the group were starting to gather in a semi-circle around Judith. "We're about to do the welcome."

Eric looked at me sharply. "Is this the singing bit?" he asked.

"Mmm, better go" I said, heading over to where Judith was talking to everyone.

EPOV

Sookie had been pestering me for ages to bring Sam along to one of her sessions. I assumed she wanted to show him off or something or maybe give him some pointers. Although to be honest, he was doing pretty OK on the crawling front. He was starting to use his knees, although he still preferred the commando crawling when he had a nice clear space. The wooden floor in the hallway was a favourite. I'd take up the rug and see if he could beat his best time going down it.

Well that was one way to pass the day.

But this was something else entirely. Sure, there was one other guy here with what I assumed was his daughter, but mostly it seemed to be a bunch of moms and their kids. And they were all looking at me as I walked over to join the group. I looked at Sam and he looked a bit wary too. Yeah, I got how he felt. But there was now backing out now.

I lowered myself onto the floor, joining the edge of the group, closest to where Sookie was standing. She smiled at me, and then started giving a welcome speech to the group. After a while she said "Right, shall we pat the beans?"

I had no idea what that meant, but everyone else seemed to pick up some small bean shaped things off the ground and start patting them together in rhythm. I would have joined in but Sam took one off me and started chewing it. Everything went in his mouth these days and he drooled like there was no fucking tomorrow. His first teeth had come through though, on the bottom, so it was kind of obvious why he was doing it, so at least I could understand why he was occasionally cranky. Sookie I had no fucking clue about.

She'd been complaining of tiredness for a couple of weeks which seemed fucking odd considering we'd even had a couple of nights where Sam hadn't woken up. In fact she'd not woken up at all the night before and Sam had, I thought, wondered if I'd done something to her. He could look fucking pissed off when he wanted to.

But I thought I might have a clue about what the problem was now that Sookie was complaining of a headache as well. I guessed her period was back, or about to be soon at any rate. That would more than explain her crankiness too.

Well, I hoped it was her period. I didn't think I really wanted to be in the doghouse over the no condom incident more than I already had been. She'd said she was over it, but there had been a lot of comments about how of course I 'forgot' to use one when I hated them so fucking much. Yeah, I might not have liked them, but forgetting, or, rather, not using one when I thought she was on the pill, was really not worth the aggravation of her being all pissy about it.

All of a sudden I realised it was my turn to introduce us, or at least say our names in the rhythm everyone was tapping out with their beans. "Um…Sam. And Eric" I said. Everyone in the group looked at us. Fuck, I hated this. Any minute now someone was going to tell me something about the accent I was supposed to have and ask where I was from, as if my 'accent' didn't make that pretty damn obvious.

Although I'd been mistaken for Canadian by more than one New Zealander, which was just fucking bizarre.

But Sookie decided to talk next. "So" she said, "In the interests of full disclosure, these two are with me", and she pointed to Sam and me. "So Sam is here to see what Mummy does at work. And now, let's do the Wiggly Woo!"

Oh fuck, I thought. That doesn't sound good. At least it wasn't actual dancing, but more moving the kids' limbs in patterns. Sam thought that was highly entertaining, until he realised that Sookie was demonstrating with another baby and he looked highly pissed.

Well, I would be too.

Then we all had to sing some fucking stupid song about a mother duck that lost all her ducklings, and finally Sookie said we could go on the equipment, and talked us through some of it. I'd seen most of it before, so I was sure I was fine. But Sookie was here anyway and she knew what to do.

SPOV

I realised I may have been in trouble inviting Eric to come along when we broke up after the initial mat session and Eric tried to hand me Sam.

"Um, I'll help" I said, stepping back a bit. "But you have to put him on stuff. Why don't you try to make him climb the A-frame?"

Eric wrinkled his nose at that. "I don't think he can climb yet, Sookie."

"Oh, if he can crawl, he can climb. The trick is teaching him to go back down because his brain is programmed to only go forwards at this age. I'll demonstrate and then leave you guys to it."

I got Eric to follow me over to one of the frames, and I took Sam off him, placing his hands and feet on the rungs. "And now" I said, "You just hold onto his ankles." Sure enough, Sam started climbing.

"Oh" Eric said. "Is that OK?"

"Yeah. And when he gets to the top I'll show you how to get him to go over and come back down…" I realised I was talking to myself and Eric had disappeared.

"What?" he said, as he arrived back.

I sighed. "Nothing" I said. "I was just trying to do my job and help you teach _your_ child how to do this."

Eric shrugged. "I brought my coffee and I realised I hadn't finished it, so I just thought I'd have that last mouthful. You had Sam."

I should not have bought him that fancy insulated travel mug for Valentine's, I thought. "Yeah, but this is a demonstration, not mummy-Sam bonding time. You guys are hanging out."

Eric sighed. "You'll make him feel unwanted" he complained.

"How? I'm not the one racing off to have coffee. And that coffee smells really strong by the way; I can just about smell it from here. "

"Fine, Sookie. Give Sam back to me."

"Well…I can show you how to get him to shoulder-roll off the Swiss ball if you like?"

"Do you think that's wise?" Eric looked worried again, like I was going to break my own child.

"I think he'll be fine" I said, as I led them over to the mat.

Eric kind of got the swing of things, and I left them to it when he was trying to get Sam to crawl through a fabric tunnel to get to a giraffe he was holding up. The problem was that even at his age Sam was a bit too smart to fall for that, and he kept crawling around the tunnel to where his dad was and laughing his head off at his cleverness.

So I helped out a few other people and received a few compliments on how cute my son was. Usually though, what the other mums would say was something along the lines of "Your son's really cute. You can see he takes after his dad…" and then their eyes would slide towards Eric and they'd smile wistfully to themselves. And as much as I wanted to tell them "Eyes front!" kind of sharply, it was Eric I felt a bit sorry for, rather than myself. I knew he was probably used to this kind of thing, but it still can't have been pleasant being such an object of curiosity.

Sam liked all the attention though. He smiled at everyone. Even at 10 month old Trina who decided to suck his toes while they were on the trampoline together. Maybe he liked it? Although as his mother, I wasn't sure I wanted to know too much about that.

EPOV

Jumping Beans was a weird fucking place. It seemed to be all about getting babies to do a bunch of stuff they couldn't do yet in the hope that one day they'd suddenly be able to do it themselves. Still, Sam enjoyed it. Or he liked the fact that Sookie was in the room. You could see his head swivel around to keep an eye on her, and I had to make sure he was distracted every time she touched another kid. A couple of times he just made a break for it, and started off across the wooden floor, in that weird arm over arm crawl of his, until he reached Sookie. I think he thought she was going to replace him with one of the other babies. But I knew she wasn't.

In the meantime, most of the other parents there wanted to talk to me. Well, most of them were moms, I guessed. There was one other guy, but he kind of kept his distance. A few of them said they were nannies. But they were all kind of friendly, I guessed because I was with Sookie and they all knew her.

Eventually Sookie called everyone over to sit in a circle again and there were instruments for the babies to play with for a while, before Judith pulled out the parachute which we waved over the kids while we sang a goodbye song. Sam kept trying to grab the parachute and looked a bit confused when the kid next to him burst into tears because she was frightened of it. I wasn't sure that Sam's drooled on hand patting her on the cheek really cheered her up, but at least it gave her something else to be sad about.

When it was over I walked over to see Sookie. "So, that was OK" I said.

"Yeah" she said quietly. "I just wished I felt a bit better. I can't shake this virusey thing I seem to have picked up. I think it's all the drool here."

"Yeah, there's a lot of drool." Those kids were drooling on every bit of equipment here, and each other. It was kind of gross. I wasn't sure how Sookie wasn't sick all the fucking time quite frankly.

Sookie looked thoughtful for a minute, and gazed off into the distance. Then she seemed to shake herself out of it. "I might give Sam a quick feed in the kitchen, seeing as you're here, and then, hopefully, he'll have a big sleep for you after his lunch." She held out her arms and took Sam from me and I followed her into the kitchen, taking the chair she was trying to drag in there out of her hands and carrying it the rest of the way.

She sat down and got Sam latched on. He looked like the cat that had got the cream, getting unexpected boob-time. Yeah, he was keen on the whole Jumping Beans experience.

I looked at Sookie's face. She looked exhausted. "Are you sure you're OK?" I asked.

"Yeah" she said slowly. "I think so. Maybe I need more iron? I just hope that whatever I've caught doesn't interfere with my milk." She sighed. "I might get some steak for dinner."

"That'd be good" I said.

"I have to go to the supermarket later on; I forgot a bunch of stuff yesterday."

"I could go, if you wanted?" I was a bit worried about her now. It wasn't like Sookie to be this listless, even with her period coming. Although maybe it was different after a baby? I didn't know. And I didn't like to ask. If I said the word period it was sometimes taken as an accusation of PMS.

"No, it's OK. I know what I need" she said. "Did you get the washing out OK this morning?" she asked, changing the subject.

"Washing?" I didn't remember anything about any washing. Shit, shit, shit.

"Yeah, I put the machine on…I thought I said something."

"No, no. But I went in the laundry room to get Sam's hat out of the folding pile and I didn't notice the machine was on." Granted, I hadn't exactly been looking, but I seemed to remember there were lights and a noise when it was on. You could tell when it was working, I was sure of it.

"Oh" Sookie said. "I must have forgotten that too." She swapped sides with Sam and I smiled at the pair of them. There wasn't much more I could do at this point in time.

SPOV

I made it through the last session we did and was just about ready to collapse. I helped Judith pack all the equipment into the van and looked forward to going home, having a shower and a nice sit down for about half an hour before I had to go and get the girls. Although maybe Eric would get them, assuming he'd told Clancy off enough for one day.

I was kind of fixated on the getting home bit and forgot about the supermarket until I pulled into our driveway. Poo. I would have to go out again.

So I wandered inside and had a quick shower and got changed. That felt slightly better, but I was still tired. So, so tired. Why the fuck was I so tired?

Eric was in his office trying to talk to a client on the phone while watching that Sam, who had discovered it was possible to crawl under the desk, didn't pull out any important wires. I took pity on him and hauled Sam out, wrote a note to say I was going to get everyone else and left with Sam in my arms. Sam looked excited to be leaving the house again, and didn't even seem put out when I told him he was in charge of reminding me we needed to go to the supermarket again.

He didn't even mind that our first stop was daycare and all the big kids were going to poke him. "Dat's Sam" Felicia told the assembled group, who clustered around us as we sat on the edge of the sandpit where we'd found Felicia. "He's my baby." She even sounded kind of proud of that fact and I had a total moment of déjà vu. It was uncannily like several visits I'd had with Felicia here when she was a baby and it was Amelia in the sandpit.

Weird. I had a production line of kids going on. In that case, I thought, I should be looking to produce the next one in about two years' time to give Sam someone to demonstrate to his peers. Although I'd be…38, nearly 39 by then. That might be a bit late for another baby I thought, as much as it might be nice. I'd have to give it some serious thought.

But right now I needed Felicia to come with me so we could be on-time to get Amelia.

We arrived outside Amelia's classroom just as the bell rang. I'd somehow forgotten that the pushchair wasn't in my car, so I'd had to carry Sam in on my hip. He was getting heavy. You could really feel where all that banana custard was going.

Amelia dawdled out, just about last as usual. "Can Emily come for a sleepover?" she asked, as she and Emily appeared in front of me.

"Oh, um. Maybe. Sometime" I said, trying to be as vague as possible. I had visions of Tanya leaving Emily with me for a whole weekend and buggering off on holiday.

"I have a special sleepover bed" Amelia said to Emily. "In my room. My new room. It's purple."

"I have a sleepover bed at my dad's" Emily said. "It comes out of the couch."

"Yeah. Mine's really special though" Amelia said, in a pretty blatant display of one-upmanship.

"Bessian come too?" Felicia asked me, she'd waved at him as he and Debbie left and been really happy he waved back. "He can sleep in my speshial bed?"

"Um…well…don't know…" I said. "Come on, we have to get some groceries."

"Oh, OK. And I'll help get them, won't I mum?" Amelia said. "That's my job."

"Yeah, you and Felicia can help" I said. Amelia glared at her sister. She wasn't impressed with the whole Felicia being three thing, any more than Felicia was impressed with Sam's existence. Production line children were all very well, but it would be nice if they appreciated each other a little bit more.

I briefly contemplated going to Nosh, as we were getting steak, but they were expensive and so had our renovations been. So I settled for the Countdown on Dominion Road instead. I managed to get one of the parents' parking spaces right outside the door, but after I stopped the car a huge wave of tiredness hit me and it was almost too much to contemplate getting three kids through a supermarket, even if we were just getting a few things. I just about started the car again and headed for home, when a sudden thought hit me out of the blue.

Pregnant. That's what Judith had suggested I was. What if it was true?

Bloody Eric.

Shit, now I desperately wanted to buy a pregnancy test and know for sure but I was going to have to avoid Amelia's eagle-eyes.

So I got out of the car, looked for my reusable shopping bags and realised I'd left those at home as well, and then got everyone else out. Amelia and Felicia were still arguing over having Sebastian for a sleepover. Felicia was in favour because he was her friend too, but Amelia was adamant you didn't have boys for sleepovers.

I tended to think Eric would agree with that one.

We walked inside and I got Sam strapped into the seat in one of the shopping trolleys and we started off. The trick, I thought, was going to be to send Amelia on enough errands that she wouldn't question being sent off when it was time to get the pregnancy test. Then I'd have to hide it in the trolley and try to slip it into my handbag after it got scanned at the checkout.

I thought I could do that.

As it was I was so distracted that I kept thinking of things we needed long after we'd past the aisle they were in, so Amelia spent a while running around locating stuff for me. Now that she was nearly 6, it wasn't such a heart-stopping moment when she disappeared from view. The trouble was persuading Felicia she needed to stay in my sight, and a couple of times I let her go with Amelia and just had to hope for the best. Usually though I could hear Amelia from whatever aisle she was in, yelling "Felicia! Mummy said to STAY WITH ME!"

So by the time we were in the aisle with all the cosmetics and medicines, I'd sent Amelia and Felicia off to find raisins and that left only Sam to see me swipe a pregnancy test box off the top shelf and hide it under the boxes of Fruit Squirtz I'd been nagged into getting earlier. As it was Sam was pretty distracted by the little old lady who was telling him what a lovely big boy he was.

So that only left the checkout to get through. I distracted Amelia by sending her back to get some yoghurt, and whipped the test onto the conveyor belt. I didn't see it get put in the shopping bag though, because by that time I was so distracted by Felicia's whinging about wanting a lollipop, and then Amelia arrived back and joined in. So it was the two lollipops I got nagged into purchasing that I ended up rescuing before they were packed and handing out. Sam kind looked a bit wistful at that. Still, he'd get lollipops soon enough.

I did however see the look the woman behind the checkout gave me as she scanned the test. I'd never been embarrassed about buying a pregnancy test before. I'd always been married and I'd flashed that wedding ring and known my pregnancies were planned. But now I was the woman with too many kids who couldn't keep her knickers on. I could see her size up Sam as he tried to pull the tissues out of the box they kept by the card scanning machine for customers to use and try to calculate how old he was. Yep, that was me. Stupid Sookie who got herself knocked up again.

I didn't have time to dwell on it though, as the negotiations for treats were on-going and Amelia was trying to get me to add some chocolate bars in with the lollipops.

I figured if Amelia hadn't seen the test yet, there was no point trying to rake around in the bags and draw attention to myself as I loaded them in the car. She was now explaining to Felicia why her choice of strawberry lollipop was better than Felicia's choice of grape. Felicia's "Daddy likes grape" argument just wasn't cutting it as far as Amelia was concerned.

About half-way home I realised I'd completely forgotten to buy steak. Bugger. I'd have to grab some out of the freezer, which I was slowly restocking, having had to pretty much empty it out when we moved. But at least the freezer was inside the house now, in its spot in the laundry. I loved that fact about the new house. Especially as the company who were going to build us a garage were still trying to work out when they could fit us in.

So when we got home mostly I was focussing on remembering to get that steak out before it got any later in the day. Eric got mobbed by the girls and I think he was a bit worried when Felicia started asking if Bessian could sleep over.

I dumped the groceries and started towards the laundry, but then doubled back and put the milk and yoghurt in the fridge. At the current temperatures it would spoil before too long. I heard Felicia asking Eric to get her a Fruit Squirtz, but didn't think much of it.

Sam followed me into the laundry. You really had to watch him these days; he was underfoot a lot of the time and seemed particularly to gravitate towards me. Or, bizarrely, Felicia, who would yell "Sam's botherin' me again!" as he slithered along after her.

I was trying to find where I'd put the steak, when Eric appeared and scooped Sam up. "You OK in there?" he asked, looking at me leaning half-into the freezer.

"Yeah" I said. "I just forgot the steak, so I'm getting some out."

"Oh. Well we could have something else."

"No, no. I've thought of steak now. I can't be arsed thinking of something else. Oh, hang on…what's this? Oh, diced beef. I think there's some down this end though…."

"OK, I'll leave you to it and give Sam something to eat too."

"Yep, sounds good" I agreed.

I eventually pulled out the packets of steak, and closed the freezer. I was about to leave the laundry when I thought about the washing. I looked inside the machine and sure enough, there were clothes in there and laundry detergent, but I obviously hadn't switched it on. I sighed. It could wait until tomorrow.

But it was a worrying sign. And it reminded me I needed to go and get that pregnancy test and hide it while Amelia was off getting changed out of her uniform.

I walked back into the kitchen to find Felicia had her Fruit Squirtz, Eric had helped himself to one too and he was currently helping Sam, who was in the highchair, to try one as well by holding it for him to suck on. They were basically mushed up fruit in a foil packet with a spout, so there wasn't anything in there that Sam didn't already eat, but he looked really chuffed to be having something everything else was for once.

And then Amelia wandered in wearing her favourite pink sundress that was really too short for her now, but which she refused to part with. "I want a Fruit Squirtz too!" she demanded.

"There's one left in the box, Ames" Eric said, gesturing to the box on the kitchen bench.

"No. I don't want blackcurrant" Amelia said, "I want a strawberry one, from the other box." Before I could do anything, she pulled a shopping bag down and starting pulling out the box of Fruit Squirtz. But then she stopped. And pulled something else out.

"Is this for Sam?" she said, staring at the box. "It's got a baby on it."

Fuck. "No" I said, knowing that if I said yes, she'd only want to know what it was. "It's for me…" I was trying to think of something plausible I could say it was, something for women after they'd had a baby, which wouldn't raise any more questions. Vitamins, I thought. I'll say its vitamins.

"It says test" Amelia said, reading the box. "And what's this word. Pre…um, pre…gah…What does it say, Daddy?" She held it up to Eric who was standing closer to her than I was.

"Shit" Eric said quickly, looking at the box, and then up at me. I didn't really want to meet his gaze at this point in time, so I focussed on Amelia.

"Um, just give it to me, honey" I tried.

"No, shit starts with S" Amelia said to Eric. "Pre...gah…nancy" Amelia said, trying to sound it out. "That's not right. What is it Mum?"

I sighed. I was going to have to come clean with her. "Pregnancy" I said. "It says pregnancy."

"But, you're not…" and then I saw realisation dawn on Amelia's face. "Is there a baby in your tummy?" she asked sharply.

"Baby?" Felicia echoed. "We gotta baby. I no want another baby."

"Um…" I said, looking at Amelia and definitely not meeting Eric's eyes. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about him at this point in time. "I don't know. It's a test, like they do at the doctor's. I have to take it. I have to do what's in the box. To find out…if there is a baby…" my voice trailed off to little more than a whisper.

"Oh. Well go on then" Amelia said, holding the box out to me. "I'll have my Fruit Squirtz." I took the box from her while she reached down to get out her snack, and then I just ran from the kitchen as fast as I could.

**A/N For those who don't have it, chutney is a spicy-ish preserve, usually tomato based, that's traditionally eaten with cheese and cold meats.**

**OSH is Occupational Safety and Health. If you don't comply with them, they will shut you down!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	94. Chapter 94

**A/N So just like Tray who started saying truck as though it started with an F, my toddler can now say sock. As though it starts with a C. Yeah, that's going to be fun at Jumping Beans later on this morning!**

**But we're nearly at the end of this story, so thanks for sticking around and encouraging me to keep going. It means a great deal.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Somehow I'd missed that fucking pregnancy test in the grocery bag when I'd pulled out those damn Fruit Squirtz. But Amelia sure as fuck didn't. When she wanted me to read the box to her I was just stunned. Sure we'd had that miscommunication when Sookie hadn't been fucking clear about whether she was actually on the pill or not, but I didn't think it could really happen, just like that. I thought she'd just continue to make snarky comments about how much I obviously hated condoms, like I'd done it on purpose.

But this…this was fucking weird. As was Amelia standing in the kitchen reading the side of the box. Yeah, she didn't do secrets of course, and I expected at any minute she'd start on about special fucking cuddles again.

Sookie wouldn't look at me and she was looking paler and paler. I was half-expecting her to turn on me at any minute, but she was dealing with Amelia.

And then she turned on her heel and ran off. Amelia, completely oblivious to the fucking drama she'd caused, went back to finding her snack, and Felicia just looked at me and yelled "Babies is poos!" like it was all my fault.

Maybe it was.

Sam had lost interest in his Fruit Squirtz, so I got him back out of the highchair, put him on the floor, and went in search of Sookie. Whether she was actually doing the test or not, I figured I could take a pretty good guess where she was.

Except that when I got there, the door of the ensuite was open and there was no sign of Sookie. That…was fucking weird. She always retreated to the bathroom. Every single fucking time.

I figured that maybe she'd gone to the hall bathroom, so I tried in there, but the only occupant was a Barbie doll with a mermaid's tail that'd been dumped in the middle of the floor.

I was a bit fucking stumped. Where the hell would she have gone?

I briefly contemplated going outside and checking to see if her car was still there, when I had another thought. The guest bathroom.

Of course I hadn't realised we had a guest bathroom, until we'd been in the house a week or so and Sookie had seen me walking out of it. "What were you doing in the guest bathroom?" she'd demanded, and I'd thought that was a fucking weird thing to ask because it was probably pretty obvious what I had been doing in there, and then her use of the word guest hit me.

"Uh…are we not using that one?" I'd asked, hoping that we were because it was the closest one to my office.

"No! I'm not cleaning three toilets when there are only four people using them. So stay out!" Sookie had replied. So I had. Mostly. If it was just me it wasn't going to get that dirty, after all.

But now I was just hoping that that's where Sookie had run off to, because if she wasn't in that bathroom, I was out of ideas.

Luckily she was, although I wasn't the first person to find her. She was sitting on the floor and Sam was sitting next to her, gazing at her adoringly. How the fuck could he find her so quickly?

"Um…" I said, realising that I'd been kind of focussed on tracking Sookie down and hadn't really thought about what I'd actually say to her. "Um…have you done the test?"

I realised immediately that was probably the wrong thing to say. Sookie waved the box at me. "Still in here" she said sharply. "Hardly matters now as Amelia's going to tell everyone anyway, whether it's true or not." She glared at me, and then managed to immediately switch expressions so she looked like she was going to cry. This wasn't good.

"OK" I said, hoping to salvage the situation. "How about you do the test, and then…we can take it from there? I mean, if we're going to have a fight let's at least fucking know what we're fighting about…"

Sookie looked at me, and looked like she was going to argue the point, but then just sighed. "OK" she said. "You can leave me to it then."

I scooped up Sam. "Come on, buddy" I said. "You can come with me." He gave me a rather annoyed look, and tried to reach towards Sookie. Yeah, he figured he'd found her first, she was his. Fuck, there was every likelihood we'd both be sharing her with someone else soon.

And that was when it all kind of hit me, standing there with a squirming Sam in my arms as Sookie shut the door on both of us. Another baby. Like Sam. In…fuck, I had no idea how many months...six, maybe? Yeah, that was a fucking freaky thought. I remember what Felicia was like when she was around a year old, she was into everything. Sam was crawling already, so…fuck. I'd never get to sit down at the weekends.

It might be kind of awesome.

Sam wriggled around so much I put him down on the floor and he took off in search of better things to do. And then I just sat down next to the door to the guest bathroom that no guest ever got to use, and waited.

After a few minutes Amelia appeared in front of me. "Has Mum done all the questions?" she asked.

"Questions?" Fuck, I hoped Amelia didn't have more questions about how babies got here. At least not until Sookie was out of the bathroom and in a position to answer them.

"Yeah. Questions on the test. So she knows if there's a baby?"

"Um…no…it's not quite like that…" I said, not really wanting to go into details.

"What isn't?"

"Never mind."

Amelia looked thoughtful. "So…if Mum has to take a test…is that to see if she should have another baby?"

"No" I said without thinking, and then immediately regretted it.

"So what's the test for?" Amelia asked, looking puzzled.

"You don't need to know" I told her, and I couldn't help wondering if things would be a bit easier if Sookie just tried this tactic with her occasionally.

"I do!" she said. "I want to know too! It's not fair if you don't tell me stuff. Secrets are bad. Like when Mum came to school and told me off for whispering to Emily and not telling Maisie what we were talking about, because we were discussing whether her baby might have orange hair like she does, but Mum says that's rude. Secrets are bad. And don't talk about other people behind their backs." She gasped. "You're talking about Mum and she's not here!" Amelia yelled, pointing a finger at me. "You're rude!"

It was still impressive how Amelia could start off talking about one subject and completely veer off into something else. I decided though my best option at this point in time was to change the subject myself. "Did you need anything?" I asked her.

"Oh, yeah" she said. "Sam wants to go out; can I open the door for him?"

Sam loved it outside, but I wasn't sure whether or not the gate on the stairs of the deck was closed. "No" I said, "Just stay inside for now."

"OK" Amelia said, and then she ran off yelling "Felicia! Don't open the door! Daddy said no!"

So that left me alone in the hallway again, sitting on the floor, contemplating my fate. Fuck, I really hoped that Sookie wasn't too pissed about it. She was going to blame me, I knew she was…

And then I thought, maybe it's a false alarm? Maybe it is just a virus, and she isn't really pregnant? And that thought made me feel significantly worse than the feeling that Sookie might be pissed at me for the next few months while she threw up repeatedly and bitched about not fitting any of her clothes.

But somehow the knowledge that I really did want Sookie to be pregnant didn't make me feel that much better. It just made me feel like I might be being unfair to her for wanting her to go through it all again, so soon after Sam.

So soon after the tests with Sam. The tests that said he might not be OK.

But then he was anyway. Sam scooted into the hallway, and then back out again when he couldn't see Sookie with me, just to prove how OK he really was.

Fuck, what were our odds this time? I'd have to look it up.

Then Felicia appeared. "Is Mummy havin' anofer baby?" she asked, coming over to sit in my lap.

"Well, not right now" I said to her.

"I don' want anofer baby" she said, looking at me with her big blue eyes. Fuck, they really did look like Sookie's, and I worried that Sookie was going to look at me and express the same sentiment.

"But…" I said, as I tried to come up with a good reason why she should really like another baby. "But, it'll be your brother…or maybe sister, and brothers and sisters are great."

Felicia wrinkled her nose. "I got Sam and Amealya. I's got a brofer and sista. I's no need more of dem."

"Um…" I really couldn't think of a good selling point for siblings just at that moment in time. "Well, let's just wait and see, OK?"

"Wait and see what?" she asked.

"Wait and see if the baby is coming."

Felicia looked thoughtful. "You mean we c'n tell it not t'come?"

"Well, no. No we can't say that. But…we don't know for sure when it's coming, so there's no point getting worried about it yet."

"Amealya wants to tell Kenn'dy."

"Well, Amelia can't right now." Fuck, I hoped she wasn't outside yelling it over the fence. And if she was outside, I hoped she hadn't let Sam out too.

"I's go tell her" Felicia said, pleased at least to be able to tell Amelia off for once. She ran off shouting "Amealya! You no tell Kenn'dy nuthin'! Daddy _says_!"

I looked at my watch. The test must have been finished by now. I stood up, took a deep breath and knocked on the bathroom door. "Sookie? Are you OK?"

"Come in" she said, and I couldn't read anything in her voice, other than tiredness. I opened the door and walked in.

SPOV

Stupid pregnancy test. Stupid Amelia. Stupid Eric.

Stupid me.

After Eric and Sam left me alone in the guest bathroom, I gritted my teeth and I peed on that stick. A part of me wanted to put it off and worry about it later, but I knew I'd just be fretting while I tried to pretend it wasn't possible. Not to mention I'd be fielding about two hundred questions from Amelia on the subject.

It was a real bugger she could read.

So instead I tried to distract myself by marvelling that not only was Eric obviously still using this bathroom regularly, but he'd not replaced the toilet roll. This just set me off on thinking about all of Eric's multitude of faults. He never listened to me, whether I was telling him I'd let him know when the pill was working, or suggesting he didn't use this bathroom to save me cleaning it, I honestly sometimes wondered whether I'd just have more luck talking to Sam. I was pretty sure he listened to me. And took my suggestions on-board…well, except when I suggested we sleep more at night, but that was just because he liked me. Eric just did what Eric wanted regardless of what I said.

Eric was a large pain in the bum.

I could hear him outside talking to Amelia. She was a pain in the bum as well. As much as you were supposed to love your kids, and I did love her to pieces, she still managed to drive me up the wall at least once a day.

So I sat on the lid of the toilet and tried to pretend I wasn't really in here waiting to see if I was going to have another baby. About…I couldn't really figure it out. Maybe sixteen months after I'd had the previous baby? Oh Christ, that was a small gap.

And because I didn't have a date for my last period to give Russell, he was going to have to estimate it anyway. And he got grumpy doing that. I really thought that it was unfair he was going to be grumpy with me, when none of this was my fault.

Well, not really. Mostly it's Eric's fault, I thought. Mostly it was him because he was in charge of condoms and just because I didn't give him a list of bullet points to talk him through the whole getting back on the pill process, and we didn't touch base every night to see where I was at with that project, then I didn't think I was entirely to blame.

Even if I had been really keen on having sex with him.

He seemed to be out there talking to Felicia now. God, she was going to be really distressed by this turn of events, she wasn't that keen on Sam as it was. Another baby for Eric to love might really push her over the edge into full-scale terrorism and I wasn't sure I could cope with that on top of everything else.

It occurred to me though that Eric would love the baby, and that I didn't have a doubt about. It was really clear to me. About as clear as the lovely second blue line I could see in the window of the test.

I looked at it for a bit, registered I was crying, and then heard Eric talking to me through the door. Well, I guess I'd have to face him sometime.

EPOV

I figured that the crying wouldn't be fucking good for me. Sookie was upset, and if she was upset well, the blame was sure to be laid pretty squarely at my feet. Or at least the part of my anatomy that wasn't wearing a fucking condom when it should have been.

But there wasn't any point telling Sookie not to cry, if she was miserable, she was miserable. So I just put my arms around her and held her, and snuck a look at the test. Two lines. Two lines meant yes…as far as I remembered. I tried to get a look at the instructions, but the sheet was placed too far away from me to really make it out.

From the way Sookie was reacting though, I was pretty sure I was correct about the result. Unless…had she wanted to be pregnant and she wasn't?

Now I was totally confused, and I kind of wished she'd stop crying and say something. But she didn't, there was just some more sobbing.

"It's, um, positive…isn't it?" I asked.

"Yep" Sookie said, sniffing. "It is definitely positive."

"OK" I said. I waited to see what came next and when the yelling or stomping or whatever would start, but there was just more crying. Fuck, she was really, really upset about this. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't make it better. I couldn't make it all disappear. It was what it was; we'd just have to deal with it.

I just hoped Sookie wasn't going to spend six months locked in a bathroom crying.

"So, um…you're upset about it?" I ventured in the end. I figured if I was going to be yelled at, I might as well get it over with. Like ripping a band-aid off and all of that shit.

"I'm just…disappointed" Sookie said, detaching herself from me and reaching over to take a tissue out of the box by the sink. It was the last tissue. "Oh, for God's sake, who used all the freakin' tissues?" she muttered, while bending down to pull another box out of the cabinet underneath the sink. I hadn't known that cupboard was stocked with supplies. I idly wondered what else was in there.

Sookie didn't say anything else, but set about breaking down the old tissue box and folding it flat so it could go into the recycling bin.

"So…you're disappointed you're pregnant?" I said, wanting to clarify the situation. I was kind of operating in the dark here and unless she gave me more of a clue as to what was actually going on with her, I couldn't really say anything that might help.

Although I kind of doubted that any fucking thing I could say would help Sookie at this point in time.

She sighed, and looked at me for what felt like the first time in a long time. "Mostly" she said, "I'm disappointed in myself."

"OK" I said, trying to work that one out, and resisting the urge not to high-five myself for not being the cause of all of the misery. Some of it was probably my fault, sure, but it certainly sounded as though I was off the hook for at least a part.

Maybe she'd realised I was actually right about the no-condom incident.

"I mean, I know you stuffed up totally with the condom that night, and really should have worn one, or at least said something to me" she continued, and I realised that maybe I was in more shit than I initially thought. "But you know" she said, shrugging with one shoulder and looking at the ground, "I'm supposed to be great at _not_ accidentally getting knocked up. God, every time Tara had to take the morning-after pill I used to give her a little mini-lecture about it all too. I'm such an idiot, and I feel like an idiot. And I think that when karma comes back to bite me on the bum and I have to face up to Tara and everyone else I've ever looked down on, I don't think 'Gee, I know I was self-righteous but naked Eric Northman is really kind of distracting and I got carried away' is going to be much of a defence. They'll still all think I was stupid. And I know I was stupid." She sighed and started turning the tissue box around in her hands.

Well it was nice to know she'd noticed I was naked that night, because when I'd first walked in the room she'd done a pretty good impression of preferring the porn-fest she was reading to me. But still, I guess that didn't help matters. "I don't think you're stupid" I said, but she ignored me.

"And then" she continued, "it seems you only have to look at me sideways and I get pregnant."

I knew that I really shouldn't be proud of that fact, but I kind of was. Although I guessed it wasn't all me, some of it had to be Sookie. I figured it was probably a good lesson for both of us to be really careful with contraception from now on.

Because we were going to be the parents of four kids and maybe that was enough.

"OK" I said, trying to work out where we go from here. "OK, so you're worried about what other people will think about you being pregnant, but what do you think?" I looked at Sookie and waited for her response. She just kept looking at that tissue box in her hands.

"Well…I just. I never thought. I mean, I knew…after it happened that we'd taken a risk, but I thought we'd get away with it. And now...I'm a bit scared about what it's going to be like. With another baby." She finally looked back up at me and she looked petrified, and there wasn't much I could say that was going to change that. I was a little shaken about it myself. I figured we were best not to dwell too much on what it might be like in the future and deal with the here and now.

"I think" I said, "that we should just figure out where we go from here. You know, what to do with Amelia and stuff…and just, um, well make you an appointment to see Russell and take it one step at a time. So I wouldn't worry about the future, not tonight. I think we can cope, after all we've coped up until now, and they're all still here. Although Sam might be out on the deck as we speak. But we can do it, Sookie. And it'll be great." I put my hands on her arms and tried to get her to look at me. I really did think we could do it.

But then Sookie said something that fucking shook me to the core. "Well it's alright for you, isn't it? But there's a tiny bit of me that wonders if you like me being knocked up all the time. So I can't run away."

SPOV

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realised what I'd done. Eric looked sick. Positively sick. Like he was the one with morning sickness. I half-expected he'd turn around and punch the wall and storm out. And while I really hoped he didn't, we'd just had the place renovated after all, I probably wouldn't have blamed him. It was kind of a shitty thing to say.

"You really think I would do that?" Eric asked. He sounded a lot less angry than I thought he would. He sounded hurt. Really, really hurt. And I wished I could take those words back more than anything else in the world at that moment. I'd take Amelia shouting about my pregnancy from the rooftops and a legion of people turning up to lecture me on not getting knocked up if I could just make Eric forget what I'd accused him of.

I had no excuse really, other than that I was angry and confused and wanted it to be someone else's fault.

And I felt so incredibly guilty about the fact I felt like this pregnancy, this baby, was some kind of punishment. What made it any less special than any of my other babies? It wasn't the baby's fault it arrived at a bad time. It was kind of mine. And I think that because I wasn't too fond of myself in that moment, I decided I wasn't too fond of Eric either, my partner in crime.

I realised he was my partner, and more than anyone else, he'd be the one who's help I'd need to get through this. And I'd just made a huge fucking mistake.

"No" I said. "I don't really…it's just though, sometimes it feels like you'd rather be forgiven than ask permission for stuff. I mean look at all the furniture you bought for the house. I know it's not the same…but you do kind of go off on your own."

"Well furniture is kind of different, Sookie" Eric said sharply. "And anyway I wasn't on my own with this" Eric said. "You were there too."

"Yep, I was" I agreed. "And it was a major cock-up…no pun intended. And now we have to face the consequences."

Eric hugged me again, which was possibly more than I deserved at that point. "I wouldn't do anything like that" he said. "I can't believe you'd think I would."

"I didn't really" I mumbled against his chest. "But…it's just so weird. That it only took the once."

"We're just really lucky" Eric said.

"Thanks, Pollyanna" I said to him, kind of sarcastically.

Eric pulled back to look at me. "I hate that you're upset about it" he said.

"I hate being upset about it" I agreed. "I really do…it feels awful. When it's a baby…" I trailed off. "It's just kind of terrifying, to think about having four kids and two of them being so small. I mean, will we be able to cope?"

I looked at Eric and there was a brief flash of something in his face as it dawned on him what we might be about to do. And I almost, almost got a glimpse of the guy he'd been when he first arrived, the one who was terrified of Amelia and Felicia and didn't have the first clue what to do with them. But then that disappeared again and I was left with the more recent, and more familiar, version of Eric. "You're a great mom" he said to me.

"Mum" I corrected and he sighed. "And you're a terrific dad" I said to him.

"At least you guys didn't change that word" Eric said, smiling at me.

"_We_ didn't change anything. You guys went off on a tangent with the mom thing. Seriously, you had to be different, didn't you?"

Eric laughed. "But if we're such great parents, then surely we can be great parents to this baby too?" he asked.

We were both quiet for a bit as we contemplated that. "It wouldn't keep you, you know" Eric said in the end, and I knew what he meant. He was thinking of his mother, the woman who took the blender and not her son. And I knew that from experience too. I may have kicked Bill out, but he didn't exactly fight to stay around for his kids. Eric would fight me.

And he hadn't even fled when I'd accused him of getting me pregnant on purpose. Maybe that was a sign, I thought. A good sign, although my brain was a bit all over the place and I couldn't get any further than just knowing that's what it was. I wasn't up to analysing much.

"OK" I said. "OK, well. That's that, then. I guess we just do as you say. Move on and take it one step at a time. And then…if we're lucky, we're going to have another baby." And I smiled at Eric, and he smiled back and I could see the excitement in his eyes. It was a little bit infectious.

"Yeah" he said. "A baby."

"So, predictions? " I asked him. "On the gender? So I can bet against you this time."

Eric smiled, and shrugged. "I think it's a boy" he said.

"Right, I'll start a list of girls' names then. Because you know I get to name this one, don't you?" I gave Eric a playful poke in the chest.

"Mmm" Eric said, carefully not agreeing to anything. "But first item I think was Amelia."

"Yeah, what can we offer her to shut her up?" I mused.

"Well, she still wants a dog…" Eric said thoughtfully. And I have to say, he looked kind of hopeful.

"No. Not adding a dog into the mix. Too cruel to Bob, he's still getting used to this place. And he's getting another baby too. How about a sleepover? She's desperate to have someone stay."

Eric sighed. "Not Sebastian, though."

"Oh, God no. I doubt Debbie would let him come, and if she did, can you imagine the list of instructions he'd arrive with?" I laughed and Eric did too. "Although" I said, "I can only imagine what she'll think of me being pregnant again. Ugh."

"Sookie, don't. Just don't worry about it now."

"Yeah" I said, shaking the mental image of Debbie looking down her nose at me. "Yeah, you're right. But we'll be the only people with four kids I know…of course, that assumes it works out."

"Don't worry about that either" Eric said. "Not tonight."

And then there was the sound of Sam's head hitting the outside of the bathroom door. Eric opened it, and he scooted in and beamed at me. Eric picked him up and tickled him and he squirmed and laughed. Babies aren't so bad I thought. And they grow up pretty quickly.

Then there was a rather distinctive noise from the region of Sam's nappy, followed by a rather distinctive smell. Yeah, maybe Fruit Squirtz weren't that great for him. "Oh, shit" Eric said. "Really, Sam?"

Sam just threw his head back and laughed.

EPOV

I hoped we were OK, I really did. I could understand why Sookie was freaking out, and lashing out in her attempts to blame me entirely for the fact she was pregnant. But that didn't stop me feeling just a little bit fucking exhilarated about the whole thing. Sookie was right when she said we didn't really know anyone else with four kids, but that didn't worry me. It felt kind of freeing, like we were in uncharted waters or something. It was an adventure, an adventure I was going on with Sookie. And while it might be kind of different from the adventures I'd pictured all that time ago, when I'd sat in an office and fantasised about travelling the world with the version of Sookie I had in my mind, it was still going to be pretty fucking awesome. And I wouldn't have wanted to do it with anyone else.

After Sam filled his diaper and felt better for it, Amelia turned up. "So…is there a baby?" she asked.

"We'll talk about it later" I told her, and she pulled a face to show what she thought of that. "Are you here just being nosy?" I asked her.

"No" she bristled. "Mum, Bob's looking at that stuff you put on the bench."

"Oh, Christ. The steak. I better go and rescue it." Sookie started down the hall with Amelia in her wake. I could hear her asking "So…did you have to do the special cuddle again with Daddy because you'd already done it two times with the other daddy and you have to be fair?"

I didn't hear Sookie's answer and I probably didn't want to. Instead I took Sam into his room and put him on the changetable. "So" I said to him, and I laid him down and undid the snaps on his onesie, "What do you think about getting a baby brother? I think it would be pretty cool." Sam gave me a smile that was nearly as broad as the smiles he gave Sookie, and I opened up his diaper and surveyed the damage. "Fuck" I said. "What the fuck has your mother been feeding you?" I started cleaning him up as best as could, but it was all kind of sticky and gross.

Sam giggled at that, and then he tried to wrench his legs out of my grasp and escape, peeing on me in the process. Yeah, fuck. Maybe by the time the next one arrived I'd remember that covering them up thing.

**Thanks for reading!**


	95. Chapter 95

**A/N So I did a big push this week and you get a fourth chapter. Yeah, the housework suffered, so think of me as my mum is coming over later and will tut, but she might do my ironing if I'm really nice to her. **

**Anyway, this is the last chapter in the current timeline, although it covers a few months. I wasn't originally going to write it, but I thought that maybe I'd get some questions on what happened next, so this (hopefully) covers those things. **

**I haven't marked the story as complete,however, because I'm going to write some 'bonus' type chapters that cover a few different time periods. So stay tuned for those. And then there will be another story. Probably called Home Truths. So no one despair that it's over, because it's not really.**

**And once again, I just want to say how much I love writing this, and knowing that you guys are getting some enjoyment out of reading the stuff I make up. It's better than when I used to spend all my ballet lessons pulling faces to make the girl standing next to me at the barre laugh as we did plies. Yeah, I sucked at ballet. So thank you for all your support through the 95 chapters that have made up this story!**

**Disclaimer: Still not mine, although I admit to feeling kind of fond of them after all this time spent hanging out.**

SPOV

Of course it was all very well that Eric's little agenda started with dealing Amelia, but maybe it might have been nice if he'd done that for me. One of his Jedi mind-tricks where he just tells her what she does and doesn't want would have been good about now. But he was off with Sam and his stinky bum and my only consolation was the yell of "Not cool Sam!" that suggested that Eric had been peed on.

"It's not about being fair" I muttered to Amelia as we walked into the kitchen. Bob was up on the kitchen bench investigating the steak, which thankfully was still wrapped up, and jumped down when he saw me. He looked very guilty. At least I lived with one person who knew when he was in the wrong.

"But…you always try to be fair" Amelia argued, as I took the steak out of its plastic trays and put it in a baking dish so I could pop it into the microwave to finish defrosting. I really wasn't up to thinking up an alternative dinner at this point in time. "Every time I say that Felicia can't go in the playhouse because I'm using it you say I have to be fair. Fair is important."

"Well OK, it is" I agreed. "But it's not the reason to have a baby."

"Why do you want another baby?" Amelia asked me. "You've still got Sam. He's not all big like Leesha."

"Um, I just do. We do. Daddy and me." Yeah, I wasn't going to tell her about unplanned pregnancies either, although I guessed one day I'd have to. But the longer I could put it off the better. I started taking out some vegetables to make a salad with.

"Because you wanted to do the cuddle again and you have to have a baby if you do it?" Amelia asked. I tried to pretend I hadn't heard her, but that trick doesn't really work with Amelia. "Mummy! I asked if it's because you wanted…"

"Yeah, I heard you" I muttered. "But…well, it's more about the baby than the cuddle" I hoped that would get her to focus on something other than sex.

Amelia thought for a moment. "Is it kind of weird? The cuddle. Because you know…the daddy puts his pe…"

"No!" I interrupted. "No, it's not weird. You just…you just don't do it only because you want a baby." I was kind of distracted by the realisation I should have bought more lettuce. And tomatoes. Maybe salad was overrated?

"So why then?" Amelia asked.

"What?"

"Why do you do it? If you don't want a baby?" Amelia looked at me expectantly.

"Oh…um…" I tried to think of a plausible reason for doing it which didn't make sex sound rather like something everyone should be doing all the time. Thankfully Eric and Sam arrived in the kitchen at that moment. "The steak's about defrosted" I said to Eric, trying to pretend I couldn't see Amelia, "So you can go and put the barbecue on in a minute."

"Yep, OK" Eric said, as he put Sam down on the floor. Sam made a bee-line for the door, which I noticed for the first time was open. "Hang on, Sam" I called. "The gate's not closed."

Sam chose to ignore me and kept going towards the open door. Yeah, he was much better at playing deaf than I was. "I said to leave the door shut, Ames" I could hear Eric saying, as I grabbed Sam up and he gave me a grumpy look. I still thought it was uncanny how much he looked like Eric when I pissed him off.

"I didn't open it!" Amelia protested. "Felicia did, and I told her not to! But no one listens to me!" She threw up her hands and stomped off in the direction of her bedroom, obviously feeling totally put upon at the moment.

"So where's Felicia?" I asked Eric, as I struggled to hold the squirming Sam in my arms. Eric shrugged, which wasn't helpful. I looked outside and could see Felicia coming back up the steps to the deck.

Eric stuck his head out the door. "Shut the gate, Leesh" he said, and she made a good attempt at it, but couldn't quite do the latch herself, so Eric took over. I put Sam down now it was safe and he raced out to join Eric and Felicia outside. He was really quick at crawling now, and I was pretty sure a lot of that was down to the fact Eric liked to race him up and down the hall, and Sam hadn't figured out his dad was letting him win yet.

Felicia came into the kitchen. "I no want anotha baby" she announced.

"Oh, sweetheart" I said. "I know it's not easy…"

"But it's OK" she continued. "I tol' Kenn'dy and she said that I'll get to be the big sista to two babies, an' dats betta than one. And maybe they's do what I say. Sam! Come here!" Sam ignored her completely and I just stood there stunned.

Eric sighed. "I said not to tell Kennedy, Leesh."

"You said Amealya couldn' tell her. But not me. I's goin' to go tell Amealya I's tol' Kenn'dy, so she doesn' get to." Felicia smiled to herself at that, and then ran off.

"Fuck" Eric said. "I think we were worrying about the wrong one."

EPOV

I kind of thought that I knew what I was in for with another pregnancy, but they're all slightly different. Maybe. It was still pretty much a given that Sookie would be stuck in the bathroom when I got home at night because she'd be throwing up, or maybe thought she might throw up. She still wanted Burger King chicken sandwiches at weird hours of the night, but could eat some cheese. She wanted to eat Thai food at least once a week but couldn't stand Marmite, which she blamed me for wholeheartedly, because that was all due to the fact she was having a half-American baby, apparently. She also started to dislike the smell of coffee, which made things a bit tense when she threatened to move the coffeemaker out onto the deck.

And while a part of me knew that maybe the least I could do was give up coffee, I really thought that might be slightly above and beyond. After all, I was doing the late-night runs to Burger King.

Amelia spent a lot of time pestering Sookie about sex. Well, I think that was the gist of their endless conversations on magic fucking cuddles. I tried to keep out of those and just watched Sookie tie herself in knots trying not to give too much away. Amelia had asked to read the book about how babies are made again and zeroed in on the fact it mentioned, very briefly, that people had sex because it felt nice. And she wanted to know details.

Fuck, I wondered if she was still going to be this curious when she was a teenager. And then I contemplated the fact that I felt so much more confident about coping with another baby before Sam turned two than I did at coping with teenage girls.

It was bad enough when Amelia got her sleepover with Emily. Although the sleep part of that was kind of a euphemism. Sookie didn't seem that fazed by the fact they were still up and giggling their asses off at 11 o'clock at night, and I just wondered when they'd finally run out of things to giggle about.

Felicia kept pestering me because she wanted a sleepover too and didn't buy Sookie's ruling that three was too young, and she wasn't impressed with my ruling that Sebastian wasn't an option even though he was older than three.

In the end we got Jessica and Thomas for a night and Felicia had to make do with having Jessica sleep in her room. It just might have been nice if Felicia had stayed in the room and kept Jessica company, rather than arriving in our bed at midnight because "Jessie breaves loud!"

Sam decided he liked our bed as well. I'm not sure whether it was just his age, or whether he started to suspect something was up with Sookie, but he got very, very attached to her. When she brought him into bed with us in the middle of the night I no longer had to worry about rolling over on him because I was pretty sure he'd fucking bite me if I threatened to get anywhere near Sookie, and now he had a few teeth he could do some damage.

It was a fucking miracle she'd ever ended up pregnant again in the first place.

SPOV

There wasn't really much I could do about the pregnancy, other than just carry on. Eric was right really, we just had to take it one day at a time and deal with the small things as they crept up. Like Debbie finding out.

I happened to arrive at school as the same time as she did one afternoon. I'd been talking to Becs who was now looking quite heavily pregnant and she saw Debbie coming first and made her excuses. "Hello, Sookie" Debbie said, her gaze sweeping over me, Felicia and Sam and finding us all a bit lacking. At least, that was how I read it.

"Hi Debbie" I said. "How are you?"

"Oh. Fine, thank you Sookie. And you're well?"

"Yes" I said, not wanting to elaborate on my woes of morning sickness. I think it was worse this time around, and it had never been great for me. It was probably my body's way at protesting having to go through this all again so soon. Of course it would be better if bloody Eric would give up drinking coffee because the smell just turned my stomach. I didn't think that was too much ask. After all, he wasn't carrying or pushing out another baby, but he looked at me like I'd suggested he cut a limb off or something, so I dropped it. And banished him onto the deck to drink his coffee. At least on the days it wasn't raining, although sometimes it was tempting when it was pouring down as well.

"She can't have long to go now, can she?" Debbie commented, inclining her head towards Becs.

"Nope" I said. "About two months I think."

"Mmm" Debbie said, enigmatically. I got the feeling something else was coming. I was right.

"Well of course babies are very exciting to kids this age, aren't they? I was doing mother-help yesterday and Maisie was telling us all about the baby she has coming. Emily has a little brother too, I believe, and of course you have…that one." She gestured to Sam who waved some drool covered fingers at her. Now he was really in the throes of teething he drooled like a trooper and we went through several bibs a day.

"Well, I guess they're at that age" I said, "where they're the big kids if they're the eldest." I watched Felicia drift off to go and socialise with the other younger siblings who were here, although she'd be pretty quick to abandon them if Sebastian showed up.

"Mmm" Debbie said thoughtfully. "Of course Sebastian is the baby in our family, but we don't see a lot of Charles' other children as they're mostly in Melbourne."

Oh. Well I was kind of stunned at that. I remembered Debbie's husband being older from ante-natal classes but had never twigged this was his second marriage. Huh.

I was busy pondering this fact when Debbie spoke again. "But the odd thing was your Amelia was saying she's getting _another_ baby. I told her it couldn't possibly be true, but she was insistent. I guess kids this age do like to have their little fantasies, don't they Sookie? But I did find it troubling that she was so adamant she was right. She spoke quite loudly to me." Debbie looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to be embarrassed that my daughter was such a shameful teller of tales, and rude to adults to boot.

"Oh, well she's right" I said, and Debbie's mouth gaped, just a little bit. "We're not really telling anyone because it's still early, but it's not that easy with six year olds sometimes."

"Oh" Debbie said. "Oh, but…you had a baby last year Sookie?"

"Yeah" I agreed. I knew that because the arm that was holding that baby was about to drop off. Eric seriously needed to cut down on the banana custard.

"So…again?" Debbie asked. "A fourth child?"

I shrugged. "If it all works out for me."

Debbie attempted to pull herself together. "Well…I suppose Eric is very young. I guess he'd want his own kids." She gave me a look that suggested she couldn't understand why he'd want them with me.

"Well, I've got to keep him around for something" I said, with a forced brightness in my voice. "I pretty much only got him for stud, after all. Luckily, that's what he's good at."

Debbie's eyes widened and I figured she was trying to figure out how to back out of the conversation gracefully. I don't think it really occurred to her that I was the one making up stories, rather than Amelia.

Luckily for Debbie, at that moment the bell rang and she could sweep Sebastian up in her arms and pretend I didn't exist. And I could pretty much pretend the same thing about her.

Tara had had a slightly better reaction to my revelation, she'd laughed. For about five minutes straight. Really laughed. Tears pouring down her face, doubled-over kind of laughing. I didn't think she was really feeling my pain on this one.

"It's not that I'm not sympathetic" she said, when she finally had control of herself again. "It's just…" she paused to blow her nose. "It's kind of funny, don't you think? I mean, you're old!"

"Shut up! You're older than me!"

"Oh, barely. Well, we're both old then. And I couldn't imagine anything worse than another baby. And my kids are nearly 11 and 8, not babies like Sam."

"Well, it wasn't exactly my plan" I said.

"No, and that kind of makes it worse! You should know better by now. I mean, you do know how babies are made, don't you?" Tara cackled again.

"Yes, because I have to keep explaining it to Amelia" I said, "Who is very, very interested in it all."

"Well, can you blame her? When her mum is permanently up the duff?"

I shrugged. I wasn't like this _permanently_, it just kind of felt like I was. At the moment.

"You'll have to get Eric fixed" Tara said. "If you can't keep your hands off him."

"It's not my fault!" I said, although it kind of was I knew. "And I can't get him fixed. That's just mean."

"You got Bob fixed."

"Yeah, but Bob would also fight things and roam if he wasn't fixed. Eric doesn't fight things, and he very rarely roams anywhere. So, I think we're good." Tara just chuckled a bit and let it drop. Well, for a while anyway. She was really enjoying this pregnancy.

Judith was pretty pleased for me too. She tried to calculate out what the gap would be between Sam and this baby. "Um so, it'll be like me and Sarah" she said happily. "That's great because it's nice to be so close. We had a lot of fun growing up." I tried to work out if that fun included the screaming matches I'd witnessed when they were 13 and 15 and liked the same guy.

Russell at least only chuckled slightly, and then only after he'd delivered the obligatory lectures on how we'd have to do our best to estimate the age of the baby, although given my history of having babies who were larger than dates, that was going to be completely trial and error, and then he'd gone on to tell me that really my body needed to rest for at least 18 months between babies and this was probably a bit too soon.

I did kind of know that, and I was tempted to point the finger at Eric for causing the problem, but I noticed Eric looked a bit embarrassed as well, so left it. Nothing like being told off by the obstetrician for not being vigilant with your contraception.

But then Russell patted my knee and said "Don't worry, I think you'll be fine" and I felt a little bit better.

Eric felt a lot better when I got up on Russell's examination table so we could see the baby. Although Sam was less than impressed, he squirmed and Eric put him down so he could cruise around the room. True to form he'd started doing that earlier than his sisters too.

I kind of hoped it wasn't another boy. Not if the boys Eric and I had were all as active as Sam, anyway. Felicia was bad enough sometimes.

Because of my history Russell wanted to do another CVS or an amnio as soon as he could to rule out anything nasty. That made my heart sink a bit. For some reason I hadn't been as worried about miscarriage this time around, maybe it was because I was so busy trying to remember where I'd put my car keys that time I'd left them in the washing machine, or maybe it was that so many people knew so early on that a part of me assumed it would all be OK. I still had the worry at the back of my mind, but it wasn't keeping me awake at night, that's for sure. I had Sam for that.

But the fact of facing another test for Down's didn't exactly thrill me. And although I knew we'd keep the baby, exactly as we'd known we'd keep Sam, I hated that it might be a possibility, and that the logistics of how it would work if it did happen were so much more complicated this time when Sam was going to be about 15 or 16 months older than this baby.

I hoped it was a good sign that we could do a CVS again. Russell seemed pleased I'd managed to grow a placenta on the front of my uterus for this baby too. It was always nice to know I could do some things right.

So when we thought I was about 13 weeks' pregnant, and on a day when Russell was working at the hospital, Eric and I fronted up again so I could have that ridiculously large needle stuck into my side, while Eric marvelled at it all and gave me a detailed rundown of what he could see on the ultrasound monitor. I just held on tight to Eric's hand and gritted my teeth and waited for it to be over.

And although it was stupid, and I knew it wasn't going to change the result in any way, I couldn't help but cry, just a bit, on the way home. I felt bad for inflicting my tears on Eric, especially as he couldn't exactly do anything about it either, but he was quite stoic about it all. "It'll be OK" he said. "Whatever happens, it'll be OK." He was right of course. We'd got through up until now.

We got home from the hospital and Felicia greeted us at the door. "Look at me, Daddy!" she said. "Kenn'dy made us look like Hi-5!"

"Oh" Eric said, probably because he was still a bit vague on who that was. "That's nice."

"Yeah, she's good at makin' de overs, although I didn' want the lipgloss. It tastes funny! But I got four pigtails!"

"You do" I agreed, wondering how elaborate Amelia's hair was. She had only two pigtails, but she'd made Kennedy curl them. She also had the lipgloss. "It tastes nice!" she refuted when Felicia complained about the taste again. Amelia was also wearing a large selection of the brightest clothes from her wardrobe to complete the effect. It was kind of blinding, and remarkably like Hi-5.

Sam had just opted for a sequinned headband and one of Amelia's necklaces strung around his neck. He was in the corner sitting half on top of Kennedy's dog, Max, who amazingly didn't run away in quite the same way Bob did. Sam loved Max to pieces, and liked to drop bits of sandwich and biscuit for him at every opportunity, so Max tolerated Sam as a trade-off for the extra treats.

"Thanks Kennedy" I said, as Eric went off to heat up my wheatbag. I guessed we all knew the drill by now.

"Oh, no problem" she said, standing up from the floor. "It was kind of fun." I guess the adoration of some kids you could walk away from would be kind of pleasant.

I walked Kennedy to the door after she scooped up Max, which made Sam a bit annoyed at the loss of his new playmate. "Um, but if they ask" she said. "I definitely know Hi-5!" She winked at me.

"Of course you do" I said. "After all, you're all bloody related over there, aren't you?"

We got the results from the CVS three days later and the baby was fine. And he was a boy. Eric tried not to look too triumphant, but failed miserably. "A fifty per cent success rate, is not really that wonderful, is it Eric?" I asked him, as he stood in the kitchen watching me make spaghetti bolognaise for the kids and smiling at his amazing prowess as a psychic.

"I think you'll find, Sookie, that every pregnancy is unique. So really it's a hundred per cent success rate."

"Eric, you know I'm totally immune to your bullshit now, don't you?" I asked him, as Sam cruised around the table, which finally had chairs. Of course it had two different designs of chairs because we couldn't agree, but I thought it made it look rustic and homey. Eric thought it made it look like a dog's dinner and kept sitting heavily on the ones I'd picked, hoping, I think, they'd break under his weight. But so far they held up.

"Oh, if only that were the case, Sookie" Eric said loftily. "And anyway, I could just get naked and distract you. That is your defence, isn't it? It's my fault for being naked. I seem to remember that was the argument." Eric smiled at me, and started to lift up the hem of his t-shirt, but stopped abruptly when Amelia's voice said "Why were you naked?"

We celebrated the result by eating Thai food after the kids had gone to bed. I had a real thing for Thai during this pregnancy and the waitresses at the local restaurant really got to know our family. I tried not to be too worried when they wanted to carry Sam around with them like a doll, because Sam didn't seem to mind now he was past the clingy stage, but I think Eric worried about what might happen and seemed to forget that he was about the size of all three Thai women added together. I seriously doubted they were going to kidnap his son.

And I seriously doubted they'd be able to carry Sam around for much longer. He was growing in leaps and bounds and usually got mistaken for a kid who was much older. Felicia got used to answering everything for him though, and I think it made her a little bit fonder of him. But only a little bit. She still wasn't above pushing him over and announcing "Sam's cryin'!" like he was the stupidest kid in the world.

But it wasn't always bad. The morning we got woken up by the sound of Amelia and Felicia singing Sam the _Wonky Donkey_ song was hilarious. Mainly because of the arguing that went on over the lyrics. "No Leesha!" Amelia said. "He's a cranky donkey because he didn't get coffee. Like Daddy. So it's a _cranky_ slinky honky tonky winky wonkey donkey!"

"Is stinky. He's a stinky donkey 'cos he smells. You no' getting' it righ'"Felicia argued. Sometimes I thought that if Amelia said the sky was blue and the grass was green Felicia would decide to argue with her over that too.

"I am!" Amelia shouted. At least all of this had made Sam stop his morning grizzle for food. Possibly because it was so entertaining watching the pair of them battle it out.

I just lay there and pretended I couldn't hear any of them while Eric said "Do you think we need to intervene? Maybe you should go in there?"

EPOV

The worst thing about Sookie being pregnant was that she would get so fucking down about the way she looked. She'd look in the mirror, and sigh, and mutter, and then walk off shaking her head.

I still thought she looked great. Really fucking hot, but she'd never believe me when I told her that, although she did grudgingly agree that it was nice she could still get some wear out of all the maternity clothes and lingerie I'd bought her. Unfortunately she'd packed it all away in storage boxes which were currently in the roof.

And Sookie still insisted I wasn't allowed to send Bob up there ahead of me to scope out the space for any rats.

Once we had the all clear from the test, and I found out I'd been proven right about it being a boy, I waited for the bit where Sookie chased me around all the time to start. I wasn't even going to run particularly fast, because she was looking really pregnant this time around, really early on. I definitely wasn't going to say that to her though, because no way would she chase me if she thought I thought she was fat.

She was just…luscious.

But it didn't quite happen like that with this pregnancy, I'd been right about that when I'd told Sookie that every pregnancy is different. Yeah, Sookie got a bit hornier, but she was so tired still that she wasn't quite up to sex most nights. Sam was sleeping better at night except when he was sick, and he was sick a lot that first winter. All the germs that Amelia and Felicia brought home hung around and infected Sam. He was kind of miserable.

So that took a lot of Sookie's energy, and she was still feeding him, although she thought her milk was changing for the new baby and he might go off it soon. He didn't show any sign of going off it anytime soon. I couldn't blame him. I loved her boobs too.

The new shower was great though. We could both fit in there, even with the bump. The bump that Sookie kept saying she was going to call Tray, after the character in that ridiculous fucking book I'd read to her. I think it was because she couldn't think of anything better. She'd think of something better, and in the meantime I just said 'Fine, sure, whatever' whenever she brought it up, and refused to take the bait.

So a lot of evenings we just got in the shower together and I rubbed her back and talked to the baby codenamed Tray, and we tried to relax as much as possible.

SPOV

While I was tired, and sore and kind of grumpy some of the time, I did realise that things could have been worse. Nothing brought that home to me more than the day Jason and Crystal came to stay for a night when I was about seven months pregnant.

They were up in Auckland without the kids. Crystal had not long before suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Her second. When Jason had phoned to tell me that news it was painful to hear how distressed he sounded down the phone and I wished I could be there to hug him. Apparently Wayne had found her bleeding out on their driveway and it was only thanks to the rescue helicopter that she'd got to hospital in time. That made me really appreciate how close we lived to Auckland Hospital.

And now I could hug Jason of course, except that they'd had another setback. They'd come for an appointment with a fertility specialist, but it appeared unlikely they were going to qualify for the government funded IVF, mainly due to the fact Crystal already had three kids. She was quiet and withdrawn when they arrived and you could see how much that knowledge weighed on her. She'd obviously wanted to give Jason his own flesh and blood kids and the only way to do that was to spend all their savings and even then there were no guarantees.

I'd never been more embarrassed to let someone into my home. Jason was typically Jason, "Shit, Sook" he said, as I showed them around, "This is all pretty fancy, eh? Fuck. Dad'd be impressed that you and Eric got all that wallpaper lined up so well." I didn't have the heart to tell him we'd paid someone to do that for us.

Crystal complimented the house, but mostly she just looked at Jason apologetically. God, I wanted to make it better for her, but there wasn't a way I could.

Sam was curious about the new arrivals, and toddled out to see them. Jason just stared at him and I was a bit worried that he was feeling the loss of his own unborn kids, but after a few seconds he grinned back at Sam and looked at me. "Shit. It's like seeing Dad again, isn't it?" he said.

"Sometimes" I agreed.

Crystal hung out with Sam and he tried to interest her in his large collection of blocks, while Felicia tried to push Sam out of the way and demonstrate correct tower-building procedure. "No!" Sam yelled. "No!"

"You're just a baby" Felicia said. "I'll do it."

No one much talked about the news that they'd received, and when Amelia came in it was hard to get a word in anyway. She mostly wanted to tell them I was having another baby. Out of my vagina. Jason just about spat his cup of tea all over floor at that point. "Oh, Christ" Jason said. "That is way too much information. That's my sister, eh?"

Amelia frowned. "Felicia's my sister."

"So you probably don't want to think about her having a baby either" I said.

"Oh no, she can't. She's too little. And she leaves her dolls out in the playhouse so I don't think that's a good idea" Amelia said dismissively.

Jason had proven in the past that he could speak Felicia, but it appeared he could also speak Sam too. Sam was in his usual spot by the door to the deck yelling "Ow! Ow!" when Jason brought his cup into the kitchen.

"Yeah, mate" he said. "Let's go out."

"Oh…the lawn's a bit wet…" I started to say, but trailed off as I looked at their hopeful faces. Yeah, it wasn't just Dad I could sometimes see in Sam's face. "Oh…I'll get his jacket, and his gumboots are out on the deck."

So Jason stood out there while Sam threw himself into every muddy patch he could find and had a thoroughly great time. Felicia got out her soccer ball and they kicked it around for a bit, and Amelia kept Crystal and I company by giving us a complete rundown on who said what to who at school that day. "So then Maisie said, she's not going to be friends with Em anymore, but she will tomorrow" Amelia said confidently. "Because she's _my _friend, and I'm friends with Em, but not if Em's mean to Chloe because sometimes she makes her cry and that's just mean. And also it makes it hard to do any work. Someone has to find her the tissues!"

"Oh. OK" Crystal said politely.

After the kids were in bed Crystal finally looked ready to talk about it. Eric was home from work now and he'd been a bit quiet all through dinner, as he normally was when Jason was around. He still tended to watch Jason like a hawk around me, but I think he knew that it was unlikely even Jason would put a pregnant woman in a figure-four leglock.

But when Crystal told us about the visit to the specialist and the fact that it looked unlikely she'd have another baby, I could see Eric's eyes flick from me, to her, and back again. And I could see how embarrassed he looked by it all. It was difficult, it wasn't like I was deliberately flaunting my pregnancy and healthy baby in front of them, but at the same time, although I knew my sympathy for them was genuine, I didn't know how to make it not sound forced, given my current position.

In bed that night, Eric turned to me and said "So, if you're the picking the first name, I get to pick the middle name? For this baby?"

"Yep" I said. "But make sure it goes with Tray. Something American might work." I didn't really know about Tray as a name, but it was fun to tease Eric with it. He knew where I'd got it from, after all, and it served him bloody right for starting this whole thing off by reading to me. While naked.

"Yeah, maybe" Eric said thoughtfully.

"So…help me with my pillows?" I asked him. Eric sighed. He kept muttering that surely a bigger bed meant more room, not less and was I just using more pillows this time? Well, I was, but I wasn't going to own up to it when he got all grumpy about it.

I noticed in the morning that Eric and Crystal had their heads together after breakfast. Jason was hanging around in the kitchen in the hope of another cup of tea. "Stop drinking so much tea" I grumbled. "Milk's bloody expensive."

Jason laughed at that. "Yeah, you can laugh, but it's no fun for the rest of us" I said to him.

Amelia looked at the pair of us. "But, you have milk?" she said. "For Sam. And the other baby. I think we're OK." Satisfied with her solution she wandered off and left Jason trying to keep a straight face. He failed miserably.

"If you mention your milking machine to me, I will punch you in the nuts, got it?" I warned.

"Yeah...like you could catch me at the moment, eh? Fuck, you're like a beach ball with arms and legs, Sook."

When they left later that morning, Crystal gave me a big hug, which was difficult with the bump. "E noho ra, Sookie" she said.

"Yeah. Take care, Crystal" I said.

I hugged Jason next. "You're bloody enormous, aren't you chubs?" he said to me.

"Thanks, Jase. Drive safe."

"Yeah, will do. Although it's not me, eh? It's those other bloody jokers you've gotta watch. They all think they're fuckin' invincible."

"Yep" I agreed. "'Course it is."

EPOV

As Sookie got larger and larger, Sam seemed to get worried about her. He'd noticed her lack of lap for one thing and his attempts to crawl onto her for a cuddle were getting thwarted by her bump.

Well, by his brother.

I'd tried talking to him about his brother, but I wasn't sure it was really sinking in. He'd only just turned one, so probably a lot of things didn't sink in. "It'll be really great" I said to Sam. "He'll share your room, and you'll always have someone to play with and just…well, you're really lucky."

Sam just blinked at me. "Ow! Ow!" he chanted.

"Yeah, we can go outside" I said. "But next year, you can go outside with your brother." Sam didn't say anything to that; he just tried to launch himself out of my arms so we could get through the door quicker.

I wasn't really doing a great job of selling this brother thing to him, no better than I'd done with Felicia. But they were really fucking lucky in my opinion. It was the one thing I'd really wanted…well, I kind of wanted my mom to come back. But only for a couple of years. After that I kind of gave up on that one. But I'd still thought it would be cool if there was someone around who was always on my side, and I couldn't help but feel just a tiny fucking bit pleased that I'd managed to arrange that, however inadvertently, for Sam.

He'd thank me later.

SPOV

When I got within a couple of weeks of my approximate due date I started to feel like I was ready to do this thing. Mostly because I felt so bloody sick all the time. I could barely eat, and I threw up. A lot. More than with morning sickness.

That scared the shit out of Eric who was convinced I was dying.

He hauled me off to see Russell a day earlier than my next scheduled appointment and demanded that something be done, right that minute.

"Um…well, we could break your waters tonight then? That worked last time": Russell offered casually.

Yeah, I wasn't sure that was the course of action Eric actually had in mind.

So once again we drove into the hospital without me actually being in labour. I'd felt bad about leaving Sam with Judith, he was so little still, and he'd looked at me with his dark blue eyes and I'd felt like a traitor. He'd really wonder where I was in the morning. Despite my best efforts to wean him, he wasn't buying it, and although he wasn't waking up at night anymore, he still liked to come into our bed in the mornings for what Eric called 'snuggle and boob-time'. I'd been trying to put him off for the last couple of weeks, but he'd just get upset and chant "Mum mum mum mum mum", which was heart-breaking to hear. I really wasn't sure how I was going to manage it when this baby was born, but I guessed I'd just have to muddle through. Which was pretty much all I'd been doing for the last nine months anyway.

EPOV

I felt a lot more confident going into the hospital this time around. I felt like I kind of knew the drill by now and what to expect. For one thing, I'd packed a book for the time that Sookie was going to hide out in the bathroom. And I'd brought my own coffee.

It was still fucking distressing though, watching Sookie's face twist with pain as she started pushing Tray out. I had a hard time thinking of him as anything else now. But Tray wasn't as keen as coming into the world as Sam had been, and Sookie had a harder time getting him out. Russell spent a bit of time muttering about shoulders, and we had to roll her over on her side while those passed through. This time she was so tired she didn't even swear at him.

But it was over soon after that. And this time I steeled myself and actually looked at Tray as he came out, all bloody and disgusting. He announced his arrival with a roar and looked highly pissed off at all of us.

It was fucking awesome.

SPOV

I wished I had remembered how hard it was pushing a baby out. It was exhausting when you were doing it. And part-way through I wanted to give up and go home, I really did. I felt like I'd done this enough for one lifetime. If I'd been able to string more words together I might have told Russell to go and get his scalpel and just cut this one out. But I couldn't. All I could do was grit my teeth and keep on pushing.

And three and a half hours after Russell broke my waters he was here. Tray. Stupidly wide shoulders and everything. All 4 and a half kilos of him.

"About 10 pounds" Russell converted, for Eric's benefit.

"Cool" Eric said, hovering over Tray as Russell checked him over. I was kind of exhausted and left them to it. While I still had some of those nice hormones, this labour had really taken it out of me. I wasn't doing this again, that's for sure.

"You're awesome at birth" Eric said, when he carried Tray back over to me. He bent over and kissed my sweaty forehead, before he placed Tray in my arms.

"Yeah" I said. "But I think I've proved my point on that front."

"Yep" Eric agreed. "Definitely."

When it came time to send out the texts to say Tray was here I asked Eric about the middle name. He'd been kind of secretive about it and I was quite intrigued as to what it was going to be. I'd almost thought it might be James, which we'd nearly used for Sam, but then why the secrecy? It was really odd.

"Um" Eric said, pulling a piece of paper out of his wallet. "I've got it written down here." He handed it to me.

I put down my phone and held it with the hand that wasn't balancing Tray. "Um…OK" I said, looking from the paper to Eric and back again. That was not what I expected at all.

"I, um…well, when Crystal was here. I asked her…I thought…" Eric trailed off.

"Oh" I said, realisation dawning. "Oh. That was a seriously great idea." I looked at the meaning Crystal had written on the piece of paper. "Precious thing" I read out. "Well he is. Even if he was an oops." I looked at Eric and we smiled at each other, with big dopey grins. And then I had a thought. "But, um, can you even pronounce it?" I asked.

"Well…" Eric said. "Crystal gave me lessons."

"Go on then."

"Tey Car-hoo...um, Car-hoo-rung-ee?" Eric looked at me expectantly.

"Not bad" I said. "Te Kahurangi. Although Crystal would probably say it better than I would. But it's great. Your accent really helps though."

"What accent?" Eric asked, and I laughed. I think he was joking.

"Yeah…have you heard Sam? When I go to get him up in the morning he keeps saying 'cawfee?' to me, like he thinks that's good morning. Honestly, it's a scarily good impression of you."

Eric laughed. "I've heard the coffee thing, but he sounds fine saying it. Like, you know, normal."

"Yeah, in Eric-land. Here in New Zealand, he's going to get beaten up."

"Nah, Felicia would take out anyone who tried that."

"She would too. She yelled at that little boy at the park the other week who accidentally pushed Sam over. The poor kid burst into tears. And then Felicia herself pulled Sam over anyway when she was trying to stop him going near the swings. If nothing else, he's getting kind of tough" I said. He was, he was so used to holding his own with his sisters other kids didn't faze him, and he was fairly at home doing mother help too, with a room full of six year olds.

"Yeah, well. He'll have Tray to pick on soon." Eric stroked Tray's head. He was slightly less bald than Sam had been, but not by much.

"I hope not" I said. "I hope they'll get on."

"I'm sure they will. I would…I kind of wanted a younger brother" Eric said, looking a bit wistful.

"Yeah, I could have done without an older brother sometimes, but it was OK. You just get used to it. I guess our kids will too. All four of them. Shit, that's a scary thought."

"It is" Eric agreed. "But it feels kind of good too." He smiled and I could see in his face just how much he liked his big family. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad I thought.

"OK, well I better send the texts so we can alert everyone to the presence of Tray Te Kahurangi Stackhouse Northman. That's kind of a mouthful; I hope he doesn't hate us for it?"

"Nah, who'd hate us? The people that accidentally made him" Eric smiled.

"Yeah…let's not tell him that one."

"No. Probably not a good idea" Eric agreed. "OK, I'll hold him, while you type." I passed Tray over and picked up my cellphone. Yeah, that was a long name to type out.

**A/N Hi-5 are an Australian children's entertainment group, known for dressing in bizarrely bright colours.**

**The Wonky Donkey song is by a New Zealand singer songwriter, and it's quite cool. It's one of those songs that adds to the rhyme as it goes, so he meets a country music loving, one-eyed, three-legged donkey - hence he's a honky tonky winky wonky donkey. Craig Smith is the songwriter. You can see it at www (dot) craigsmith (dot) co (dot) nz/gallery/?id=25**

**E noho ra (Eh no-ho rar) is goodbye.**

**Te Kahurangi is pronounced (pretty much) Tey Car-hoo-rung-ee. It has several meanings, when applied to New Zealand greenstone (Pounamu - pronounce po-nah-moo) it means a rare type that is highly valued, but it's also used as a name for highly-born men, and means precious thing.**

**The government in New Zealand does fund two rounds of IVF, but you need to qualify based on a points system, based on a lot of factors - general health, age, and number of children under 12 are just some of them. **

**Thanks for reading, and remember the first bonus chapter will be up next week. We're skipping ahead a year to that one.**


	96. Bonus Chapter: The Barbecue

**A/N No, as tempting as it is to contemplate because the weather here today is rainy and cold, I did not skip off to a tropical island and forget about my story. As promised here is the first bonus chapter. It's set a year after Tray's birth, so we're in December. Tray's 1, Sam's 2 and 3 months, Felicia's 4 (but very nearly 5) and Amelia is 7. It slots in about two month's prior to the bonus chapter First Words that was at the end of Homecoming (if anyone remembers that far back).**

**So I hope you all enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I couldn't help but think that it was all very well having a stupidly large shower, but occasionally I would like to use it by myself. Yep, I thought, as I realised my foot was being peed on; I definitely would like to shower by myself from now on.

I moved my head out from under the spray and opened my eyes. "You had to go right now, Tray?" I asked him. I think it had been Tray but it was hard to tell when the three of us were sandwiched in here.

Tray didn't do anything; he just sat down and pushed one of the many, many plastic cars that were in here with us around. Sam was busy sticking the pirate ship themed bathtub puzzle to the back wall of the shower. I shampooed, and then stepped back to rinse my hair again, in the process stepping on a car. The resulting ache in my arch was painful to say the least.

But Eric had gone to work early. Again. And if I didn't put the two smallest members of the family in the shower with me then I simply didn't get one. There was no way I could trust them to roam the house without me watching them, and their big sisters were more enablers than anything else, fond of leaving the door to the deck open when the gate wasn't shut, or turning a blind eye to the rolls of toilet paper that were strewn down the hall, and the time Sam decided that life was far more interesting when viewed from the back of the couch all I got was Felicia casually mentioning that Sam was 'pretty good at climbin' now'. And of course there was the usual emptying of cupboards, trashing of drawers, the time they got into Eric's office and pulled his laptop off the desk, the time Sam locked Tray in the guest bathroom, and the infamous laundry powder snowstorm.

It was exhausting just trying to keep ahead of all the possible trouble they could cause. But at least in here, the worst thing they could do was pee on me and generally clog up the shower with small plastic objects. That I could cope with.

Felicia came into the bathroom. "Aren't you finished?" she grumbled.

"No. I'll be out soon" I said, reaching for the showergel.

Felicia sighed. "You're so slow!" she said, and then she stomped off leaving the door to the bathroom open.

"Mum!" Amelia cried, as she came in next. "Mum, where are my shoes?"

"Um…where you left them?"

"No, they're not! I don't know where they are!"

"Well, hang on for a bit and I can come and help you look."

"Aaargh!" Amelia said in frustration. "Hey, are there any blueberries in my lunchbox?" she asked.

"No" I said, switching off the water and grabbing my towel so I could wrap it around myself.

"Why not?" Amelia demanded.

"They've all been eaten" I said, trying to get Tray and Sam to stand still so I could wrap one large bath sheet around them and dry them both at the same time so no one got cold. There was a fair amount of squirming and wriggling and I wished I had more arms.

I also hoped neither of them peed again.

"Well, who ate them?" Amelia asked. "I like blueberries!"

"I know you do, but they got eaten yesterday, while you were at school." I wasn't going to name the culprits, but it was pretty obvious. And getting squished blueberries off the floor by the table had occupied me for a while in the afternoon while Sam had come over to give me lots of encouraging pats to the back. Only later I had realised he still had some blueberry stuck to his hand and I was now sporting some lovely blue marks on the back of my t-shirt.

It might have been easier to cope with had it not been Debbie who pointed that out to me at school pick-up time. With a certain amount of glee in her voice, well, about as much glee as Debbie ever managed to express about anything.

"Well, you have to buy more blueberries!" Amelia yelled at me.

"I will try to do that today" I assured her. "I really will. Now, go and have another hunt for your shoes. The walking bus will be here soon."

"If Sebastian's mum is taking it she gets grumpy if I'm late" Amelia grumbled.

"Yeah, so best try to be ready, then." Amelia stomped off and I could give my full attention to Sam and Tray. First up was getting them both into nappies. I grabbed Tray's one and tried to get him to lie flat on the floor, only to have him immediately roll over, stand up, and go and stand between the toilet and the wall, where it was hard to get him. And he giggled.

So did Sam.

Tempting as it was to just get myself ready and leave the pair of them to their own devices, I knew I had to see this through, so I hauled Tray out of his corner and got him to stand facing the toilet and holding onto it, while I tried to get a nappy on him. It wasn't easy, but it was easier than trying to pin him to the floor. Sam was wearing a nappy-pant, so his was meant to be pulled on anyway and I didn't have to get him to lie down. Ideally I wanted to toilet train him, so I only had one in nappies, which would be a luxury after a year of changing two bottoms all the time, but I was kind of hoping that Eric would take charge of the toilet training Sam project, and he hadn't been around much lately.

First there had been a trip to the States back in April, followed by another in October. I think he was making up for the fact he hadn't gone the previous year when I was pregnant with Tray. It had been hard enough him going when I was pregnant with Sam. So he'd made the effort to stay around and help out. But then opportunities had come up to get involved in some new stuff that Indira and Clancy were doing, and now we had a mortgage and four kids it was hard to turn our nose up at the US currency he could earn. So he'd gone.

And lately he'd been back and forth from Wellington a lot, working with a bank which still had its head office down there. Sometimes it felt like I never saw him. He'd arrived back the previous Friday just in time to participate in Tray's first birthday party on Saturday morning and to be honest it felt as though it was Sunday night before I really got a chance to even say hello to him. And then on Monday morning, and just about every other morning this week, he'd been out the door at the crack of dawn trying to cram in as much work as he could, so he could present it to the Wellington people today.

And sure, he'd had his turn at home on Wednesday but whenever I was in the house he was shut away in the office, working flat-tack. Sometimes it was hard not to feel just a bit like flatmates rather than husband and wife.

I missed Eric, but I didn't want to say anything and make him feel bad. I'd said a few things to him when Tray had first been born that I regretted now. When I first found out I was pregnant with Tray we might have had an unspoken agreement that the pregnancy was no one's fault really and it was one of those things, but somehow when it's the middle of the night and the three week old is screaming and you've only been in bed for 30 minutes because you've been up late wrapping Christmas presents and eating cherry tomatoes while pretending to be Santa and his reindeer, and you know you have about four hours maximum before the first kid arrives in bed and announces that Santa has been, things get said. Things like "you're never getting near me again unless there are at least two condoms between us".

So I was determined to keep my mouth shut for as long as possible, but it wasn't easy.

I finally had Tray and Sam's bums covered, so I jammed them into shorts and t-shirts and tried to make myself somewhat presentable. It was kind of a losing battle, about the only thing I could do with my hair was just scrunch it up into a knot on my head. And at my age I probably needed to be investing in some amazing skincare routine, but all I had time for was a quick wipe of moisturising sunscreen and I had to leave it at that.

Tray and Sam had been loose for about five minutes so God knows what had happened.

As I left our bedroom, Amelia came up to me. "Can I wear these shoes? You could write me a note."

"No! They're ballet slippers. You can't wear those. Look, I'm sure your shoes are, um…by the front door or something." We walked to the front door and sure enough there were her navy sandals, the ones she was actually allowed to wear with her uniform. Amelia huffed and sighed but put them on.

There was no sign of Tray and Sam, which was worrying. However Felicia wandered over. "What's happenin'?" she asked.

"Nothing. Amelia is putting her shoes on and the walking bus will be here shortly."

Felicia nodded. "Have you got everything?" I asked Amelia.

Amelia looked around. "Where's my bag?" she asked.

"Where did you put it? You had it earlier?" I asked.

Amelia shrugged. "Kitchen" she said. "I think."

The three of us trooped into the kitchen to find that Amelia's schoolbag was on the floor. And it was currently being investigated by Tray and Sam, who had emptied out her pencil case and were now slowly munching their way through the contents of her lunchbox. Well, Bob was helping. He seemed to be enjoying the marmite and cheese sandwich that had been carefully cut into triangles and had all its crusts removed.

"Oh, no!" I said, although it kind of felt like an inadequate response. "Guys, we don't spread stuff everywhere." That kind of got ignored too.

"What happened?" Amelia asked, as she arrived behind me. "Oh! That's not fair! That's my stuff. They can't have _my_ stuff. Mum! Mum, they're eating my lunch. Mum, I won't have any lunch. Mum, make them stop!" Amelia was really getting worked up.

"It's OK" I said, picking up Sam and putting him on his feet. I picked up the bag and put it on the bench, and then tried to wrest the actual lunchbox out of Tray's grip. "Let go please, Tray" I said.

"Nuh!" he said. It was one of the few words he could say, and he was very fond of it. I managed to get the lunchbox back, which left him clutching a Shrewsbury biscuit in each chubby hand. Sam had turned his attention to Tray anyway, and chances are Tray was going to lose one of the biscuits in a minute.

Possibly it was wrong to let your kids fight over food like animals, but I had bigger problems.

"Felicia" I said, while I opened the fridge door, trying to find some replacement food. "You go and watch for the walking bus, yell when you see it. But don't let the boys out the front door, whatever you do, OK?"

"Yeah" Felicia said slowly. "You're not supposed to leave stuff on the floor" she said to Amelia. "They get it. You know that." And with a superior glance at Amelia, she left the room, hopefully to stand at the door and yell when she saw Debbie coming up the road.

"Mum! I won't have any lunch!" Amelia wailed again, glaring at her brothers. I grabbed a replacement yoghurt pot, as the previous one was now a puddle by the stove which had some distinct paw prints leading away from it, and the marmite and cheese to make another sandwich…only I was out of bread. Shit.

"Just pick up the stuff from your pencil case and I'll deal with your lunch. You'll have to have cruskits though, instead of a sandwich."

"Well, that's not fair" Amelia grumbled, bending down to retrieve her pens and pencils.

"No, it's not" I agreed. "But it's a good lesson to learn." Tray was also learning a lesson having refused to give up one of his biscuits to Sam, Sam had pushed him over and he'd burst into tears.

"Hey" I said, "Just behave you two. You're in enough trouble already."

"'rouble?" Sam asked, looking at me with all the innocence he could muster, while never removing the grip he had around Tray's wrist.

"Yeah, for eating Amelia's lunch. It's naughty."

"_Very_ naughty!" Amelia said, vehemently.

"Norty spot?" Sam asked.

"Well, probably" I agreed, reaching over to pull Sam's arm off of Tray. "It's OK Tray" I said.

"They're coming!" Felicia yelled from the hall.

"Shit" I muttered.

"Mum!" Amelia wailed. "Hurry up!"

"Nuuuuh!" Tray yelled, crawling away from Sam and straight through the puddle of yoghurt.

"I wanna bistick!" Sam demanded, just generally in case anyone was listening to him.

"In a minute" I said, closing the lid of Amelia's lunchbox and shoving it in her bag. "OK, go" I said to her, and she sprinted down the hall, however it appeared that Tray had run in that direction first, because as I followed her Felicia said "Tray got out."

"Well I said…oh never mind" I called, starting to jog towards the front door and pushing past Amelia. It wasn't really Felicia's job to act as jailer for her younger brothers, but I would have appreciated the help.

I reached the front steps as Debbie and her charges appeared at the front gate. "Oh. Hello, Sookie" she called out.

"Hi Debbie" I said, as I tried to surreptitiously scoop up the now sticky Tray.

"Nuh!" he yelled. "Nuh, nuh, nuh!" I had no choice but to hold him tight to my chest and cover myself in yoghurt in the process. Just…lovely.

"So, um, busy morning?" Debbie asked, as Amelia walked past me to join the throng of kids all ogling me.

"Yeah" I said, as Sam marched up. "I wanna bistick!" he said again, and I ignored both his demand and the shocked look on Debbie's face. No point trying to explain I didn't intentionally give my kids biscuits at 8.15am.

Amelia looked at me sadly. "I don't know if my homework's in my bag" she said.

"Hang on, I'll check" I said, hoping it was. Debbie was looking really annoyed now. I put Tray on the ground, so I could unzip Amelia's backpack and check. It was there and I told her so. Debbie just looked at us impatiently. The rest of the kids appeared to be watching something else. Stupidly, I followed their gaze.

Sam and Tray were fighting over the one biscuit Tray still had in his hand. Sam had grabbed it and was trying to twist it out of Tray's grasp. "Hey" I said, "Stop that." But before I could get over to them to break it up, Sam actually got hold of it, and ran off triumphantly as Tray burst into tears.

Once again I had no choice but to pick up the yoghurt covered child. "It's OK" I said, but Tray didn't think it was because he just sobbed noisily, and messily, into my shoulder while I patted his back.

"Well, we should get going" Debbie said briskly. "Come on everyone!" She turned and started walking and I pretended I couldn't hear her saying to Amelia "You do very well, don't you? To cope with all of that?"

I carried Tray back up to the front door, leaving Felicia standing at the gate yelling "Bye! Bye Sebastian!" Yeah, she still had a soft spot for him, although now that he was nearly 8 he was starting to gain a bit of confidence and in the process didn't have quite the same need to be idolised by a four year old. Felicia in turn had discovered a nice little boy her own age, Finn, who she could boss around for the three days she was pre-school. Finn was a tiny kid, a good head shorter than Felicia and he looked terrified most of the time. I think he liked her, it was hard to tell.

As I reached the front door, Bob shot past me with Sam hot on his heels. "We don't chase Bob" I said, trying to block Sam's exit with my body, and pulling the door shut behind me. I got almost all the way down the hall before the sound of the door-handle rattling alerted me to the fact I'd left Felicia outside.

I put Tray down and started to backtrack while Sam yelled "Ewic! Ewic!"

"No" I said, opening the door. "It's not Daddy, its Felicia."

"Finally!" Felicia muttered, as she pushed past me. "Ewic!" Sam shouted again.

"No, definitely not Daddy" I re-iterated. Sam was starting to give it up, but for a long time Eric had been Eric instead of Daddy, I think because he took his cues from me. And it didn't seem to matter how many times Eric sat there and said "Daddy" very slowly to Sam, he still reverted occasionally. It made Eric a bit grumpy but there wasn't much I could do about it.

I walked back into the kitchen to start mopping up yoghurt. I hoped that Sam and Tray would forget about the biscuit wars and we could move on because I just didn't have the energy to punish them when they'd probably already forgotten they stole Amelia's lunch in the first place.

Sam and Tray hovered around me, and Sam tried "I wanna bistick" kind of half-heartedly. "No" I replied, while wiping up the yoghurt. "No more biscuits. You weren't supposed to have any biscuits in the first place."

Sam thought for a moment, and wandered off. Tray sat down and watched me for a bit longer. Once I'd done with the floor I turned my attention to him and carried him into the laundry to find some clean clothes out of the big basket of stuff that needed folding and putting away. I changed my t-shirt as well, and then I started scooping the wet clothes out of the washing machine that I needed to hang out on the line.

Felicia came to see what I was doing. "I wanna go out" she whined.

"Well, maybe later on. We need more blueberries. Amongst other things."

"No! I don't want to go to the shops. I want to go somewhere better."

I sighed. "Where's better Felicia?"

"Oh…anywhere. Like um, that rock-climbing place I went to with Daddy" she said, while doing a good job of ignoring Tray who was sitting there staring at her.

"We're not going to the rock-climbing place" I told her. There was a place on Dominion Road that had indoor rock-climbing and they took kids from about age 3 upwards. Felicia had been to a birthday party there a few weekends back and loved it, and probably part of the reason she loved it was that she got Daddy all to herself while she was there as Eric had drawn the short-straw and been the parent attending on that day, although staying at home with the rest of them wasn't such a breeze. At any rate ever since then Felicia had been pestering us about going back.

"Well, you're no fun" she huffed and stomped off.

I had all the washing in the basket now, but I hadn't seen Sam in a while. Normally he had a sixth sense about when I was about to head outside, given he was such a fan of being out there. I'd spent a lot of winter watching him from the deck as he trawled through every mud puddle in the backyard, and now it was summer he was happy with any excuse to go out.

I found him in the main bathroom. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"Norty spot" he said sadly.

"Oh" I said, realisation dawning. I briefly wondered how long he would have sat here if I hadn't thought to go looking for him. "Oh…well, good thinking and now you can help me hang out the washing."

"Ou'side?"

"Yeah, come on."

"Otay" Sam said happily, before following me back into the laundry, where we found Tray slowly spreading wet clothes all over the floor.

When I got them both outside, things went a bit better. They ran around and only had a small fight over the small, pink plastic ride-on they'd inherited from their sisters. After I while I shoved the pair of them into the trampoline and zipped up the screen around it. Sam ran around a bit and Tray mostly fell face-first repeatedly while giggling because Sam was giggling at him.

I managed to get the washing hung out in peace and it was kind of nice. Until Felicia showed up. "I want to go on the tramp" she grumbled.

"Well…you can. But you can't do any big bounces" I said to her.

"But it's a tramp. You have to do big bounces, Mum!" Felicia whined.

"But not when your brothers are on there. You can't bounce them around too much."

"But…they'll be OK."

"I said no, Felicia."

"Daddy lets me bounce really high" Felicia complained. "Even if they're in there. They like it."

I sighed. The probably did, they'd enjoy any attention from Felicia even if it meant they'd be bounced around like popcorn in the process.

"It's morning tea time, anyway" I said, walking over the trampoline to try to get Tray and Sam back out again. It wasn't easy, and they tended to run to the other side if you threatened to get them out, but the promise of food eventually won them over and I could lift them back down.

Of course once you've promised food, they pretty much expect you to produce it automatically and there was a certain amount of confusion when we got inside and morning tea wasn't there waiting for them. So I scrabbled together some crackers and cheese and raisins, poured chocolate milk and got Sam and Tray to sit at the small table we had set up by the bifold doors.

"What do you want?" I asked Felicia.

"Dunno" she said, searching the pantry for something better.

I took the opportunity to go for a toilet break. It wasn't my smartest move. When I got back, Tray and Sam had left the table and there was food spread everywhere, and a puddle of chocolate milk in the middle of the table where one of them had managed to prise off the lid of their cup.

"Oh for fuck's sake" I muttered to myself, only it wasn't quite to myself.

"You shouldn't say that" Felicia piped up, from where she was standing in front of the pantry, eating something out of a bag. "They might hear you" she nodded her head towards Sam and Tray who were clustered in front of her clamouring for whatever she had.

I resisted the urge to ask Felicia exactly what family she was growing up in, or point out her resemblance to the pot in the saying. Instead I muttered "You need to be in school." She was more than ready for it these days, only a couple of months to go though, and I'd be back down to just two kids at home. Somehow I didn't seem to be getting anywhere fast on that front.

I looked at what the kids were eating. "Are they prunes?" I asked Felicia.

"Yep" she said, as she handed another one each to Sam and Tray.

It was about twenty minutes later that the first waft of smell hit me and I got to play the fun game of who's pooed? It was going to be a long day.

EPOV

I felt like I'd barely seen my family in weeks. I'd been back to Shreveport, for the second time this year, and I'd spent two weeks there trying to talk Indira through another pitch she wanted to make. It was slightly more pleasant now that she had a place with an actual spare room, although the spare room seemed to mostly belong to her cat, Jock, who was fucking weirder than Bob. Indira said he hadn't been the same since she'd had him fixed, and you couldn't exactly blame the poor fucker, but I could have done without waking up every morning to find him lying on my chest staring at me, like he fucking wanted to take me out. It wasn't my fault she'd done that to him.

The alternative was to pay for a hotel, which would have eaten into any money I was actually making by being over there, or to stay with Clancy and Ginger. Ginger had offered to let me stay, but Clancy was staying silent on the matter and I didn't know how welcome I really was. Plus they had even more cats, so the chances of waking up and finding more furry assassins lying all over me was quite high.

So I'd spent two weeks missing everyone at home and slowly forgetting exactly how chaotic it was there, despite the fact Sookie did her best to fill me in when I called. And it was chaotic these days; there was no other way to describe it really. Sookie was doing her best but I could see that she found it hard work, and every time the boys created another fucking disaster around the house she'd sigh, and then she'd kind of look at me, as though it was all my fucking fault. I'm not quite sure how she figured that, whether she thought it was the DNA they'd got from me, just the fact they were boys or whether it was simply that she was still blaming me for the fact that we had two toddlers instead of one, but the implication was pretty fucking clear. If it wasn't for me, she wouldn't be stuck breaking up fights and cleaning up poop and mushed up food.

And I really didn't have a great counter to that argument, so mostly I just tried not to meet her gaze when I was getting the look of fucking death.

Not that I was getting much of it at the moment. No sooner had I got back from the States than I'd been contacted by Peter Threadgill, who'd resurfaced working for another bank down in Wellington. He was General Manager Corporate Strategy and Planning and wanted my input to work through a new planning model they wanted to implement. And he was willing to pay handsomely for my input.

So I'd found myself flying to Wellington for the first time, but not the last. I hadn't quite realised what Sookie had meant when she'd said "Hope the landing's OK" the first time I'd left. Yeah, fuck. It was bad enough having spent an hour cramped in that stupid fucking plane but as we started our descent I honestly thought the winds buffeting us from side to side were going to blow the plane right across the fucking Cook Strait. Fuck, it was awful. And no one else seemed to bat a fucking eyelid.

But I survived, and found myself stuck in a stuffy meeting room in an office tower in what had to be the world's smallest capital city, with Peter and his Senior Manager Planning, Dawn Green. Dawn was in charge of the project and she was actually OK to work with. Well, she was better than OK. I actually liked Dawn.

The first day I'd been there Peter had left the room suddenly to take a phone call and Dawn had turned to me and said "Uh-oh! He's in trouble."

"What?" I'd asked, half distracted by the PowerPoint I was still reading.

"He hasn't checked in. If he doesn't check in regularly his wife rings him. She's like clockwork."

"Oh" I'd replied, not particularly interested.

"Yeah…of course that's why he's down here now. I don't think he can go back to Auckland because of the history. She doesn't trust him. Of course you weren't first choice for this" Dawn continued.

That got my attention. "I wasn't?"

"Nope. We had someone else down here first. A…Sophie something? She'd been made redundant and Peter was going to get her on contract. She seemed alright, although she's got the world's weirdest looking baby. She would have been cheaper than you, too, which would have been nice because this is my budget we're eating into, but there was some bullshit reason about why she couldn't do it. Conflict of interest or whatever, but the real reason is that Peter's wife said he couldn't work with her again, so we got you instead. Guess she figured he'd be less likely to cheat with you. Although…" Dawn leant back and regarded me. "Who knows? You might be just his type. Have you seen his wife?" I shook my head no. "Mmm, Jade's not exactly the most feminine person I've ever seen. And she takes no prisoners, that's for sure. Maybe you really were first choice and that Sophie was just a smokescreen."

I wasn't sure quite what to make of all of this information. Some of it was far more than I wanted to know. There was silence for a moment and then Dawn burst out laughing. She had a nice laugh.

"Oh, you should see your face about now" she'd said. "It's priceless. Don't worry; I don't think you're really going to sleep with Peter. We're not offering enough money, for one thing. We're a bank. We don't spend our own money!"

Yeah, Dawn was good fun. I was glad that while I was stuck down here in a hotel that hadn't been decorated since about 1998 I at least had someone to work with who wasn't a complete moron. Nor was she a bitch on wheels like Sophie-Anne. She was smart, and funny and knew her shit but wasn't about to take credit for stuff other people had done.

The problem was when it came time for me to produce what they needed me to do on my own. It was one thing working on stuff with Indira and Clancy, when there were three of us to share the workload and they even had Ginger working for them as an associate these days. If nothing else she was better at getting lunch than Clancy had ever fucking been. But in New Zealand, it was only me, and so I'd been working all the hours I could to get it all done because today was the day that Dawn was flying up to Auckland so we could go over it before the presentation in Wellington next week. She'd said it seemed only fair for her to do some of the travel and I will admit to not being too fucked off at the thought of missing out on a landing at Wellington airport.

So I'd left for the office early that morning, when only Amelia was properly out of bed to see me off, so I could go over the last few details before Dawn arrived. Just after 9am she'd walked in the door. "I made it!" she said brightly.

"Yeah, the landings aren't so fucking bad flying this way" I said, and she laughed.

"Jesus, you're just soft!" she said. "You get used to the wind."

"I'm sure you do" I agreed. "Coffee?" I pushed one of the takeaway cups I'd bought at the café across the desk to her.

"Oh, did you get me a latte?" she asked, as she stowed her small suitcase in the corner. I nodded. "Thanks, Eric" she said, taking a sip from the cup. And the she took a seat and we started to go through the presentation.

Around lunchtime I offered to go and get us something from the café by the office, but Dawn wrinkled her nose. "I think we deserve a proper lunch" she said. "And…" she pulled a credit card out of her handbag. "The bank's paying!"

"OK. Well, let's walk up to Mt Eden then" I suggested, standing up and holding the door open for Dawn.

"Yeah, although I warn you. I'm not used to all the sunshine they get up here. I might melt."

"Oh…OK" I said, locking the door behind us.

Dawn slapped my arm. "Yeah, it doesn't work on you does it. I need a real JAFA to say that too, so they can on about how fucking wonderful this city is."

I shrugged. "I like it" I said.

"Yeah, you do I guess. But Wellington's better. Trust me on that one" she turned and smiled at me, before pulling her sunglasses out of her handbag.

"OK" I said, shrugging. "I'll take your word for it."

"Good boy, Eric" she said, patting my arm.

We started slowly walking up Mt Eden Road, talking as we walked. I'd talked to Dawn quite a bit when I was down in Wellington, and we'd been out to dinner a couple of times, once with Peter and once with some of the other people from her team. She was quite interesting, having returned from five years spent in London about eight months earlier. She'd left her boyfriend there and was currently, in her words, 'concentrating on my career after spending a few years fucking around in Europe'. But she did have some interesting stories to tell about her travels. I hadn't quite got around to asking her if she'd been a live sex show in Amsterdam, but I wouldn't have been surprised if she had. And I could bet she'd see the funny side of it too.

When we reached the village I steered us into The Mulberry. We could have gone to one of the other restaurants or bars around, but for some reason I'd never been to this one with Sookie. It felt like I hadn't been out with Sookie for a long time. Mostly our lives seemed to revolve around the kids and the house and just passing information to each other during the random moments we were within talking distance and both awake. I missed her. I missed talking to her like this.

But those thoughts were only fleeting, before we were shown to a table and sat down. "So" Dawn said. "Shall we have a drink?"

SPOV

After the horrific nappies were dealt with, I made a quick lunch of cruskits with Marmite and then I thought we might have a go at leaving the house. It wasn't always as easy as it sounds. Not by the time I put sunscreen and hats on all three kids, got Felicia to find some shoes, told Sam he absolutely had to wear pants, which he'd been resisting doing since the nappy change, wrestled both boys into the pushchair, made sure I had enough snacks as bribes, plus water for everyone, yelled at Felicia to hurry up or she was being left behind, and finally remembered to bring my large shopping bag.

Some days, actually, many days, it was easier to just stay home.

But I was determined to go out, if only so we had bread for the morning and some blueberries to appease Amelia. She'd no doubt be in a mood when she got home, mainly because of the presence of the other Amelia in her class. Amelia Chang had arrived from Christchurch at the beginning of the year and things had been frosty between them ever since. So frosty that Amelia had considered changing her surname to Northman just so she could be Amelia N. and not the dreaded Meela that everyone had decided to call her instead. Yeah, she was not happy with the person who stole her name.

As we were walking out the front gate Kennedy pulled into her driveway. I pushed the pushchair over to say hello.

"Hi" she said, getting out and walking around to the boot. "I was just getting the last minute things for tonight. You guys are still coming, right?" Kennedy was hosting a big pre-Christmas barbecue for Danny's workmates and their friends. She was taking it all quite seriously and had been out working in the garden all week. I'd even heard, from Amelia, that there was going to be a catering company doing all the food. Amelia was hugely impressed. Far more impressed than she'd been with Tray's first birthday party the week before. As far I was concerned Tray was just lucky he got a party at all. After all, he was the fourth kid.

"Yep" I said. "Definitely we'll be there. Although I don't know what time Eric'll show up. He's got some people up from Wellington today going over…I don't know what with him. So I guess he'll have to wait until that's all done."

"Oh, well that's no problem. Just come over when you're ready. The bar will be open from about 4.30."

"Yeah" I said. "Sounds good…although….do you really want all of um, well…the kids at this thing? I just don't want them to ruin your night." Tray and Sam gave Kennedy their best angelic looks from their spots in the pushchair, but I wasn't fooled and I hoped that Kennedy had lived next to us long enough not to be fooled either. Felicia was just staring at her feet, bored rigid by the adult conversation and the presence of her brothers.

"Oh, it'll be fine. They can just run around the backyard. And Leesh, you can look after Max for me, if you like?"

"Can I?" Felicia asked, breaking into a big smile.

"Yeah, he'll need someone to hang with." She scooped up an armful of shopping bags. "OK, well I better this inside. See you later!"

"Yep, see you later on" I said, as I turned around and herded my charges down the road. Of course at the corner everyone saw the playground and there was a fair amount of whinging that we weren't stopping there, but I promised we could have a twenty minute play on the way home if everyone was good up the road.

Shortly afterwards though, as I was pushing the boys up a hill, I wished we had stopped there. This was a stupidly hilly suburb, that's for sure. And it was a really hot day. Even Felicia lagged behind on the uphill bits. On the flats and the downhill slopes she was off, due to the fact she was wearing her sneakers with the wheels in the heels that allowed her to coast along. Eric had brought them back from the States and Felicia loved them with a passion. I just wasn't sure what was going to happen after she grew out of them.

Eventually we made it to the Mt Eden village. I stopped in Loo's fruit shop, and then I popped into the Baker's Delight next door to buy some bread. "I want one of those" Felicia said, pointing to the iced finger bun with the sprinkles all over it in the cabinet.

"What do you say?" I asked her.

"Um…please?" she said after a pause.

"Three of those finger buns, and a custard scroll" I said to the lady who was serving us. I figured I deserved a treat as well.

"Where else are we going?' Felicia asked, as we stood waiting to cross at the lights, and I handed pieces of their buns to Tray and Sam to keep them quiet for a bit longer.

"Nowhere. We're going home. Well, we might stop at the park. If everyone is good." The last bit I said leaning into the pushchair for the benefit of the kid who kept throwing his hat off and the kid who kept kicking the back of his brother's seat. I didn't think either of them were listening to me.

"I want a fluffy!" Felicia demanded.

"No, I'm not stopping at a café" I said to her. It seemed like a nice idea, but the kids didn't appreciate it. Sam and Tray would throw food and run around and even in the Sierra café, which had a sandpit, they were just loose cannons. And Tray normally ate far more of the sand than was good for him.

"Well…can we get an ice cream then?" Felicia tried.

"No. And please stop asking for stuff" I asked.

"Ice!" Sam chanted.

"Now you've set him off" I said to Felicia.

"Well _Daddy_ buys ice cream" Felicia said, challenging me to deny it.

"Daddy isn't here every day, I am. And I said no, because ice cream is a treat." I suddenly became aware that people were crossing the road and we hadn't heard the buzzer. "Come on!" I said to Felicia, and I hustled her across the road, she wheeled along beside me, while I jogged with the pushchair so we'd make it before the lights changed.

It's always weird to see people out of context, where you least expect them to be. And so it took me a moment to realise that the very familiar looking shape standing on the opposite side of the road was in fact Eric. And when I did fully register it was him, helped by Felicia's joyful shout of "Daddy!" as she spotted him, I kind of wished I hadn't.

He was deep in conversation with some immaculately groomed dark haired woman. Or girl. Probably she was more of a girl. She was younger than me that was for sure. Also she was a lot less sweaty and unkempt. She was wearing a beautiful black shift dress that probably cost more than the clothes Sam, Tray, Felicia and I were wearing combined.

Eric looked good too, of course. That was one thing about suddenly finding myself standing in front of him like this; I could kind of appreciate him objectively. But then he always looked good. He was wearing the shirt I really liked, the one with the stripes in shades of blue and brown on a white background. I'd only ironed it the night before for him to wear, precisely because it was my favourite. So I could totally understand why this woman was looking up at him and smiling like that.

What I didn't understand was why he was smiling at her like that, though. And I really didn't get why, when his eyes flicked to me as Felicia threw herself into his arms shouting "Daddy!", the smile totally faded off his face.

"Hi" I said, trying to sound much brighter than I felt. "We're, um, just heading home. I needed a few things."

"Oh, OK" Eric said. "Sookie, this is Dawn Green. She's the manager I said was up from Wellington today. This is Sookie, my wife."

"Hi" I said, trying to remember if there had been any mention of _a_ manager, singular coming up today. But to be honest, there hadn't been much mention of anything. Just a lot of vague stuff about what was happening that I'd half-listened to while I'd been doing about six other things. Shit, I really wished I'd paid more attention.

"Lovely to meet you" Dawn said, extending her hand to me. I shook it, and hoped my palms weren't too sweaty from gripping the bar on the pushchair. Dawn looked me up and down and I felt my smile go tighter. I'd never felt more like a huge unkempt blob in my life. I would have rather taken a million instances of Debbie pointing out smushed berries on my top than stand next to this creature and be subjected to her judgments.

"We just took a break for some lunch" Eric explained.

"Oh, was it nice?" I asked, looking at place they were standing in front of. I'd never been to The Mulberry. It was supposed to be nice.

"It was OK" Eric said, at the same time that Dawn said "Very nice."

"Right, well, um. I'll let you get back to it then" I said. "I guess…you remember about tonight, don't you Eric?"

"Tonight?" he asked.

"Yeah, Kennedy's barbecue…but, um, don't worry if you guys have plans…" I looked at Eric and waited for him to respond.

"Um…" he said, but then Dawn spoke up. "Oh, don't worry about me. I'm staying over for the weekend to catch up with some friends. I'll be fine."

"Yeah, OK. Well, I'll be home when I can" Eric said, dodging Sam's icing-covered hand as Sam attempted to wipe it over the leg of Eric's trousers.

"Yep. If we're not there, we've gone next door" I said. I looked at Dawn. She'd given up on me and was cooing over Tray, who was giving her a big grin, and he was dangerously close to putting a large blob of icing on her dress. I shot forward and grabbed his arm, but a part of me felt that I shouldn't. As it was I didn't get a thank-you from Dawn, but instead she frowned at me, like I was doing something bad to Tray.

"Lovely kids" she said. To Eric.

"Yeah, mostly" he said, laughing.

I felt a bit redundant, even though I was nominal half-owner of the lovely kids. "Right, come on Felicia."

"I want to stay with Daddy" she pouted, putting her arms around Eric's legs.

"Um, I've got work to do, Leesh" he said, gently, while appealing to me to step in with his eyes. Yeah, great. I get to be the bad guy. Again.

"Daddy's going to be busy this afternoon. But he'll be home tonight" I said to her.

"Are you doing stuff with _her_?" Felicia asked, inclining her head towards Dawn.

"He is" Dawn confirmed. "He's proving to be very useful. Not sure what I did without your dad."

Felicia just frowned at that. "But he's my dad" she said slowly, obviously trying to work out what Dawn's interest in Eric was. Sure she was younger than me, and possibly Eric, but I didn't think she was looking for a substitute dad. I hoped not anyway.

"He is" Dawn agreed. "And you're very lucky" she beamed at Eric when she said that, and it seemed to mollify Felicia somewhat. I wondered what, if anything, Eric had told her about his history with us. They seemed to be getting on like a house on fire.

I started walking away. "Bye Dawn" I said, as I passed her and Eric.

"Bye" she said. "Hopefully I'll see you again soon."

Felicia shouted bye, and so did Sam. Tray just threw his hat again and I stopped to pick it up. As I did so I made the mistake of turning around and looking behind me, in time to see Eric and Dawn walking down the road back to his office. "Why didn't Daddy want us to go into work?" Felicia was asking me. "He likes it when we visit."

I sighed, and turned around again. "He already has a visitor" I told her. "Right, let's go to the park and then hopefully some of you will have decent naps this afternoon."

EPOV

I'd enjoyed lunch with Dawn, she was fun to talk to. And it was good to get out of the office and recharge a bit before the afternoon's work. We really had to get down to it and nail what we wanted to present to the CEO next week, and time was running out.

And then Sookie and the kids had suddenly appeared in front of me, which kind of shocked me. For some reason it was like she existed at home and Dawn was, well…Dawn was work. And the two worlds crossing over like that was weird. It felt awkward. Luckily Dawn didn't mind the small girl trying to climb me or the sticky toddlers trying to wipe whatever it was Sookie had given them all over us, but Sookie just seemed…odd about it all. Like I'd done something wrong. I knew it was hard work for her, being at home with the kids, but fuck, I did one day a week with the boys. Well, half a day. I fucking helped. I didn't see why I was being fucking blamed for going out for a business lunch, I was pretty sure Sookie had had a few of those in her time.

And I really did not see why she was taking it out on poor fucking Dawn.

SPOV

We survived the park, although the twenty minutes I'd hoped for were closer to thirty. But at least then I only had to get the kids part-way up our street and into the house. A drink and a nappy change later and Sam and Tray were in bed and I could bring the washing in and fold it in peace. And brood about Eric. And Dawn.

I didn't want to brood about Eric. It was hardly his fault he was working with her. And I'm sure she was really nice. And I trusted him. I did. But it still wasn't very nice seeing him laughing with her, and watching as she put her hand on his arm, and knowing that they'd gone to the restaurant that Eric and I had been talking about trying for ages. One night. When we could find a baby sitter who wanted four kids, because the logistics required to split them up got too difficult sometimes. I just…I just wanted that to be me again. The person that Eric hung out with. His friend. Not just the woman who ran his household and nagged him about bathtime.

Felicia watched TV for a while and then announced it was boring without the boys, so came to watch me fold our clothes. "Do you think Daddy's having fun?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

"With his friend. Dawn."

"Oh, no. Well it's just work. It's not fun."

"They were laughing though" Felicia countered. "They were having jokes. That's what friends do."

"Do you have jokes with Finn?" I asked her, still curious about how her relationship with him worked, and more than a little reluctant to dwell on Eric and Dawn's relationship any longer than I had to.

Felicia sighed. "He's not really funny. Except sometimes he trips over. That's funny."

"Um, I don't know that it is."

"Oh yeah, really funny!" Felicia assured me, and then she wandered off to do something else.

The afternoon dragged a bit when Sam and Tray woke up. It was just more of the same, nappy changes, giving them food, cleaning up food, cleaning up other messes, listening to Felicia whine, protecting Bob from their attentions, protecting them from Felicia when a game of tickle-monster got a bit boisterous.

I thought how I might like to be sitting in an air-conditioned office. With Eric. Or even Dawn.

We picked up Amelia from school. "How was your day?" I asked, as she walked up to the car. These days we were expressly forbidden from meeting her at the door of her classroom. We were embarrassing, and she'd done enough showing off of younger siblings to last a lifetime.

"Alright" Amelia said, taking off her backpack so she could climb in. "But _she's_ got a bigger part than me in the end of year assembly. I'm reading one paragraph. We're all reading one paragraph. But _she's_ doing the introduction as well. It's not fair!"

"No, probably not" I agreed. She was of course the other Amelia, the bane of my Amelia's existence.

"Bye Meela!" Chloe called out happily as she walked past.

"It's AMELIA!" Amelia screeched back. Chloe looked a bit stunned, but carried on.

"Bye Amelia!" Amelia Chang called out next. Amelia stuck her nose in the air and refused to say anything.

"Say goodbye Amelia" I warned her, and she muttered "Bye" through clenched teeth before she climbed into the car and Felicia said "Kenn'dy said I can look after Max tonight. All by myself!"

"So? She said I could help. Because I'm good at parties" Amelia replied. Amelia would love helping tonight, I thought. This would be right up her alley. Unlike Tray's party. She'd hated the fact that the guests were a bunch of kids who didn't understand the rules she'd set up. "Mum!" she'd wailed at one point, when I was trying to talk to Judith. "Mum , Tray's sitting in the wrong chair. He's not sitting in the special birthday seat. _And_ he's sitting at a girl's place. He's got a Tinkerbell hat on. Felicia put it on him, and she's laughing. It's not funny! He should have one of the Thomas hats on. Because he's a boy!"

"I don't think he's that worried" I'd said to her. "If that's what he wants, just let him have it. I have spares in the house so no one will miss out."

"But it's not _right_" Amelia carried on. "It's just not."

Jessica, who'd wandered over at that point, looked at Amelia. "Hey, Amelia" she'd said. "Just chill, huh? It's not that bad." Amelia looked livid at that, and Judith tried very hard to contain her giggles. It was a perfect imitation of what Calvin said to Judith when she was in danger of getting carried away and she had the good grace to realise that sometimes she needed it. However seeing her five year old daughter giving the same speech was too much for her.

It was too much for Amelia as well, who flounced off.

I thought, however, that we were probably safe from any dramas over the party hats at Kennedy's party. It was just the boys that I was worried about. I didn't know if there'd be other kids there and I really didn't want my little troublemakers to stand out too much. I just hoped that Eric wasn't going to be too late.

I made everyone some toasted sandwiches, so they wouldn't be clamouring for food the minute we walked into Kennedy's backyard and then I managed to get a shower to myself, but only because I gave Amelia strict instructions to watch her brothers. I felt a bit bad about doing that, after all, she hadn't decided to have them. She'd probably much rather blob in front of the TV and I could totally understand that, but sometimes I needed her to be the big kid.

"Can I tell them off?" she asked.

"Just…tell them what they can't do" I said, and then I ran for the sanctuary of the shower. It was bliss, being in here by myself. Really good. I washed my hair, I used my fanciest showergels, and I shaved my legs. When I got out I dried my hair so it actually looked like a hairstyle, and I put on body lotion. I even repainted my toenails. Just quickly.

It felt good.

I threw on a silk robe that Eric had bought me for my birthday and went to peruse my wardrobe choices. One by-product of having Sam and then Tray was that I'd lost a lot of weight. Feeding two hungry boys would do that to you, especially when you're running after them at the same time.

I'd finally managed to wean Sam about three months after I'd had Tray. It had taken a lot of persuasion and several father-son talks from Eric about how he was a big boy now and he wasn't a baby like Tray was. Sam was a bit dubious about that one. So Eric had focussed on telling him how proud he'd be of Sam if Sam could drink milk from a cup like Felicia did. Sam had finally got it, but I could see the internal struggle that went on when he watched me feeding Tray, especially when Eric wasn't around. Daddy's absence made the fact of him being proud of you a lot less enticing than having nice cuddles with Mummy.

Tray seemed a little bit more ambivalent about it all and the presence of so many big kids made being the baby somehow less appealing. In fact since he'd started walking, at what seemed to me the shockingly early age of seven months, it had been hard to pin him down long enough to feed him. So he'd been weaned for about a week now, as I'd figured a year was long enough. And so far he hadn't asked once, which I'd taken for a good sign.

But I was definitely thinner. I hadn't exactly slimmed right down like the Hollywood actresses did about two minutes after they gave birth, but I'd noticed that my clothes were a little larger and even Eric, in one of the rare moments we'd had together recently, had squeezed my bum and then looked a little shocked. "Where did your ass go, Sookie?" he'd asked.

"Yeah, I know!" I'd agreed. "I've lost some weight."

"Fuck, hang on. I have to check" he'd said, grabbing a boob in each hand. "Yeah, they're OK still. But I'm disappointed about the ass."

I'd giggled and then shrugged. "I guess you'll just have to get used to it" I'd said.

"Mmm" Eric had mused. "I could knock you up again if you want? That might solve the problem."

"Don't even joke about it" I'd muttered, walking away from him.

But he wasn't here to see me standing around in my underwear, trying to choose something that looked…well. Looked nice , mostly. Made me feel good. More attractive that when I was wearing t-shirts and shorts and assorted and interesting stains.

I finally settled on a maxi-dress I'd bought a while back and maybe worn once. I think I got it after I had Sam. Or maybe Felicia. I briefly contemplated calling Tara to ask if maxi-dresses were still in fashion, but just decided to go with it. I liked it. It fitted my boobs well, now that they weren't on the pneumatic side, and I really liked the print. It was bright red, yellow and orange flowers on a black background. It reminded me a lot of a dress my mother had owned in the '70's, and maybe that made me like it more. I teamed it with the silver sandals I'd worn for our Civil Union and thought it looked OK really.

I put it on and stood swishing the skirt from side to side in front of the mirror. Amelia walked in and caught me. "Um, Mum" she said.

"Yeah?' I said, expecting her to spout off a list of requests and demands. But instead she just said "You look pretty" and walked out of the room.

It took a little longer than I hoped to get everyone else in the house ready. The boys weren't thrilled with their new, matching checked shirts and shorts outfits that I'd bought them. And Sam ran off when I tried to brush his hair, so I abandoned that altogether. He actually needed a haircut. Now that he'd finally grown some proper hair it had not only come with a red tinge that had to have come from my mother's side of the family with its Irish roots, but it had a weird cow-lick to boot.

Felicia resisted my attempts to get her to wear a skirt and turned up her nose at the skort I produced because it was pink. The skort had been Amelia's, but I think she'd only worn it once because it wasn't a proper skirt. It was obviously doomed to languish unworn forever.

So in the end I let Felicia wear her best knee-length shorts, which were a blue and black check, and a navy polo shirt that had come from the boy's department. She wasn't too thrilled with the purple crocs she had to team it with, but they were a hand-me-down too and at least they weren't pink.

The person at the top of the clothing chain actually looked reasonably put together for once. Amelia had a sundress on, that was white with yellow and mauve stripes and a headband with a big white flower on it. She'd put on her silver sandals to go with it. I decided to return the compliment. "You look really nice, Amelia" I said to her, and she just looked at me. "Well…yeah" she said, like I was an idiot.

So we trooped next door to join the party. There were already some people arriving and none of them seemed to be travelling with even one kid, let alone four. I kind of worried we were going to stand out.

We got in the front door and Kennedy waved us down. "Wow! You look great!" she said enthusiastically. A part of my brain wondered how bad I normally looked that my dress got this kind of reaction, but I shrugged it off and decided to take the compliment. "You look lovely too" I said to Kennedy, and she did. But she always did, it was a point of pride with Kennedy.

"Well, go on out to the garden and make yourselves comfortable" Kennedy continued. "Uh…Felicia, here's Max's ball, you can go and find him and keep him company if you like." Felicia took the proffered ball and ran off.

"Can I help you too?" Amelia asked hopefully. "I'm great at parties."

"Yeah, you can pass the hors d'oeuvres round if you like, come with me and I'll give you a tray." Kennedy walked off with Amelia trotting after her saying "I don't think we had horse derfs at Trays birthday."

Well no, I thought. We didn't. I couldn't remember if I'd ever been to a barbecue with hors d'oeuvres. This was kind of fancy.

I shepherded Sam and carried Tray out into the back garden, where people were milling around and the caterers were setting up their equipment. It was kind of busy out here.

I put Tray down and told Sam to sit next to him. Then I pulled the secret weapon out of handbag, and handed them each a Fruit Squirtz. Plan was that they'd be distracted by those for a bit and resist the urge to immediately run off. At least until Mummy got to enjoy it here for five minutes. It was the same trick I'd used with Bob when we'd brought him to the new place after we'd moved, I'd put butter on his paws so he'd have no choice but to sit and lick it off. Eric had pooh-poohed it as a dumb idea but I think it had worked. We still had Bob with us, after all.

I could see Felicia off in a corner of the garden with Max, so I guessed she was OK. She did hit someone's leg when she threw the ball, but I figured I wasn't her coach so that wasn't my problem. I think she said sorry.

Amelia appeared carrying a tray and looking important and Kennedy was right behind her carrying a couple of glasses of champagne. She came over to where I was. "Here you go" she said, handing me one. I hesitated, but then thought why not? I could walk home from here and I wasn't breastfeeding any more and more than anything I was tired of being the responsible parent, the one who never got to have any fun.

I took the glass and raised it. "Merry Christmas" I said.

"Merry Christmas" Kennedy echoed. And then she spied someone who'd just arrived, a tall guy with dark hair and a rather generous amount of stubble. Kennedy waved him over to us and he gave her a big smile as he walked up. "Great you made it!" Kennedy said to the guy. "So, I'll introduce you to my friend Sookie, and…I'll just leave you to it for a moment because that caterer is doing something weird with the roast lamb. Sookie'll look after you."

Kennedy took off and I was left with some strange guy I'd never really met who apparently I was taking care off. Terrific. Because Sam and Tray weren't enough. I didn't even have another Fruit Squirtz.

"Hi" he said. "I'm Alcide. Alcide Hervaux." He held out his hand and I shook it. OK, well I kind of figured why I got him dumped on me. I guess I was considered the person most likely to understand what the hell he was talking about.

"Well, I'm Sookie, as Kennedy said" I said to him. "So whereabouts in the States are you from?"

Alcide frowned slightly. "Vancouver" he said and I immediately clamped my hand over my mouth. Shit, there was no backing out of that one gracefully.

"Sorry" I said, removing my hand from my mouth. "You can tell me how much I sound like Kennedy if you want."

Alcide looked at me, "Well you do" he said, and then he gave me a broad smile. I still felt embarrassed, but it seemed like we were good.

"So how do you know Kennedy?" I asked him, trying to be polite.

"Oh, well I work with Danny. I haven't been in the country long though. I think she felt sorry for me and invited me along."

"Oh, OK" I couldn't think what else to say. I was a bit out of practice at making polite conversation at these sorts of events.

"So, uh, can I get you a drink?" he asked.

"Oh, no. I'm good" I said, holding up my glass. His eyes kind of slid towards my ring as I did so.

"I might just get myself a beer" he said, and he left. I didn't exactly expect him to come back, so I turned my attention to Sam and Tray.

"So how are you guys going?" I asked them.

"Done" Sam said, thrusting the empty packet at me. Tray did the same.

"OK. Well, let's get your box of stuff out, shall we?" I asked. I pulled the travelling box of toys out of my handbag. It was really just a lunchbox, filled with a selection of cars and other plastic things. I hoped it would keep them occupied for a while.

"So, how old are they?" asked a voice just beside me. I turned to see Alcide standing there again. I figured he was kind of starved of company and we were probably better than no one.

"Well, Sam's 2 and a bit" I said, pointing to Sam. "And Tray's just turned one."

"Just little guys, huh?" Alcide said, looking at them. Sam and Tray just stared at him. "But they look kinda big for their age?" Alcide said to me.

"Yeah, they are. Have you got kids?" I asked him. Maybe that was the attraction, I thought. He was missing his own kids and mine were a good substitute. Or just there, anyway.

"Nah" he said, taking a sip of beer. "But my sister Janice, she's got kids. They're great."

"Yeah" I said, which seemed to be the appropriate response for a mother of four, even if it wasn't always the way I felt. "I've got two others. That's Felicia" I pointed in her direction. "She's nearly five. And Amelia over there thrusting napkins into everyone's hands is 7."

"Four kids" Alcide said slowly. "You don't really look old enough to have four kids."

Yeah, I did. But it was nice of him to say that, so I smiled. "Well they keep me busy" I said. "But mostly it's OK. Well, we like it. Eric and I do. That's my husband. He's from the States…hence the confusion before. That's why I thought Kennedy brought you over here. Because I speak American. Almost like a native now." Aware I was rambling a bit, I stopped short.

Alcide seemed to take it in his stride though. "He's a very lucky guy" he said smiling down at me. He was a bit smarmy, but I think he meant well.

"Well he'd like you" I said. "You called him a guy for one thing. I keep getting told off because I call him a bloke."

Alcide winced exaggeratedly. "Yeah, I'm with him on that one." We laughed and then sipped our drinks.

"So…do you live around here?" Alcide asked.

"Next door" I said, indicating the fence. "Poor Kennedy."

Alcide laughed. "I'm sure you're not that bad" he said, and I wasn't completely sure whether he meant me singular or all of us.

Tray and Sam had now reached the limit of their interest in their toys, and they'd decided to stage a fight over something that was in there. "Hey" I said. "No fighting guys. You know the rules."

"Tray's a poo" Sam said. Yeah, he'd learned that one from Felicia. Tray just yelled "Nuh nuh nuh nuh" really loudly. This was the point at which I expected Alcide to make himself scarce.

Instead he crouched down so he was at their level. "Hey guys" he said to them. "Who wants me to chase them?"

"Me!" Sam said and he ran off as fast as he could, Tray didn't say anything he just sprinted after Sam. Alcide looked up at me and winked, and then he put his beer down on a table and took after them, with huge exaggerated steps. I could hear Sam and Tray's giggles as he captured them and tipped them upside down on the grass.

I threw back the rest of my champagne and walked over to the bar that was set up by the barbecue to get another. Well, I figured I might as well. All my kids were reasonably well occupied and I was feeling kind of free.

I liked that Alcide guy. He could stick around for a bit, I decided.

EPOV

The afternoon's work went well. Dawn and I discussed what slides we needed to use in our presentation for the following week and there were some back and forth phone calls to the customer segmentation team down Wellington so we could get the visuals we wanted. So by the time five o'clock rolled around I was in a pretty good mood and had forgotten the whole thing with Sookie earlier.

Well, I'd pushed it to one side. I still didn't understand why she was so pissed with me. And I wasn't exactly in the mood to go home and get the cold shoulder either. I seemed a lot more pleasant to sit here with Dawn and just talk to her. I told her some stories about working for Victor, she told me about the guy she'd worked for in London who got drunk every lunchtime and spent the afternoon chasing the women around. They all tolerated it because he had a wife with terminal cancer.

And then she told me about the dick-brained boyfriend she'd left over there and how she was over, as she put it 'drongos who don't know their arse from their elbow.' "I'm so over it all, Eric" she said. "I just…well, you know what it's like. I'll be thirty the year after next, I just want a real relationship. With someone who doesn't think it's appropriate to accidentally lock me out of the flat and go out drinking with his mates. I had to spend seven hours in the pub across the road with all our groceries for the week. If he'd just told me he was going out I would have made sure I had my keys, you know?"

I nodded sympathetically. The guy did sound like a douche.

So before long it was six o'clock and then six-thirty and we were still just sitting around talking, work having long been packed up for the day. "I love the long summer evenings" Dawn said, looking out the window. "You can really pack so much more into the day."

That reminded me about the barbecue. Fuck.

"I, uh…well, do you need a ride anywhere?" I asked Dawn, as I started to pack my laptop into my bag. "To your friend's place, or whatever."

"Oh" she said. "Oh, OK. Actually I booked myself into a boutique hotel near Newmarket…so, if you could save me the taxi fare, that'd be great." She smiled at me gratefully.

"Sure" I said. "Least I could do for you saving me from flying to fucking Wellington again."

"It's not _that_ bad" she said, standing up and grabbing the handle of her suitcase. "But, you know, if I had the right job…or opportunity, then I wouldn't say no to moving up here. There's more going on, you know?"

"Yeah" I agreed, as I opened the door and waited for Dawn to step through.

We found the place she was staying without too much effort, it wasn't far from the main shopping area in Newmarket. "Nice place" I said, pulling in front of it.

"Yeah" Dawn said. "Well, I hope so. I thought I deserved a treat…and I wanted this weekend to be special." She turned to look at me.

"With your friends?" I asked.

"Well…" Dawn said thoughtfully. "With someone." She held my gaze for a moment and then seemed to shake herself. "And I thought I might do some Christmas shopping" she added, brightly.

"Fuck, it still just doesn't seem Christmassy when it's summer" I said to her.

She laughed. "It's not all about the Northern Hemisphere, you know Eric" she said, putting her hand on my arm.

And then it hit me. Why I liked her so much. She reminded me of Sookie, but she was an imagined version of Sookie. A Sookie without Bill or kids or a whole heap of the other shit that had happened to her or responsibilities that she'd carried alone. Dawn had none of that, she was single and independent and doing what she wanted. And looking at her, it was hard not to notice that this vibrant, clever, funny woman was wrapped up in a fucking alluring package.

But she wasn't Sookie. And it was Sookie I loved.

"You know" Dawn said, obviously reading my silence for something else. "If you wanted to see…the hotel, you can come in? We could get a drink if you don't have to rush off?" And there it was in her face, as clear as fucking day. The invitation I'd been turning a blind eye to for so long. The real reason we were sitting here right now, in front of a hotel in Newmarket.

"Um, I really have to get going" I said to her. "But, you have a good weekend and enjoy your shopping and I'll see you down in Wellington next week." I didn't wait for her to say anything else, but stepped out of the car to get her suitcase out of the trunk for her.

Dawn got out of the car and came around to take it from me. "So, um. OK then. Have a great weekend Eric."

"You too, Dawn." And then I got back in the car and drove towards home. And Sookie. They were still the same thing to me.

SPOV

Alcide was great at entertaining the boys I had to admit. They were leaping all over him like over-excited puppies and he was taking it, which was fantastic because I'd discovered that Kennedy was serving a rather nice pinot gris and it's hard to play with your kids with a wineglass in your hand.

It was nice Sam and Tray had someone to play with. I went to see how Felicia was getting on "Not long until we eat" I said to her. Max would probably be grateful for that. He looked kind of stuffed after the workout Felicia had been giving him.

"Amelia won't let me eat any of the horsey things" Felicia complained. "Says they're for grownups, but she's been eating them."

"Oh, well you can have some. Say I said so."

"She won't believe _me."_

"Tell her Daddy said you could. That might shut her up" I suggested. I wasn't above using Eric's name occasionally.

Felicia shrugged. "Who's that?" she asked, pointing to Alcide.

"Alcide. He's a friend of Danny's."

"Doesn't he have his own kids?" she asked.

"Well…no, but I don't think he wants mine either" I assured her.

"Maybe he does?" Felicia suggested. "He could borrow them for a bit?"

"What? Sam and Tray? They're not library books Felicia, I can't loan them out." I knew she wasn't fond of them, but she didn't have to be quite so blatant. Mind you, Jason had once tried to sell me to Mrs Fortenberry who'd apparently remarked she'd wished she had a girl after Jason and Hoyt had put mud all over her new lounge suite. Jason was prepared to let me go for three comics and a 50 cent lolly mixture from the corner dairy. I guess I'm glad Mrs Fortenberry didn't want to take that deal.

"But…they wouldn't mind. They're having fun." Felicia gestured over to where Sam was trying to leap on Alcide's back and Tray was…well I hoped he was just pretending to bite Alcide. Shit. I thought I'd better go and check on them.

"Sorry" I said to Alcide. "I think they're getting a bit out of hand. I'll pull them off and you can make a run for it."

"Oh, no. I'm OK" he said, as Sam just about strangled him.

"Um…I'll get you another drink" I said, thinking that was the least I could do. I got myself another one while I was up. I hoped there was some food soon. Or that Amelia turned up with the hors d'oeuvres at least.

She may have read my mind because when I got back to Alcide she was standing in front of him carrying her tray. I snaffled a couple of the cream cheese and smoked salmon blinis she was holding. They were great. I loved smoked salmon.

"So…are you from the States?" Amelia asked Alcide.

"Canada" he replied.

"That's in the States" Amelia told him.

"No" Alcide corrected. "It's quite separate."

"Mmm, I think it is part of the States" Amelia mused. "You sound like Daddy. He's from the States."

Alcide looked a bit taken aback. I guessed he wasn't used to Amelia just telling him how the world worked. "Well, it's a bit like us and Kennedy" I tried explaining to Amelia, before I grabbed another blini. "I guess we sound kind of the same as she does, and she's from Australia."

Amelia turned to look at me and frowned. "Oh no" she said. "Kennedy sounds like Hi-5. You know, they say dance funny. And can't and…hey is Australia in the States?"

"No" I said, and Amelia gave me a look that suggested she thought I might be wrong. "I think it might be close though" she said.

"Closer than here" I agreed. Then I turned to Alcide. "So you've met Amelia now, as you can tell I'm saving my pennies for the inevitable geography tutor we'll need down the line."

Alcide laughed, "I don't know" he said. "I think in some American high schools she'd be getting an A+."

I laughed at that and Amelia looked at me, then at Alcide, and back to me again. "You're laughing" she said.

"Yeah" I agreed, hoping I wasn't going to be lectured for laughing at her.

"She likes you" Amelia said to Alcide. "You make her laugh. And you laugh at her…for some reason. If you want, you can come and visit. When Daddy's not there, because he's really busy with work. And keep Mum company. It's nicer when she's happy, sometimes she's just grumpy. And she doesn't laugh a lot with Daddy at the moment, mostly she tells him things like 'if you're not going to pick up any toys at least look where you're putting your bloody feet.' So it might be nice if you visit. But you can't cuddle her. She's already done special cuddles with two daddies and we have enough babies, OK?"

"Um…OK?" Alcide agreed, sounding unsure about the whole thing. I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. Having your daughter try and pimp you out was infinitely worse than having your brother sell you for comics and lollies I decided.

Amelia decided she'd done her job and took off, leaving me with Alcide and the two smallest troublemakers. After having child no. 1 embarrass him and me, I decided that maybe he needed a break from kids 3 and 4 as well.

"Hey, Sam" I said, trying to get his attention. "Why don't you go and play with Felicia for a bit?" Max had flagged completely now and was lying by the fence refusing to catch the ball anymore. I had a feeling Sam could sub in for him though.

"Wha'?" he said.

"Go over to Felicia. Look, come with me." I shepherded Sam and Tray down to the back of the section and told Felicia to play with them for a bit. She complained that she was looking after Max, and my pointing out that Max was starting to snore didn't appease her. But she threw the ball and that kept the boys amused.

I walked back towards the deck thinking Alcide might have made his escape, but instead he handed me another glass of wine. "I thought you could use another drink" he said.

"Oh, um. Thank you" I was a bit worried I was reaching my limit, but I didn't want to be rude.

"So, um, tell me about yourself" I said to him, as I sat down next to him again.

EPOV

All the way home I thought about what I'd done. What I'd nearly done. It would have been so easy to follow Dawn into her hotel room. It wasn't like it would be the first time I'd done that sort of thing, after all. Once upon a time I wouldn't have fucking thought twice.

But I had too much to lose now. Too much to risk for a one-night stand with a girl who reminded me of the woman I had at home already.

And I felt shitty about leaving Sookie carrying the can with the kids for so long. I'd been away, and I'd been preoccupied and I'd been just…fucking missing out. I'd stopped appreciating how fucking great my family was. Although it might be better if they left less shit around the house, but I could even live with that.

But of course when I got home, it was empty. All the noise was coming from the other side of the fence.

SPOV

I was totally over Alcide now. He was boring as shit. I did not want to hear about his father's gambling addiction, his lying cheating ex-girlfriend Annabelle, or the group of guys he went hunting with and all the beautiful things he'd killed. Not even the wine was helping me, if anything, I think it was making me less tolerant. Way less tolerant. Just shut up, I thought. Shut up and go and bother some other poor woman who might care more about how difficult it is to find a woman you actually want to settle down with, and how much you've struggled to get where you are today, and what a sacrifice it was coming to New Zealand. Just bugger off.

And then I noticed that the food was being served. "I'd better go and sort out something for the kids" I murmured and I took off. I got a couple of plates and picked up some things the boys would eat. Chunks of meat mainly. And then I waved them over and sat them down with the food and a box of juice each. They were mainly happy to be having juice as that was a treat.

Then I helped Felicia get something and I tried to get Amelia to join the queue, but she turned her nose up. "She's eaten too many horsey things" Felicia said, and I could tell from Amelia's face that was probably true. "Well, as long as you're not hungry" I said, leaving Amelia to her self-appointed task of handing cutlery out to the people getting food.

After Felicia had something I took her back so I could check on the boys. They seemed to be doing OK, although Max had shown up and was reaping the benefits of Tray's decision to see how far barbecued lamb could be thrown. "It smells pretty good" Alcide commented, and I noticed that Sam had moved and he was now sitting on Alcide's lap chewing on a piece of beef. He turned and gave Alcide a big grin. Tray shuffled closer so he was leaning against Alcide.

I realised I didn't have a choice. "Can I get you something, too?" I asked Alcide, and he smiled at me. "That'd be great" he said. "Some of that lamb would be good, and maybe the beef. And if you could get me coleslaw too, I'd appreciate it. The little guys here seem to have made themselves comfortable."

"You can move them. I do" Felicia said, sullenly. Yeah, she had no qualms about hauling her brothers around to where she wanted.

So I went back to the queue, which wasn't much of a queue now and got some food for Alcide and some for myself this time, and took the plates back again. When I handed Alcide his, he smiled at me. "Thank you" he said. "I could get used to service like this."

I laughed politely, and then something made me turn around. Eric was there, finally. Thank God, he'd save me from Alcide. Eric was great. I really loved Eric.

EPOV

When I walked into Kennedy's backyard I saw them immediately. They were all clustered around some guy I didn't know. I think Sam was sitting on him. Sookie was handing him food and laughing. She looked lovely with dying sunlight shining behind her.

And it hit me then, finally, what I'd just about thrown away. Because this would be what I'd be left with. Turning up and feeling like an outsider, watching someone else walk away with my family, knowing that Sookie and the kids didn't need me any longer.

Bill was fucking lucky he was dead.

And it would all be because I'd once fucked Dawn in her hotel room. And it probably wouldn't even matter if Sookie never found out, I'd know. And the damage would have been fucking done. There was no recovery from that.

But then Sookie turned her head and looked at me and she smiled, and I thought that it was probably all going to be OK after all.

She walked over to where I was standing, still holding her plate in one hand. "Hi" she said. "You made it."

"Yeah" I said, leaning down to kiss her.

"Did you and Dawn get everything finished?"

"Yeah, we did. I just have to go down and present it next week."

"Cool. Well, you'll be done for Christmas then. Have a bit of the lamb, its good" she held the plate up and I took a bit of the meat off it. "I'd get in the food queue if I was you" Sookie said. "Before it's all gone."

"Mmm" I said. "Who's the guy Sam's sitting on?"

"Oh" Sookie said, and then she lowered her voice. "Some guy called Alcide who works with Danny. He's been boring me to tears because Kennedy put me in charge of him, but he lets the kids crawl all over him so he's kind of useful. I didn't really need another person to look after though." She looked up at me.

"Well, I'm here now" I said. "I can help."

"Yay! But eat first, OK?" I nodded, and then I went to get my own food.

SPOV

I wasn't sure I'd ever been happier to see Eric. I now had a legitimate reason for dumping Alcide on someone else. Anyone else. Only he didn't seem to want to go. Eric came over to sit with us, once he'd got a plate of food.

"So, I hear you're from the States" Alcide said to Eric, after I'd made some introductions.

Eric nodded. "Yeah" he said, and he left it at that. I hadn't realised how much I'd liked the fact that Eric kept stuff to himself until I'd been faced with Alcide's desire to tell me about every facet of his life. I didn't want to know all his innermost thoughts and desires, it was too much information when I'd just met someone, but he didn't seem to get it.

I thought that maybe he was a bit thick.

Alcide kept trying to make conversation and Eric played ball a bit. He was more forthcoming when it came to talking about his work, and he and Alcide had a bit of disagreement over the New Zealand economic environment. I switched off during that bit, but I could tell Eric thought Alcide was a know-nothing wanker who'd only just arrived in the country for a start.

I thought that I agreed, but I also thought how nice the wine was, that the brandy snaps for dessert had been particularly crunchy, and that I was going to have to go and rescue Max from my kids pretty soon. Eventually I thought that I really needed to go to the bathroom.

Alcide had gone to get another drink and I told Eric where I was going. "We'll pack the kids up when I get back, and in the meantime, just be polite to Alcide, OK?"

Eric shrugged. "He's...you know…"

"A moron. I do."

Eric chuckled. "I was going to say Canadian, but yours works too." I smiled at Eric and headed off to the bathroom. Kennedy's bathroom actually looked like a guest bathroom, and had a lovely collection of expensive soaps and lotions. I was kind of jealous.

When I got back Eric had a small boy in each arm. They were tired and more than ready to give up partying for the night. Felicia was standing beside him talking to Alcide. "We're going home now. With Daddy. Who's my daddy."

"OK" Alcide said. And then he looked at me and smiled. "Nice to meet you Sookie, thanks again. Hope that maybe I'll see you all again soon."

Yeah, I thought. No good angling for an invitation to our place, you're not getting one. "Bye Alcide. Take care. Hope you enjoy your stay here."

We collected Amelia, who was busy helping the catering staff count knives and forks. Not sure they needed the help. We said goodbye to Kennedy and Danny just before we left. "Thanks for taking Alcide under your wing, Sookie" she said to me. "He would have been a bit lost otherwise."

"Oh yeah, no problem" I said.

Kennedy looked at Eric. "You didn't mind sharing her, did you Eric?" she said with a laugh. Eric looked like maybe he did mind, but he managed to force a smile anyway.

EPOV

I was glad to get home and away from that fucking douchebag who latched onto Sookie. Fuck, he was annoying. And he talked shit. Even Sookie could tell that one.

The kids were exhausted by the time we walked in the door. Well, all except Amelia who was buzzing about the night. "Mum, can we make brandy snaps? I love brandy snaps." she asked as we walked in the front door and I almost stepped on Bob. He'd been watching us from the top of the fence for a while, but had obviously run home in order to be here to greet us properly.

"I thought you were too full to eat any dinner?" Sookie asked, and Amelia looked a bit sheepish.

"Yeah, but dessert isn't dinner is it? It's different."

"Mmm" Sookie said. "Well, it is nearly Christmas I guess. Now go and get ready for bed."

"Can I wear my nightie with the butterflies on it?"

"No, it's not clean. You'll have to wear another one."

Amelia sighed. "Kennedy doesn't have dirty clothes" she muttered, and then she wandered off.

Sookie and I took the boys into their room and changed them and put them in their pyjamas and got them into bed. Sam looked so little in his bed, still. He'd had to move into one so Tray could have the crib.

"Did you have fun, buddy?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said, sounding sleepy. "I's like de food. And Max. I like Max."

"He likes you too. And I love you very much."

"Love you too, Daddy" he said, as his eyelids closed.

Tray was pretty much asleep already when I leaned over the crib to kiss him goodnight. They were fucking pains in the ass when they were awake, but when they were asleep they were awesome.

Well, they were awesome all the time really. I was fucking lucky.

"They're worn out" Sookie whispered as we left their room.

"Yeah" I agreed. She turned and walked down the hall to check on the girls, and I watched the way her skirt drifted around her body as she did so. She was stunning, really fucking stunning tonight.

I went into Felicia's room and escorted her to the bathroom and then back to her room again. "I thought you'd never come tonight" she grumbled. "You were off with that friend of yours, weren't you?"

"What, Dawn?" I asked.

"Yeah, her. Did you have fun?" Felicia asked, as she climbed into bed.

"Not really" I said.

"Because it was work? Mum said you wouldn't have fun with her because you were working. Working sounds sucky."

"Um…something like that."

"Yeah. It's better at home, isn't it?" Felicia asked.

"Definitely" I said, and then Amelia burst into the room. "My turn to pick the story" she announced. "We're doing the Pearlie one, about Christmas. Because it's nearly Christmas. And it was my day for the advent calendar!"

Felicia sighed noisily, but didn't say anything.

Once the story was over, Sookie and I said goodnight and tucked them in and then I followed Sookie into our room.

"I think I'm a bit tipsy" Sookie said. "I haven't really drunk much since…God, I guess before I had Sam. I seemed to have been pregnant and breastfeeding for a long time."

"Yeah" I agreed.

"But that's over now, at least" she said. "It should get easier from here. I mean, Tray's one now, so we're well passed the baby stage."

"Yeah" I said. "It'll get easier." She turned her back to me and kicked her shoes under the bed.

"Want me to undo your zipper?" I asked.

"Yeah" she said, "That'd help." She straightened up and pulled her hair to the side so I could reach the zipper. I pulled it down, kissing the bare skin of her back as it was revealed.

"Oh" Sookie breathed out. "That's nice."

"Mmm-hmm" I said in agreement.

"Maybe you could un-do my bra while you're back there?"

"I could" I agreed. I unhooked her bra and slid my hands around to touch her boobs. They felt slightly different now she'd finished feeding Tray, but they were still fantastic.

Sookie leaned back against me. "I liked that wine" she said.

"I like you" I said into her ear and she giggled. I nuzzled her neck and just enjoyed the feeling of being this close to her, her scent was intoxicating.

"I feel so relaxed" Sookie said, stretching her spine slightly.

"Good. It's better when you're relaxed."

Sookie turned around and faced me, which meant I had to let go of her boobs, but she kissed me and that kind of made up for it. And then she started to unbutton my shirt, which I really liked. "I really do like this shirt" she mused.

"Well, I could leave it on if you like" I said, as she pushed it over my shoulders.

"Nah" Sookie said. "I don't like it that much."

It was still just light outside but for the first time in a long time, it felt, Sookie didn't try to hide away from me when she undressed. She stood back and shed the dress and her bra, and then stepped out of her underwear, before climbing onto the bed.

I took that as my cue to lose the rest of my clothes too, and then I lay down beside her. We lay there and kissed for a while, and the sun finally disappeared below the horizon outside.

"I don't have to be quick, do I?" I asked her.

"No. No, I think you're good" she said.

And we weren't. Everything had been so rushed and so stressful for so long that I couldn't remember the last time we'd been like this together, just Sookie and Eric without worrying about which kid would need us next, or what else we were supposed to be doing.

I did though, remember to check about condoms before I entered her. I wasn't about to make that mistake again.

"It's fine" Sookie said, as she lay beneath me. "I think we're safe."

I was fucking glad, it would have been a shame to have anything between us. It was always so good when I was inside her, watching her moan and writhe. The fucking best thing though was when she opened her eyes and smiled at me. And the absolute best thing was when she whispered "I love you, Eric" after she came for the first time. "I love you too, Sookie" I said. "I really fucking love you."

SPOV

I might have had to spend half the night babysitting some idiot who was looking for a girlfriend or mother but at least I got to relax a bit. And the sex at the end of the night was very relaxing. Eric and I hadn't been doing this so much recently and it was nice to reconnect again. I think that was why we'd been so grumpy with each other, we'd been missing out on adult time, and this was some serious adult time.

After I came for the first time, we switched around so I was sitting on Eric's lap. I loved this position where I was pressed up against him and I could see his face properly. I loved his face. I loved Eric. I never wanted to lose him.

I came again and then I felt Eric tense underneath me just after. "Oh fuck, Sookie" he muttered. "Oh fuck, yes". And then we just stayed close together, panting and sweaty and clinging to each other like it would stop us from drowning.

I had my third shower of the day, and it was my best one yet. Eric sniffed all my showergels and decided on which one he liked the best and then he washed me. Thoroughly.

"So the new, smaller bum isn't too bad?" I asked.

"Dunno" Eric said. "I mean, I always like your…no, I'm not saying bum. I always like your ass, but it was great."

"It was huge before" I said, snorting.

"It was lovely before" Eric said, very solemnly. "You're lovely" he did that looking into my eyes thing.

"You're lovely" I said. "You saved me from that idiot, Alcide."

"Douchebag" Eric corrected.

"Well, whatever he was. He was painful. God, I don't envy the woman he hooks up with. Did you know he hunts? For a hobby? That's just a bit creepy."

"Yeah, he told me." I took the showergel off Eric and started soaping him. He looked a bit thoughtful.

"Next time I go" he said. "You guys should come with me."

"What Wellington? I don't fancy four kids on a small plane."

"No, the States. I'll have to back next year. So…you guys could come. We'll do Disneyland."

"We'd get banned from Disneyland, more like. I don't know." I thought about it. I guess the kids were getting older all the time. "I suppose it's not like we're travelling with any babies" I said.

"No" Eric agreed. "Although at least a baby might sleep on the plane."

"Yeah…but you never know. Although I can't see Tray sleeping on a plane. I can see Tray running randomly up the aisles."

"I'd catch him" Eric said, decisively.

"Yeah, you would" I agreed. "Good thing we've got you around."

"It is" he said. "So I'm never leaving. You know that, right?" he looked down at me with such intensity I just about burst into tears.

"Yeah, I know" I said. "Where else would you go? It's not like you can go back to the States. You nearly said bum before. They'd revoke your citizenship if they heard that."

Eric laughed. "I like this shower" I mused. "See I need you around for bathroom design as well."

"Just for designing the shower?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Well I like it when you're in here too" I said. "For one thing, you don't pee on my foot like your son does."

Eric laughed at that too. "About time one of them got you" he said. "They fucking aim for me, I swear it."

"You just forget to cover them up" I said to him. "But you can't blame them. I think they're marking their territory."

"Yeah, maybe. I guess that's OK, I don't mind being marked."

"No, I can live with it too" I said. "I guess its one definition for a family after all, you and the people who pee on you." Eric laughed again, and then we stood under the water for a long time and just talked. I really did love this shower.

**A/N Wellington is the capital of New Zealand, but it's much smaller than Auckland. And it is known for it's extreme winds, sometimes landing at the airport is a bit of an adventure. Most companies, and banks, used to have their head offices based there, but as Auckland has grown it's become a lot more important to be where the business is, so many of them have re-located.**

**JAFA stands for 'Just another fucking Aucklander'. They're just pissed off because of all that wind.**

**Lollies are sweets, or candy.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	97. Bonus Chapter: Bullet Points

**A/N So some of you will know that I posted a one-shot earlier this week that was all in Lorena's point of view, it ties in with a chapter of Homestay. And then I found it a bit difficult to get out of her head, as it were, and I felt like I needed something a bit lighter. So I've written this chapter which kind of covers the question of why on earth Sookie would decide to even try having Pam? I couldn't quite face sending them all off to sit in the same room as Eric's dad just yet, but that's coming. **

**In other news my toddler has become quite a good mimic, saying "Good girl!" to her older sister, and repeatedly asking "Why?" when you tell her anything, just like the big kid does. It was cute the first four hundred times. And today she did an experiment and found out the cat prefers peanut butter sandwiches to marmite, but he will eat both. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I have a toddler that questions authority and a cat with an eating disorder.**

SPOV

It started on a Saturday. I know it was a Saturday because it was movie night. I think we watched one of Amelia's choices, something involving princesses. It might have been _Tangled_. The boys got a bit bored; Felicia at least liked the horse.

Eric was kind of quiet during the movie. With four kids all clamouring for attention it was hard to get a word in these days, and even though Tray didn't really say words he was capable of making a range of different noises, all of them loud. And annoying. They certainly annoyed his sisters. "Sshh!" Amelia said. "They're singing!"

Yeah, the boys didn't really care about the singing, they liked the fighting. At one point they tried to stage their own fight over a plastic dinosaur I didn't realise had been in the bed with us. I wondered how long it had been. Still, at least it wasn't another skink. Bob had brought one in the other day and Sam had carried the poor stunned thing around for a while, slowly squeezing the life out of it, before I realised it wasn't a toy he had in his hand. And I wasn't really sure who was entirely responsible for the loss of the skink's tail, it might have been Bob, but then Sam wasn't all that careful with his toys either.

I found the headless Spiderman kind of creepy, but Sam didn't seem to mind that we hadn't seen his head for a week or so. And the Barbie he was currently shacked up with wasn't complaining either. Eric said he couldn't decide whether it was touching or weird that Sam had stolen Felicia's Barbie, because he thought she kind of looked like me. I just hoped Felicia didn't find out. She wasn't that attached to the Barbie, but that didn't mean she wanted her brother to have it.

But right now, Eric wasn't saying very much at all. Not even when it got to the kissing part and Amelia asked me, in a loud whisper, whether I liked it when Daddy kissed me all slobbery and was it really OK that he licked me inside the mouth when I'd specifically told her that Kennedy's dog Max couldn't lick her mouth because it wasn't hygienic? Yeah, Eric wasn't exactly jumping in to help there, but that wasn't anything new.

The fact he was still a bit quiet after the movie when the kids had gone to bed was though. I wanted to ask what was up, but didn't want to push him. We'd been having a nice summer up until that point. Eric had had time off from work after Christmas and we'd hung out at home, gone to Piha for the day, and generally relaxed. It was a good wind-down after a rather stressful year of dealing with two small boys and with Eric away so much. He'd made the presentation to the team he was working with at that bank in Wellington and only had a few loose ends to tie up and then he was done with that project.

Of course he still had a trip to the States later in the year, and we were in the process of discussing how that might work if we all went. As much as I liked the idea of going, the logistics were a bit tricky and I wasn't sure we could do it. But that didn't really explain Eric's silence tonight.

Later on I came out of the bathroom to find Eric just sitting on the bed staring the duvet cover. I wondered what the stain was this time, as I walked around to my side and started untucking the sheet so I could get in.

"I feel like…" Eric said, still staring at spot. I waited for him to say we needed to ban eating on the bed, and it was a good idea in theory but hard to police during the day, like a lot of things. Things Eric didn't need to know about. Like the fact that last week Tray had been outside riding in the little car the boys had been given by Santa, while wearing Eric's sunglasses that he'd pilfered from wherever Eric had left them. It had been OK until they'd fallen off his face and he'd nearly run them over. But they'd survived, so I wasn't 'fessing up to that one any time soon.

"I just think" Eric continued. "It feels like there's still a space." He turned to look at me expectantly. I hadn't the foggiest what he was on about, but I wasn't up for purchasing any more furniture with him, it was a lesson in masochism. Not only did I have to make sure my four kids didn't run riot through the furniture store, but I had to actually find something that Eric and I could agree on. It wasn't easy, or fun. I kind of appreciated the fact that Eric had just gone out and bought the table and those couches now. Quite frankly if he wanted to put any more furniture in here he could just buy it and I'd live with it.

"What were you thinking?" I asked.

"Well…I think there's room for one more" he said, still looking at me seriously and I realised we were talking at cross-purposes.

"One more what?" I asked cheerfully. I was feeling kind of suspicious now, but I didn't want to let Eric know I was.

"Um…baby" Eric said quietly, probably waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

"No" I said, knowing full well where we could be going with this but determined not to get sucked in just for the sake of peace.

Eric sighed. "I just looked around tonight when we were all sitting here, and I felt like there was a space. That someone was missing."

"Bob. Bob wasn't here. That's who was missing." I was kind of hoping that maybe Eric would suggest we got another cat. Granted, Bob would hate the thing and it would just be another target for the boys, but at least I wouldn't have to deal with another pregnancy and baby and everything else that went with it.

"No" Eric said, decisively. "That's not what I meant." And then he got up and walked into the bathroom. He didn't say any more on the subject and I sure as hell wasn't going to until a few weeks later.

By now it was February and it was kind of hot and sticky. Well, it's always hot and sticky in the middle of February of course, but the small child who was clinging to my side wasn't helping me.

We were all sitting on the bed for another movie night. It was _Cars_ again. Amelia had sighed a bit at that, but she was putting up with it. Sam and Tray had mostly just crawled around the bed making loud brrm-brrm noises for the first bit, and then Tray yelled "Fuck!" a lot every time the truck came on the screen, and Felicia muttered "What is his problem?", while Eric looked pointedly in the other direction so he couldn't make eye contact with me. Sure, we thought it was truck, but who could really tell.

Sam liked the helicopter and happily said "Helidokker!" when he saw one, which would make Amelia correct him, which just made Sam say "Helidokker!" even louder, because it was pretty clear to him that his sister just wasn't getting it. It was a wonder anyone could actually pay attention to the movie, quite frankly.

Eventually the popcorn Eric had made ran low and I brought in mugs of Milo for Amelia and Felicia and toddler milk for the boys. Tray promptly drank his and fell asleep on Eric's lap, and Sam had mellowed right out and was leaning against me. Felicia was asking Eric a series of long involved questions about cars and Amelia was sitting next to me telling me all about the purple car she was going to get when she learned to drive. I wasn't exactly sure who was going to be buying her this car, and I was hoping she didn't think it was going to be me. If I set a precedent with Amelia I'd be buying four cars before I knew about it.

I also hoped I wasn't teaching Amelia to drive because I couldn't see that going well at all. Surely that was Eric's job? Although I wasn't sure he was that qualified, I had a feeling he was still hazy on the whole roundabout thing and he tended to plough through them at speed with only a cursory glance to the right, and occasionally the left as well if he'd forgotten which side he was giving way to. I'd learned to just keep looking straight ahead whatever happened.

Eventually the movie finished and we could send the kids off to bed. Tray barely woke up as Eric carried him into the bedroom, and I took the very sleepy Sam off to use the toilet one more time before bed. He was getting better at the concept, but it was hard work. It was always was. Thank goodness I'd only be doing this one more time though.

Felicia had to be reminded to brush her teeth, use the toilet and put pyjamas on. Amelia just had to be told that we'd talk about the car later on, in about another 8 years. Maybe. And no, she couldn't just go and ask Daddy.

Eventually the house was quiet. It got to that nice bit of the day where it was just Eric and I and I got him all to myself.

"Amelia seriously thinks we're buying her a car" I said, as I walked back into the bedroom. Eric was flipping through the channels on the TV and I could see he was momentarily tempted by something noisy and gory. But then he kept going until he found something less gory and a lot less noisy. That was odd. Since when did Eric want to watch Hugh Grant romantic comedies?

He put the remote control down and patted the bed next to him, so I climbed on and crawled over to him. The bed didn't seem that big when we were all sitting on it, but sometimes you noticed it took a while to get to the person on the other side. Who very rarely stayed on his side, of course.

"So what do you want?" I asked, as Eric lifted up his arm so I could lean against his side.

"I don't know what you mean Sookie" he said.

"The movie. Why are we watching this and not something you'd prefer?"

"Because I thought you'd like it" Eric said, sounding affronted that I might think he had ulterior motives.

"And that's it?" I asked.

"I'm allowed to be nice to you" Eric huffed.

"And you are, but normally not so nice that you'd watch Hugh Grant chase Julia Roberts around London."

Eric frowned at me, and then sighed. And then obviously decided to try another tack and smiled. "Well maybe we could turn the TV off and read one of your books?" he said to me. "What are you reading at the moment?"

Now I was really suspicious. "Well" I said, "I'm reading that book on mothers raising sons which is apparently going to explain why Sam and Tray are constantly trying to destroy the house, it's just a bit hard to find the time to read it because I'm constantly cleaning up destroyed bits of the house. Oh, and that book on transforming the New Zealand economy through the use of innovations and creative uses for technology, the one you said I should read because it had a lot of good points."

Eric looked thoughtful. "That's it?" he asked.

"Yeah, pretty much. Apart from the endless Hairy McClary books I have to read to the boys, that's it." I knew what he was angling for, of course. He wanted to read sex scenes to me again, but he was up to something and I wasn't sure what.

And then I twigged. He was still after a baby. Bugger.

While I'd figured that out Eric had moved on to other tactics. He'd switched the TV off and pulled me closer so he could kiss me. I got momentarily distracted by the kiss. I like kissing Eric.

A part of my brain wondered whether maybe it was true and you did get pregnant from kissing, because I could kind of see where this was going.

I pulled back, which wasn't easy because Eric had been slowly manoeuvring me so I was lying on the bed and I didn't have much further I could go back. "Um" I said. "Just hang on for a sec. I'm going to the bathroom."

Eric released his hold on me and I wriggled away and made it to the bathroom in record time. He'd looked a bit puzzled as I zoomed away, but I just needed a bit of a space. I shut the door and pulled out the top drawer on my side of the vanity. I took out my packet of Pills and stared at them, hard. OK, Saturday's one had been taken, and today was definitely Saturday because we'd had the movie so, I was OK.

I put the pills away again. I was sure I was OK. I mean, I'd used contraception for years and years and nothing had gone wrong. Not ever. So…I'd be fine. I mean, Tray was down to a total failure of precautions on everyone's part, so it wasn't like that was going to happen again.

But somehow I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that there was a chance Eric could get me pregnant just by sheer force of will, and if he really wanted another baby there'd be no hope for me.

I braced myself, and I walked back into the bedroom where I discovered Eric was now lying on the bed completely naked.

Eric did his best to adopt a nonchalant air, but he was clearly failing and I couldn't help but smile at him. "So, decided to pull out the big guns, huh?" I said to him.

"I don't know what you mean" Eric said, "But I think I'm flattered."

"I know what you're trying to do" I said, coming over to sit on the bed but trying to maintain a bit of distance.

"Well I don't think it's exactly a secret" Eric said, rolling towards me.

"No" I said. "No, but I think maybe we should talk about it…" Eric kissed me again and I had to stop talking.

"Do you want to talk dirty to me, Sookie?" Eric asked, huskily.

"No, talk about the fact you're still trying to persuade me to have another baby."

Eric looked at me for what seemed like a long time. "Would it be that hard to persuade you?" he asked.

"I don't know" I said quietly. And that was the problem really. Logically, it was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea. Who in their right mind would have another baby at this point in their lives?

But I knew that I'd packed away all those baby clothes instead of giving them away. And I knew that the bassinet was stored up in the roof, along with the storage box that held all the sheets and blankets for it. I knew that the bumbo seat was in the cupboard in the laundry. And when I'd put all those things away I'd assumed I was just doing it out of habit, but I wasn't so sure now.

Eric didn't say anything else though, he dipped his head again and kissed me, and then he kissed down my jaw and my neck, across my collarbone, and down the valley between my breasts, before he finally brought his mouth to my nipple. I forgot what else I was supposed to be thinking about at that point. Or pretended I forgot, anyway.

EPOV

When Tray was born, everything suddenly got very busy. Well, it had been busy before that as well. But having a baby and a toddler, and then two toddlers, plus two other kids, the house and work, it was a lot of work. And it wasn't like we'd exactly planned for it to be this way. I think Sookie would have liked a bigger gap between the boys, certainly having two in diapers for that first year was a fucking huge amount of hassle and cost.

But I think it had worked out. It was kind of nice in a way they were so close together, they'd look out for each other. It would be great when they went to school.

And school loomed larger than ever before in our house. Felicia was about to start and she'd spent all summer talking about it. "I'm going to sit with Finn" she said to Amelia one day when we were sitting on the deck eating watermelon. Well, I was eating watermelon. Amelia and Felicia were doing a reasonable job of it, but Sam and Tray were mostly just dribbling watermelon juice everywhere. Thank fuck I'd remembered the rule about the deck before I'd handed it out.

"What? At school?" Amelia asked.

"Yep" Felicia said nodding. "I've told him already." Finn was a bit fucking weird, but I think he was just used to Felicia telling him how things went. He was scared of her, and terrified of the rest of the world. He'd never even said two words to me when I'd picked Felicia up from pre-school; he'd just stared at Felicia as if she was going to answer for him. I got the feeling it wasn't so much that he liked her, but that he tolerated her as the least scary option.

"You can't tell him, you have to sit where Mrs Garfield tells you to" Amelia said haughtily.

"But you sat with Maisie" Felicia countered. "And she was your friend."

"Yeah, but Mrs Garfield told us to sit there so we did. Plus she liked me" Amelia said.

"She likes me!" Felicia argued.

Amelia just shook her head sadly at how deluded Felicia obviously was, and went to wash her hands.

I tried to persuade Tray to eat his watermelon, rather than just rub it on his t-shirt, and didn't think much about the whole conversation. Felicia going to school was a given, she was excited, she had new shoes and a new bag and a uniform that had once been Amelia's and everything was fine.

Until the day we actually had to take her. And then it wasn't fucking fine. Somehow I'd missed the whole bit where it wasn't such a good idea to let them go to school with Amelia, somehow she'd always been old enough to go. I guess because I met her when she was nearly four, and she was never really my baby.

But Felicia was. I could remember what it was like when she couldn't walk for fuck's sake, and then the first time I took her to school we got to the door of the classroom and put her bag away. I thought maybe I'd take her inside but instead she said "OK. Bye. See you, Dad" and took off after that Finn kid. I wasn't sure what I'd fucking expected, but it certainly wasn't that. She'd always been the one who actually wanted to hang around with me. And now she just wasn't there anymore. She was at school. With some kid who she scared the fuck out of it, but who thought she was wonderful anyway.

Sookie arrived with Tray and Sam trailing behind her, just after Felicia had disappeared into her classroom. "Amelia was hard to get rid of, because although we're embarrassing, she didn't want to walk in just after Amelia Chang had gone into the classroom, so we had to hang around outside for a bit, which meant I ended up listening to Debbie tell me all about their trip to some resort in Samoa while Sam and Tray took turns pushing each other over on the playground in the hope of gaining Sebastian's approval. It's no good telling them Sebastian doesn't care if they give each other brain damage."

"OK" I said, because I'd really only been half-listening to all of that.

"Where's Felicia? Has she gone in?" Sookie asked.

"Yep" I said, still staring at the door she'd walked into and wondering if she'd actually come back and hug me anytime soon.

"Cool, well that's another one that's Mrs Garfield's problem, although I hope she doesn't think she's getting another Amelia because she'll be mistaken." Sookie paused for a bit. "She's met Felicia though, she'll be fine. OK, well we can go…shit, where's Tray? Sam?"

"Tray's ova dere" Sam said, and Sookie walked over to pull Tray out of the garden.

"Bugger, you're all dirty now" Sookie muttered. "Come on; let's go home before you embarrass me further. Luckily Mrs Garfield will have probably retired before she gets you guys."

"No' helpin'?" Sam asked.

"No, it's not mother help today."

"Otay" Sam said, following Sookie.

"Fuck!" Tray yelled, hopefully in response to a truck that I could see driving past the playground. Sookie scooped him up at that point and started to speed-walk away. Well, as fast as she could walk carrying Tray and holding Sam's hand.

I just stood there. Surely Felicia was going to come back out? But the bell rang and I could hear Mrs Garfield talking to the class and I realised she wasn't. That was it. She was gone.

I felt fucking empty.

I followed Sookie back to the car. She'd had to put Tray down on the ground because he was squirming around in her arms so much and he came running back to me and just about ran straight into my leg. Fuck, he shouldn't be running. He was the baby of the family. Where the fuck had all the babies gone? We'd had so many and it didn't fucking last.

"Da!" Tray yelled happily, like he'd found me after a long absence. I picked him up and held him upside down as we walked but mostly all I could think about was when Felicia used to be this size.

"You OK?" Sookie asked me, as we struggled to get the boys back into their carseats.

"Yeah" I said. "I just…when did she get so big?"

Sookie laughed. "I know" she said. "Time's going fast. Four more years!"

"For what?"

"Until they're all at school. Yay!" And then she climbed into the car as well. Fuck, she wasn't really getting this. It wasn't a good thing they were growing up. It was fucking miserable.

I'd thought for a while that maybe another baby might be a good idea, and I'd even tried bringing it up with Sookie once, but she wasn't thrilled about the idea and it was hard to blame her in a way. Fuck knows she had a hard time when she was pregnant. And then of course there was the actual labour…although she was pretty fucking awesome at that.

But now that Felicia was officially a big kid I realised just how badly I really wanted another baby. Because babies were great. Even the really tiny ones that kind of looked breakable, and despite Sookie always pointing out that Sam and Tray had been at the less breakable end of the scale because they were definitely at the less small end of the scale, they were still pretty fucking tiny. Having big kids around always just confirmed that fact to me. Fuck, I thought Tray was kind of small now but that was just because he was the smallest we had.

I thought we could go smaller. I thought we could have one more. We were kind of good at this parenting thing, Sookie and I. She was good at feeding and bedtimes and I got the throwing around bit. The kids were great, we were doing a good job, so why the fuck shouldn't we try for another one?

The problem with that idea was Sookie. Sookie who wasn't so fucking thrilled about the idea of another baby. Sookie who kept sticking her ass in my face and saying "I can't remember when my bum was this small! Look!" Yeah, I'd seen it. It was a nice ass. But I kind of missed the old version.

I just wasn't sure how to go about persuading her that another baby was a good idea. And I felt like the heart of the matter was that she just didn't trust me. Sure, she'd said that Tray was an accident, but she still thought I'd knocked her up on purpose just to suit some evil plan I had, when really, Sookie just hadn't been clear with what the situation was. Sometimes the really important information she's trying to impart gets lost in the deluge of chit-chat, but I can't fucking tell her that. I have the same problem with Indira, who likes to fill up her emails to me with fucking paragraphs speculating on the state of Clancy and Ginger's relationship. I don't fucking care. But then I don't have to, because I'm not married, thank fuck, to Indira, and if I send her a reply that simply says 'bullet points' she doesn't get all pissy and threaten to stop doing my laundry.

So my problem was one of…finding the right lever for Sookie. Figuring out what would tip her into wanting another baby. Trouble is she thought she was fucking on to me. She knew what I wanted, and she knew she had the upper hand. It was fucking frustrating. I couldn't figure out what to do next.

SPOV

When I was a bit more clear-headed, which meant that I didn't have a naked Eric trying to pin me to the bed, I thought a bit more about the baby.

Yeah, I liked babies. But I should probably stop having them. I was going to be 39 this year. That was too old. Even Lorena had stopped having kids long before that. No, it was definitely a dumb idea, although I wasn't saying that to Eric. He got all shitty if I brought up my age, like I was trying to run him off, when really, it was a bit late for that now. I wouldn't have had two kids with him if I was going to do that. But I couldn't change how old I was, it was just a fact. And even though I'd managed to be quite spectacularly fertile previously, it didn't necessarily follow that we could do that again.

And I didn't think I was up for the disappointment. Not just my own, but Eric's too. I wouldn't promise the kids anything I couldn't deliver, so I wasn't doing that to Eric. And I figured that at this stage in our history, it would be pretty bloody obvious where the fault lay if I didn't get pregnant. So, no. The answer was no. The logical answer was no.

I just had to find a way to convey that to Eric. Problem was that he usually had a comeback for any objections I raised, and if he ran out of them he'd just try to have sex with me. Sometimes he didn't even bother with the objections and just moved straight to the sex. He was lovely, but he was slightly frustrating in his eternal optimism that one day I'd just suddenly see his point of view. If we had enough sex in the meantime, that is.

And the worrying thing was that there was a part of me that wondered if maybe, he wasn't right.

So mostly we danced around the subject. I said things like "I really should put those baby clothes on TradeMe" and Eric ignored me because he'd heard that one before. Eric decided to suddenly show an interest in when Judith thought she might try for number three, which was totally out of character on his part. He was just calculating when there'd be another newborn around for me to fall in love with. "Never" I said. "They've decided against any more kids because two is quite sufficient for most people, and we have double that." Eric shut up after that and luckily he didn't think to ask about anyone else because I knew that Kennedy was six weeks' pregnant and had only told me because she wanted advice on remedies for morning sickness. I didn't think she was particularly enthused when my answer was that labour was the best cure I knew.

And of course there was an awful lot of Eric just trying the old trick of having sex with me. I'm not sure whether it was to addle my brain so I'd say yes in the heat of the moment, or whether he really did think that the Pill could be overcome by sheer force of numbers, but he was certainly giving it his best shot.

We both got a bit sneakier. I started hiding my books and he started finding them. How someone who always seemed a bit hazy about the fact that clothes went in drawers and wardrobes and preferred to rely on the benevolence of the underpants fairy suddenly discovered where all the nooks and crannies in our bedroom were, I'm not sure. But he did. And then I'd find him lying in bed with one of them open.

"I think we should read this one tonight" he announced one night, when he'd obviously spent the ten minutes I was in the bathroom rooting right through my pyjama drawer.

"No" I said. "I was going to read that book on innovations tonight. So that I can get it back to you." I sat on the bed and picked it up off the bedside table.

"Uh-huh. Sure, Sookie. You've had that for weeks now. I don't think you're really fucking interested in it."

"Oh, you have no idea Eric. I have a business degree too, remember. I'm deeply interested in why we should all be…" I turned to a page at random "_Encouraging the melding of science and artistic endeavours in ways that could provide New Zealand with a framework in which to pursue a greater presence in the global marketplace, while retaining the unique selling point of a small country with a high intellectual capital and low thresholds to marketplace participation_…" I trailed off. OK, that was out of context but it was a bit boring for bedtime reading. I'd have to be in the mood for that one.

Eric was in a totally different mood. "Well, you're missing out on this book" he said. "It's _riveting._"

"Somehow, you're not selling me on that one" I said. "I think it's the condescending tone of voice you're using. It cancels out the accent."

Eric sighed. "But it's hot this one. I'm sure you'll like it."

"I've read that one. It needs to go back to the library. And you only think it's hot because it has pregnancy sex in it."

Eric leaned over so his face was very close to mine. I was immune to that trick these days. Almost. I was almost immune to it these days. I wondered if shutting my eyes would help.

"You remember how hot pregnancy sex is, don't you Sookie?" he said, before he started kissing my neck. "You…look…so…beautiful…when…you're…pregnant" he said between kisses.

"Yeah, yeah. But you know sex is also nice when it's not a threesome. And I'll have you know that the pregnancy sex in that book only happens because he's her brother's best friend and they have a one-night stand no one's supposed to know about, but he gets pissed off with her and doesn't tell her the condom broke. I don't think that's a way to start a relationship, do you?"

Eric stopped nuzzling my neck and trying to get his hand inside my tank top and looked at me. "But I'm sure they're meant to be together, Sookie. In fact I'm sure the baby brings them together. How could they not fall in love when they see that tiny little newborn?"

"Have you seriously forgotten what it's like Eric? When they don't sleep and they just cry and I can't walk three paces without having to stop and breastfeed?"

"It's not all bad" Eric said. "And anyway. They grow up. We know that."

"Yeah, and it would just add another kid into the dramas we already have. It's like a warzone here half the time."

Eric propped himself up on his elbow. "It's hardly a warzone" he said. "There'd be more blood for one thing."

"What about Tray last week?"

"Mmm" Eric said thoughtfully. "Technically that was his fault not mine."

"Seriously? You want to blame the toddler? For running into his brother, the brother you were swinging around at the time?"

"Well I couldn't see where he was" Eric huffed. "And he's fine anyway; it was just a split lip. It looked worse than it really was."

"I suppose it didn't exactly slow him down" I said. Tray had been up and running around about two minutes later despite my attempts to hold a cold cloth to it. He'd thought he might be missing out on something fun, which was the problem in the first instance and had caused the accident. Of course when Eric wouldn't swing him around, mainly because I pointed out I wasn't cleaning the blood spatter off the walls, Tray got really upset and he cried and cried because he thought we were punishing him.

Small kids were hard work. I couldn't figure out why Eric wasn't getting that. He lived here too, and despite his attempts to occasionally shut himself away in his office there was no escaping the four other people who lived here. I could barely remember the last time I'd been to the toilet during the day by myself.

"So see, Sookie?" Eric said, his free hand trailing over my stomach. "Another one would be OK. We haven't lost one yet."

"We haven't lost Bob either, but you won't let me get another cat."

"Cats are meant to be solitary, Sookie. It would be cruel to Bob. But people…people are meant to live in families." Eric's hand drifted higher and started circling my breast.

"You like having a big family" I said to Eric. It was pretty obvious and he didn't really need to answer but he looked thoughtful. "I like our family" he said.

"But you think there's someone missing?" I asked.

"Yeah" Eric said. He was staring hard at his hand as it moved over me. "I do."

"Are you…is this just to replace Felicia?" I asked. "Because she's at school now?" Eric had seemed to take Felicia's sudden promotion to big girl almost as badly as Amelia had.

"No" Eric said. He sounded fairly sure of it.

"Well…I'll think about it" I said. It was a bit of a cop-out I knew, but it wasn't the definite no I knew I should tell Eric, and it wasn't the yes he wanted. But I didn't want to fight about a baby again. We'd fought about having Sam, and then we'd fought when we found out we were having Tray. After a while, you could only take so much.

"OK" Eric said, and we left it at that.

EPOV

I thought I was maybe making progress with Sookie, but it was difficult to get a definite read on it. She'd said she'd think about it, but I wasn't convinced she wasn't just saying that to get me off her case. And I didn't want to press her. I'd tried that the first time around, tried to force her to see it my way, but all it did was force her to put up her walls and dig in for the long haul. She was pretty fucking stubborn sometimes.

She wondered if I was just trying to replace Felicia now she'd gone to school, and I wasn't. No one could really replace Felicia. You couldn't replace any of the kids, they were all so unique. And I loved that. I loved seeing their personalities come through, and while I might not be responsible for everything that made up Felicia, I thought I'd done a pretty fucking good job. And I wanted to do it again, with the boys and with...someone else who wasn't here. I couldn't really explain it, but I felt like there was someone else who was supposed to be here. I mean, I'd wanted a baby, really fucking wanted a baby, before we had Sam, but this...this was different. This wasn't just about wanting a baby, we'd had babies and they didn't stay that way for long. This was wanting another person. Another member of the family.

But it wasn't like I could just go ahead without her, no I needed Sookie to be with me on this plan and she just…she wasn't. She avoided talking about it as much as she could.

Instead, we spent our time trying to figure out if we could take the kids to the States. The sticking point was whether Sookie wanted to come to Shreveport.

"I can't see the point" she said, one night when we were sitting in my office looking at airline websites and calculating costs. "It's a lot of money to fly us half-way across the States to sit there while you work. What the hell is in Shreveport anyway?"

"Well, I thought you wanted to see Indira's cat? And Clancy's?" I asked her.

"Meh, they're all grown up now. And I could go to the pet shop and look at kittens for free. Although not if I have to take Tray and Sam. We got pretty close to being banned last time we were there, they rarked up an entire litter of Staffordshire terrier crosses and the din was pretty unbelievable. The poor kittens in the next cage had to hide in their litter tray and the cockatiels looked particularly unimpressed. It was easier when I just had Felicia poking rats and Amelia telling me a long and detailed story about the princess who was brought up with a family of cats." Sookie paused and looked at me. "What? My stories aren't at all as rambling as Amelia's and at least they're based in fact."

"Uh-huh" I agreed. There were some facts in there, probably far too many if I was being honest. "So if you're not coming with me to Shreveport, are you going to fly over with all the kids yourself?"

"Um…" Sookie said. "Oooh, I don't know. Crap…I'd just...Yeah, that's a long flight to sit there with four kids."

"Exactly" I agreed.

"But on the other hand, a week is a long time to spend in a hotel room in a place I'm kind of vague about doing…I don't know? What the heck do we do while you're working?"

"Oh" I said. "Well…you could take them to the park…or something…" I hadn't really thought about that one.

"Yeah, that fills in half a day. And then it's me and four kids in a hotel room. A very expensive hotel room." Sookie sighed. "Why is the exchange rate never in our favour?"

I shrugged. She had a point. It was a lot of money to pay for a hotel when you worked out the cost in New Zealand dollars. I wondered if we could all stay with Indira? Or maybe I could stay with Clancy and the rest of the family could stay with Indira? But I couldn't figure it out. And although I wanted to bring them all with me, there was a nagging worry that I didn't really want Sookie and Ginger anywhere near each other. It was just fucking difficult, really.

"The bummer is that Amelia got wind of it" Sookie said. "If nothing else we have to go to Disneyland now, she's told everyone. She's told Amelia Chang about twice a day, every day. Of course Amelia Chang has already been to Disneyland, so she isn't all _that_ impressed. Emily is terribly jealous and keeps saying her dad is taking her next year, but sadly Amelia doesn't really care about that."

"Um. Yeah" I said. I was only vague about who Amelia Chang and the rest of them were. I wasn't quite sure how Sookie kept up with it all.

"Of course I'm a bit out of the loop now I don't do mother help with Amelia's class" Sookie continued, while I carried on trying to compare flight prices and times and connections. Changing planes three times would be a bad idea. We'd definitely lose someone that way. "But Amelia doesn't mind" Sookie said. "She says it's difficult to concentrate with her family there anyway, which I think means she's kind of fed up with Tray and Sam thinking they can steal her stuff because she's their sister. So we only get to see Felicia's class now and they all seem really young, I'd forgotten what five year olds are like. You can barely get them to write two sentences."

"Uh-huh" I said, clicking a few more options. Nope, that wasn't going to work either.

"You got a mention when I was there the other day" Sookie said. "They were writing about dads…I seem to remember that topic from the first time around. I guess Mrs Garfield has been trotting out the same topics for the last twenty years, but she seems to do OK. Anyway, Felicia wrote about you."

"What did she say?" I asked.

"Um…well I managed to talk her out of writing about the whole, um, incident where you smacked Sam into Tray that time…"

"That was an accident" I said. It had been slightly traumatic for all of us involved, I thought, and I wasn't convinced Sookie understood that.

"Yeah, I know! But I didn't want Mrs Garfield ringing CYFS after she read 'My daddy hit my brother Tray with my other brother Sam and there was lots of blood. Mum cleaned the blood. She's good at that. Daddy's good at throwing people.'

"That was her story?" I asked. I wasn't sure that Felicia quite appreciated what had happened either. Mostly she was pissed that I was paying attention to Sam in the first place. I think that had clouded her memory of what happened.

"Well, first draft. But I talked her down to 'My daddy plays with us and is lots of fun. I like playing with him and my brothers.'

"Well that's better, but it doesn't exactly say that much about me" I said. "You'd think there should be a bit more background to the story."

"Just be thankful you didn't get 'tall and talks funny' again." Sookie sat forward to look at the screen on my laptop, and then Sam appeared in the doorway of the office. "I wanna dwink" he said, coming over to Sookie and climbing into her lap.

"Yeah, OK" she said, and she took Sam's hand and left the room. I gave up trying to make the trip work and shut the laptop down. I couldn't make anything work at the moment, I couldn't get Sookie to see that another baby was a good idea, and I couldn't work out how to get us all to the States without there being a huge amount of trauma involved.

SPOV

I wasn't sure what was worse, Eric trying to persuade me to have another baby, or Eric giving up on it. As much as he was a pain in the arse when he wanted me to do something, I didn't like the thought of him just accepting defeat.

He didn't quite give up on trying to have sex with me, usually at inappropriate moments. Like the time I was stretched right out trying to retrieve all the toys Tray had biffed into the space between the wall and the cot when he was bored, and I had lifted one knee up onto the side of the cot for balance as I dug around looking for the sock I was still missing. It maybe wasn't the best time for Eric to walk into the room, pause, and then ask "How long do you think you can hold that position for?" Yeah, he needs to learn to pick his moments.

I still wasn't feeling that hot on the whole baby idea, but I didn't want the thing to fester away for years and suddenly blow up one day in the future. I wished I could come up with a simple answer. Mostly I just worked myself into a dither wondering what to do. I tried peering very closely at the very small babies who came along with their bigger siblings to Jumping Beans, they were all very cute, but I wasn't sure I wanted another one. It wasn't the day I first saw Thomas and I knew how much I wanted Sam. I had four kids, after all. Four is a lot.

But the day I pulled out some baby clothes with a thought to finding the nicer, less-worn pieces to hand on to Kennedy, I spent a lot of time just staring at them. Maybe I wasn't that keen on other people's newborns, but I had loved mine. A lot. I remembered what it was like when they fell asleep on you, and I felt kind of achy. The logical part of my brain jumped in to remind me that you don't just get cuddles, you get feeding and nappy changes and midnight screaming as well.

I couldn't figure it out.

And so we carried on, and I really wanted to say something about it to Eric, but couldn't think what to say. I guess I had no luck picking my moment either, so I chickened out. Mostly we just talked about other stuff like trying to plan Amelia's birthday party and the trip to the States. Neither of them were straightforward to organise. Amelia's guest list kept changing depending on who she was talking to on any particular day, and she hadn't quite grasped the idea that it was rude to tell Emily she couldn't come anymore after she'd handed out the invitations.

As for the trip to the States…that was a bit trickier. I wanted to go, and Amelia thought we were going, but I couldn't face spending my days in a place I didn't know while Eric worked. It was supposed to be a holiday after all. I just had no concept of what Shreveport was like and Eric didn't do a great idea of selling it either, mostly I just got the impression the only thing he had there was some work and a few people he didn't mind hanging out with as long as they were happy for him to order them around.

We weren't getting anywhere fast. And it was starting to get down to the wire. So one afternoon when I managed to get both Sam and Tray to have a nap for me I sat down in front of the old laptop I'd inherited from Eric when he replaced his. I had a feeling that part of the reason he'd replaced it was because the letters were starting to wear off the keys and unlike me, he hadn't been taught to touch-type at school using bibs that prevented you seeing the keys of the typewriters. My typing teacher, Miss MacAndrew, was Scottish and pretty old-school, and I always half-expected that if you peeked under the bib she'd whack you with a ruler. As a consequence I was quite good at touch-typing, a lot better than Tara who hadn't been scared to spend half the time looking under the bib.

But touch-typing was only so useful. What I really needed was inspiration. I brought up the timetable of flights to the States again trying to figure out what we should do. I looked at the destinations listed…and then I had an idea.

EPOV

I'd shelved the baby idea. I could see Sookie's point. We had a lot of kids. They were awesome, but they were also loud, fond of being destructive, and, according to Sookie, unable to hold a birthday party without offending most of their friends.

I decided that I would just hold onto the idea of how lucky we were. We had four healthy kids and neither of us had been driven mad yet, although Sookie was fond of saying she was about one more crisis away from being committed. But I didn't think she'd really go.

Mostly I just worried about the trip to the States. I hadn't actually booked any flights yet because every time I mentioned it Sookie would screw up her face and say she wasn't sure about staying in Shreveport, but I wasn't really sure what the alternative was, other than that she joined me in Los Angeles, but a 15 hour flight with four kids would probably get her committed.

We were getting nowhere fucking fast, that's for sure, and in the meantime we just carried on as best we could. Until one night, late in March when Sookie whispered that she had a presentation for me after dinner. I thought that was a bit fucking cruel, really, because when she said it, it was definitely before dinner and I had to get through dinner first. I might have suggested skipping dinner altogether if I hadn't been able to imagine, quite clearly, the amount of whining that would go on if that happened. As it was Sam was pretty much sitting right underneath Sookie's feet asking repeatedly if he could have some milk, and not really talking no for an answer.

But dinner was, I thought, very nearly ready so I just had to suck it up. "How was school, Leesh?" I asked Felicia, who appeared in the kitchen, still wearing her school uniform.

"Awesome. Mr Pryor took us outside after lunch to do running races. We stayed out there for AGES! Mrs Garfield never did that. He's a heaps better teacher!" she replied.

"No he's not" Amelia said, from where she was sitting doing her homework. "He's the Principal."

"He's my teacher now!" Felicia shouted at Amelia.

"_Just_ for now" Amelia said. "Because you have to have the Principal, because you're all so naughty."

"I don't care" Felicia said, shrugging. "I like him. He's cool." And then she wandered out of the room. I wondered if I was still cool too, but figured that maybe it was a bit needy to go after Felicia and ask her.

Maybe she could tell me later, at bedtime.

"What happened to Mrs Garfield?" I asked Sookie.

"Her Mum's sick" Amelia replied. I glared at her, because she really wasn't who I was talking to, but she ignored me and kept filling in her worksheet. "How do you spell horrendous?" she asked Sookie.

"H-O-R-R-E-N-D-O-U-S" Sookie spelled, and then she took the spaghetti off the stove and over to the sink to drain, managing to avoid Bob and Sam in the process. "Mrs Garfield has taken early retirement, officially to look after her mother who's very ill."

"And, um, unofficially?" I asked, as I dragged Sam across the floor so he wasn't in Sookie's way anymore. He just glared at me, and then started edging back towards her.

"Well" Sookie said, going back to the stove to stir the pasta sauce. "There was an, um, incident."

"Felicia can't spell" Amelia added.

"What incident?" I asked Sookie.

Amelia looked up. "I told you!" she said, exasperatedly, "Felicia can't spell."

I was none the wiser so I waited for Sookie to elaborate. "Um, Felicia and Mrs Garfield had a disagreement. Over the spelling of, um, the word colour…" she trailed off and stared really hard at the saucepan she was stirring.

"I told you that" Amelia muttered in the background.

"I wan' milk!" Sam whined, kind of plaintively. "Not now" I said to him, "It's nearly dinner."

Then I turned back to Sookie, "Colour?" I asked. I couldn't work out what the big deal would be.

"Yeah…you know, she had the, um, American spelling…" Sookie said, still staring at the saucepan. I realised she was trying not to laugh.

"I didn't realise there was a fu…that there's an 'American' spelling" I said. I'd been helping Felicia with her writing and spelling, sure, but I didn't see how this was getting pinned on me.

"No" Sookie said. "You wouldn't, but that's because you set Word, and everything else, to American English, like that's an actual thing. I had to change it back when you gave me the laptop. So the upshot was that Felicia thought she was right and there isn't a 'u' in colour, and Mrs Garfield didn't appreciate being corrected. Repeatedly. And it got a bit heated."

"Felicia used bad words!" Amelia supplied.

"There may have been a 'for fuck's sake' thrown around" Sookie conceded, "But reports vary and the star witness is staying mute."

"Finn?" I asked.

"Yep, he's not implicating Felicia that's for sure" Sookie said, giving the sauce one last stir, before switching the heat off.

"But I'm getting implicated?" I asked.

"Well…I'll admit it's circumstantial, but if you can find me another American round here, then I'll maybe do a more thorough investigation."

I was about to reply when Tray ran in brandishing a truck. "Fuck!" he yelled joyfully. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"Those are _bad_ words Tray!" Amelia said.

I sighed; I was probably getting implicated for that one too. "No, is mine!" Sam yelled at Tray, having been roused from his quiet contemplation of Sookie. "Give it!"

"Nah" Tray yelled. "Is Fay's. Is FAY'S FUCK!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake" I muttered.

"And that" Sookie said, stirring the spaghetti into the sauce, "Is how it all starts."

But all of the noise and drama at least distracted me from Sookie's promised presentation, at least until the kids were in bed. I tucked Felicia in and she told me joyfully how much fun school was now that they 'got to run around heaps and heaps and not do stink stuff like numbers'. She didn't mention how cool Mr Pryor was again, but then she wasn't exactly telling me I was either.

I hoped I still was.

After I came out of her room, Sookie grabbed my hand and dragged me away, except not towards the bedroom, which was kind of confusing. "Kitchen table?" I asked.

"What?" Sookie said, turning back to look at me. "It's not sex, Eric."

"Oh." Well that fucking confused the shit out of me. She pushed me into the little office she had next to the kitchen and pointed to the chair. I sat down.

"Wow, it's kind of crowded in here with both of us. Well, with you" Sookie said.

"You brought me in here just to point that out?"

"No" she said, reaching over and clicking the mouse attached to the laptop. That was kind of nice because she was standing behind me and her breasts brushed my shoulder as she did it. "I brought you in here for the presentation. It's on PowerPoint and everything."

"OK" I said slowly, as she opened it. There was one word on the screen. I turned to look at Sookie. "Hawaii?" I asked.

She grinned. "Oh yes, Eric. Hawaii. It's the answer to our problem."

"Hawaii is?"

"Yep. Well, going via Hawaii is. Look, see I've set it all out. Bullet points and everything." She looked at me pointedly when she said bullet points, and then she leaned over and clicked the mouse to show the next slide.

Underneath a little picture of some palm trees, Sookie had written the following points.

_Travel time is closer to 9 hours than the 15 odd just to Los Angeles, making it a more realistic flight with small children. It therefore breaks up the trip for them._

_Limited jet-lag due to time difference – Honolulu is only one hour behind Auckland (but its yesterday)._

_There are beaches and swimming pools for entertaining small children._

_The presence of beaches and swimming pools counts as an actual holiday for their mother, even if she has to prevent four kids from drowning._

_Due to my upbringing in South Auckland with its large and diverse Polynesian population, I can pronounce all the place-names._

_Close enough for you to be able to go on to Shreveport, and then come back and get us when you're done._

_Will make me happy._

I looked at the list Sookie had written. It actually kind of made sense. And as much as I wasn't fucking looking forward to flying on to Shreveport, at least Sookie and the kids would get a decent fucking vacation and she wouldn't have to fly all the way to the States on her own with them.

"Yeah" I said. "Yeah, OK. We'll do it that way. And then when I get back we can have a few days there before we fly on to L.A." Fuck, an actual vacation sounded good about now.

"So, you think it's a good idea then?" Sookie asked, looking slightly worried. I pulled her down into my lap.

"I think it's a great fucking idea" I said. "The kids will love it. Hawaii _and _fucking Disneyland. What more could they want?"

"Yeah" Sookie agreed. "Just don't say 'fucking Disneyland' when we're actually there, because I think Mickey Mouse throws you out if you do that."

"OK" I said. "I can do that. And I can take you to Hawaii too. I've never been."

"Me either. But I think it'll be great. I can just see you in one of those God-awful Hawaiian shirts."

"Fuck off" I said, and Sookie laughed. It felt fucking good to have finally figured out the trip, and it felt really fucking good to have Sookie sitting on my lap. I kissed her neck. "So, table now?" I asked.

She snorted. "Yeah, right. With the constant parade of kids that get up at night, I don't think so. Somewhere with a door that locks if you please."

"OK" I said. "Bedroom then." I tried standing up holding Sookie, but she yelled that there wasn't enough room, and there really fucking wasn't. This was a cupboard basically, but it was all we could squeeze into the house when we remodelled. It had been worth it though, she loved having her own space to work in and it felt fucking good to make her happy. It was like the trip to Hawaii, if that made her happy, then we'd fucking do that too.

Sookie climbed off my lap and I followed her down to the bedroom and locked the door behind us. Sookie climbed onto the bed and I lay down next to her and looked at her for a long while. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I loved her so fucking much.

SPOV

I felt kind of pleased with myself when Eric liked my idea about Hawaii. It made sense I thought, we could hang out there for five days or so while Eric worked, he could come back and have a bit of a holiday, and then we'd go on to the mainland. Simple, really. And at least in Honolulu I had a beach and a pool to entertain the kids with. They'd love it.

Of course I kind of realised that there'd be no sitting around sunbathing for me, but that was OK. The sun would be nice even if I was running around in it. It would be winter in Auckland when we went over and we could do with a recharge.

I think Eric appreciated the presentation, bullet points and all. I could have just told him my idea, I suppose, but I didn't think it would have the same impact.

"So..." I asked Eric, as we lay in bed later on after some rather satisfying sex. "What was it about the presentation that really swung it for me? My use of a rather apt graphic or the impact of my straight-to-the-point bullet points?"

"Um…" Eric said thoughtfully. "Um…well, when you rubbed your boobs all over my shoulder that definitely helped a lot. I'm thinking that if I need any help with my next presentation, I know where to come. We'd be an awesome team."

"What, you and me?" I asked.

"Well…me and your boobs, really. But, sure, you can help too if you like."

"Oh, euw! No thank you."

Eric just laughed. "No, you'd be awesome. All of you." He kissed me. "It was a fucking good presentation."

"You still didn't answer the question, though" I reminded him.

"What was the question?" he asked. He'd been staring at my boobs again. Of course.

"What really sold it to you?"

"Oh. Oh. Well…I thought the last bullet point was really good."

"Did you?" I asked, trying to remember which one that was. "Oh" I said, remembering. Mostly I'd just put that one in to use up space. It was either that or try to find another picture, and I couldn't be arsed searching clip-art. "So, you'll do it because it will make me happy?"

"Yeah" Eric said, settling himself more comfortably into his pillow. "Yeah, your other points were good too, but that would probably have persuaded me without the other stuff."

"Oh" I said, feeling a bit stunned. I mean, I knew he liked me and everything. Loved me, even. But it was still sometimes a bit weird when he wanted to do stuff just because it made me happy. I spent so much time worrying about whether I was giving in too easily when he was being incredibly persuasive about stuff he wanted that I sometimes forgot the other side of the coin.

I decided to go out on a limb. "So what would make you happy?" I asked, rolling onto my side so I had a better view of his face.

Eric frowned. "I am happy" he said. "We figured out the trip without any more fucking staring at airline websites, and I have you and four kids…"

"But you still think another one would be good?"

Eric looked torn. "Um…" he said. "Well, I just think that maybe it would be a good idea, because, you know…we're kind of good at it now…" he stopped, and just stared straight ahead.

"Would it make you happy?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said. "It would."

"Even if we tried and it didn't happen? You'd be OK with just trying?" That was my biggest fear, I didn't want to disappoint him, and I was reluctant to set myself up for something that might just be a pile of negative pregnancy tests and a lot of heartache. I didn't want this to break us apart.

Eric looked thoughtful, and then he smiled at me. "Well, trying might be nice, because we really haven't fucking tried before. It always just happened."

"It might not this time. I'm…" I had to say the dreaded thing "…a lot older." Eric sighed, and looked a bit pained. "I'm just pointing out the facts, Eric. Fertility does drop off. We've been lucky so far. We might not be again. I just…I just don't want to do this if it goes nowhere _and_ we end up getting hurt over it. Not when we have such a lot of good stuff already."

"Yeah, I know" Eric said quietly. "But I just think if we don't give it a fucking shot, we'll never know."

I thought for a moment. "OK" I said. "OK, if you're happy to try and just see, then that's what we'll do. But maybe we won't officially try. Maybe we could just stop using contraception and see how it goes?" I knew that I'd still pretty much know when I was ovulating, but I figured that maybe if I could pretend I wasn't really trying all that hard, I might not feel like a failure when it didn't happen for us.

"Yeah" Eric agreed. "That sounds OK. We'll just…wait and see." And then he leaned over and kissed me. "I love you" he said, kind of fiercely. "I really fucking do."

"I love you too. You're probably the only person in the world I'd do this with."

Eric laughed. "Good, because that Alcide guy still has his eye on you. When I was outside with the kids at the weekend he was next door with Danny, and he kept looking this way to see if you'd come out."

"Was that when I was at the supermarket?" I asked, and Eric nodded. "Huh. Although possibly he was just marvelling at the sheer number of kids we have."

"Let him marvel all he wants" Eric said, "Let them all fucking marvel."

"Yep" I said. "And they will, if we have five. Five would be a lot."

"Five would be _awesome_" Eric said.

"Yeah, you say that now. Wait until there's three of them trashing your office. Then you'll change your mind."

Eric laughed, but didn't reply, and we rearranged ourselves so we could go to sleep. "I'll never change my mind" Eric said, just as I was drifting off. "Not about the kids. Best thing you ever gave me."

"You're welcome" I said, and then sleep pulled me under.

**A/N CYFS is Child, Youth and Family services**

**Thanks for reading!**


	98. Bonus Chapter: Hawaii

**A/N Wow! I can't believe how long it took me to write this, and I didn't get quite as far as I wanted to with it. Real life got busy, and it's annoying! It may yet get worse as I'm supposed to be starting a part-time job next week, so we'll have to see how it goes.**

**But it is officially one year now since I first started writing Homestay, which is kind of amazing. I honestly thought I'd give up after about two weeks, my childhood is littered with abandoned activities - guitar lessons (I can't play), gymnastics (I'm scared of the beam), the cross-stitch I started aged 12 that still lingers on in a cupboard somewhere. So yeah, I'm feeling quite proud of myself, and very, very grateful to you guys for supporting me all the way through. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I thought Sookie would really, really, really like Hawaii!**

SPOV

Hawaii seemed like a good idea when I'd done my presentation but when you were stuck in Auckland Airport with four kids you could rapidly go off the whole idea of a trip anywhere. It wasn't so bad when there were two of us to watch them all, but Eric was fond of disappearing off to buy himself another coffee and all of a sudden I'd be trying to listen to Amelia, while watch Sam and Tray and make sure their game of pushing each other over didn't spill into anyone we didn't know, and hope that Felicia didn't just wander off in search of Eric. It was exhausting. But I suspected I wasn't going to be sleeping on the plane.

I did hope that some of the kids might sleep though. It was probably a vain hope, but I wasn't prepared to contemplate spending nearly nine hours on a plane that wasn't all that big with four very wide-awake kids. I might be tempted to sit in the corner and rock if I admitted to myself that was the likely outcome.

Eric had the short end of the stick anyway. We'd spent a while trying to work out how we were going to arrange the seating and he'd ended up in the row behind us with Felicia and Tray, who was going to have to be strapped into his carseat. I had Sam and Amelia in the next row. I hoped that maybe I had the better deal, and God knows, Tray was unlikely to sit still for long.

We finally made it to the gate and I spent the time there leading everyone in a game of Simon Says to try to tire them out. "I don't want to play _that_" Amelia complained.

"Well, fine. Don't, then. The others can play" I replied. "Simon says, run on the spot. Spot Tray! Don't run off." Eric reached over and stopped him taking off around the waiting area, which made Tray giggle because now he thought this was going to be a game of 'who can I out-run?'

Felicia muttered "I'm winning!" while staring daggers at Sam who was running around in small circles.

Amelia, sitting next to me just sighed. "I can't wait until I get on the plane" she said. "I've never been on a plane. Amelia Chang's been on _lots_ of planes. But I've had to wait _sooo_ long."

"Not that long" I pointed out to her. "I didn't go on a plane until I was an adult." Amelia gave me a look which suggested that was totally my problem and I went back to the game. "Simon says do star-jumps."

"Aren't you supposed to not say Simon Says sometimes?" Felicia asked me.

I shrugged. That wasn't the object of this exercise. The object of this exercise was to tire everyone out. "Simon says, touch your toes." Felicia followed my instructions, but Sam just kept doing random jumps. Tray had long given up and he and Eric were playing a game that involved Tray starting to run, and Eric catching him and swooping him up.

"I'm definitely winning" Felicia said.

Eventually they were ready for boarding and, after the very important people with the right memberships or seats had boarded, it was time for the people travelling with small children. We trooped over and handed over our boarding passes and started down the walkway to the plane. I had a sudden moment of panic as the tunnel narrowed and I realised more than ever just how cooped up we'd be for the next nine or so hours. I was tempted to turn and run in the other direction, but Eric was behind me, and I wasn't sure I'd have any more luck getting past him than Tray had.

We got inside and found our seats. I could hear Eric and his charges getting settled in behind us. I was in the middle of Sam and Amelia. Amelia looked around. "Is this it?" she asked. "It's not very big." She wrinkled her nose.

"Well…it's not the biggest plane, but it's a lot bigger than the ones Daddy flies on to go to Wellington" I replied, while trying to get Sam's seatbelt done up.

"I've never been to Wellington!" Amelia huffed, as she plopped down on her seat.

"No, but you're going to Hawaii. It's a lot further away. It's in the States."

"How long until we get there?" Amelia asked, as I showed her what to do with her seatbelt.

"Um…nine-ish hours. All day" I replied, glancing back at where the others were sitting. Tray was giggling because Eric was tickling him. And kicking the seat repeatedly with his foot as he tried to squirm away. Yeah, that was going to get old soon.

"Really?" Amelia asked, incredulously. "But…all day?"

"Yep" I replied, pulling stuff out of my backpack and stashing it in the seat pocket.

"I need wees" Sam announced. And that was going to get old soon too.

EPOV

I wasn't looking forward to the flight to Honolulu anymore that I suspected Sookie was, but at least she didn't have to sit with the kid who never sat still. We'd gone backwards and forwards about buying a seat for Tray and in the end had come out with a resounding yes, because as ridiculous as Sookie thought it was to spend all that money on a kid who wasn't even two, no one liked the idea of Tray sitting on their lap for nine hours.

So to prevent him running around the plane for the whole fucking nine hour flight, he was going to be strapped into his carseat. Assuming I could wrestle him into it for long enough to get the straps done up. We'd always thought Sam was kind of active, and certainly he was always fucking keen to be outside. I'd spent most of the last couple of months permanently outside in the cold and wet so Sam didn't get 'cabin fever' as Sookie liked to term it. But Tray was something else again. The kid just couldn't fucking sit still, unless he was asleep, and even then he had a tendency to toss and turn and contort himself into weird fucking shapes. Sookie liked to say he had two speeds, full-tilt and asleep, and I thought she was fucking right.

This flight was going to be a nightmare. It was bad enough when I had to share an armrest with someone, but this was a whole other level. And as soon as I sat in my seat, after Felicia had climbed into her seat next to me, I realised the whole concept of leg-room was a fucking joke anyway.

Fuck, this was a tiny fucking plane to be flying across the Pacific Ocean in.

Tray decided that he might make a break for it, and threw himself forward. "No, Tray. There's no running around."

"N'runnin?" he asked, trying to process that.

"Yeah, you have to sit still. So it's booorin'" Felicia added, with a hefty sigh.

"Well, you can look at the TV thing" I said to her. I doubted I'd fucking get a chance.

Felicia didn't look enthused. "Might" she said.

"And we've got food" I added. We had a fuck-load of food because Sookie somehow didn't believe that they would feed us on the plane, or feed us when we were hungry, or some shit like that. There was all sorts of things stashed in the backpack I'd had to bring with me, and I was hoping that if I just shoved enough of it into Tray, he'd eventually fall into a food-coma. Fuck knows that kid could eat.

Sookie walked past with Sam. "Wees" she said as she passed me. Yeah, that didn't seem great, but fuck; I had the kid in diapers. Did I actually have the diapers though? I was wondering if I should look through the bag I had when an air hostess bustled over.

"Hi" she said. "I'm Fay; I'll just help you get the carseat set up. So we just strap it on here like this…"

"Fay!" Tray shouted happily. "Fay, Fay, Fay!"

"Oh, well done" Fay said, smiling at Tray, who grinned back. "You're a clever wee thing aren't you?"

"Fay!" Tray repeated.

"He's Tray" Felicia said, sounding a bit exasperated. "But he can't say it."

"Well he's doing a good job with my name, aren't you sweetie?" Fay gave Tray another smile, and then went back to showing me how to strap the carseat onto the aircraft seat. When that was done she said something about kid's packs and bustled off.

Amelia, who'd been left alone, kneeled on her seat and turned around to face us. "Am I getting a kids' pack?" she asked.

"Probably" I said, as Tray slithered off my lap and tried to edge his way into the aisle, so I moved my leg to stop him doing it. He frowned, but he didn't have a meltdown, he just quietly set about trying to wriggle free.

"But she didn't talk to us. That lady. Why didn't she talk to us?"

I shrugged, and then Fay arrived back with the promised packs for Tray and Felicia. Felicia took hers and mumbled "Thank you", I took Tray's as he was still trying to figure out how he could get loose and cause mayhem. Given there were still people trying to board it would be a fuckload of mayhem too.

"Do I get one?" Amelia asked Fay, with an extremely haughty tone. Fuck, she definitely thought she was in First Class or something.

"Oh. Sure, Sweetie. I'll be right back" Fay said, and she trotted off.

Sookie and Sam arrived back to their seats, having had to push past the people arriving. "Right" Sookie said. "Let's get settled in."

"Felicia got a colouring thing" Amelia announced, sitting back down in her seat. "Mine's coming."

"Yeah, that's nice" Sookie said.

Fay came back with Amelia's pack, saw Sam was now in his seat and said she'd be back in a moment. Felicia decided to start whining. "I'm bored" she said. "Can I open my pack now?"

"Well, why don't you wait until we take off?"

"We haven't taken off yet? Why is it taking so long? I'm soooo bored!"

"We'll take off soon" I assured her. I hoped so. Tray trying to run off was losing its appeal for both of us. I decided it was time to attempt to put him in the carseat. Yeah, he wasn't happy with that.

"Nooo!" he wailed.

"There isn't a choice, buddy. If you don't sit in your seat the plane can't take off." Tray looked like he didn't care about that one. "And the Air Marshals will come and take you away." I was pretty confident there weren't any Air Marshals within 100 miles of this plane, but Tray didn't need to know that.

"'way?" he asked.

"Yeah, if you don't behave, they put you in the baggage hold. With the suitcases."

Tray looked thoughtful. "Can I see the suitcases?" Felicia asked.

"No" I said to her.

"But…not even if I'm bad?" she asked.

"Do you really want to be bad and risk the consequences? There's no TV or colouring in down there."

"Fine" Felicia huffed. "I won't be bad."

"Great. Thanks. Because I'd really hate it if they just came and took you away" I said, while I lifted Tray into his carseat and strapped him in. He looked a bit confused at being put in it, having spent the last few days being told repeatedly by all his older siblings that they were going on a plane, but he didn't struggle too badly, thank fuck. I just hoped he managed to stay as well-behaved for the rest of the flight.

"They'd take me away?" Felicia asked.

"Well, yeah. That's what I said. If you're bad, you end up in the hold. Guarded by the Air Marshals. So, you know, let's all be on our best behaviour and not piss anyone off."

"OK" Felicia agreed.

"That goes for you too, Tray" I warned him. "If you're bad, they'll come and get you." Tray gave me a very solemn nod and set about seeing if he could kick the seat in front of him.

SPOV

By the time we were a few hours into the flight I'd made a few discoveries. One was that Amelia was an annoying person to sit next to for any length of time. She fidgeted, couldn't settle on one thing, flipped channels and moaned loudly about her choice of in-flight entertainment. And then she got incredibly annoyed that I wouldn't let her watch _Twilight_. "Is it because they're all kissy and stuff? Because you and Daddy do that ALL THE TIME so it's not like I haven't seen it before...or, is it because they're making babies? I haven't seen that, but you've done it. Lots. When do you do that, Mummy?" My God she was loud, and I was tempted to jam the headphones back on her and let her watch the stupid movie, but instead I muttered something about the violence and tried to interest her in watching some _Hannah Montana_ instead.

Poor Sam had, I discovered, yucky sinuses. Which led to sore ears, and a lot of grizzliness and micro-naps, where he'd doze off for a bit, usually leaning on me, or, at one point, actually sitting on me, but then he'd wake up and have another whinge, while I tried to interest him in something on the little TV. The Wiggles weren't really cutting it though, and he just wanted to be off the plane. "Ou'side?" he kept asking. "Ou'side soon?"

"Soon" I lied.

My final discovery of the flight was that Eric Northman is a big fat liar. Every time he'd ever flown back to the States I'd ask him how the flight was and he'd sigh and shrug and say "Of course, I can't sleep on a plane."

Can't sleep on a plane, my arse. They all fell asleep, Eric, Tray and Felicia. Of course they did. But not until after they'd eaten all the pizza muffins I'd packed for them, and started on ours, and enjoyed several visits from that flight attendant who'd taken a shine to Eric and Tray and kept bringing them extra things from the galley, which caused a huge amount of fuss in the row I was sitting in. "Felicia got juice! More juice. I didn't get any juice" Amelia would huff, and then Sam would rouse and go "Juice?" and I would have to try to palm him off with a drink of water and one of the blueberry and banana custard muffins instead.

It was exhausting. I could have done with a nap, but it wouldn't be the responsible thing to do I figured. I wouldn't put it past Amelia to march off to the galley and start looking for where all the treats were stashed if she was left to her own devices. She seemed to think that the flight attendants were at her personal beck and call and to be honest, the fact that Eric seemed to have one attending to his every need wasn't helping matters.

And so the flight dragged on. And on. Eric eventually woke up and he and Tray decided to stretch their legs by taking a walk around the plane, which meant that every woman over the age of about 15 cooed at Tray while looking directly at Eric. I might have felt that changing the nappy that Tray eventually filled was a suitable penance for Eric, except that his flight attendant friend rushed ahead to show him how to put the change table down in the toilets. Needless to say I'd had to make several trips with Sam without any assistance whatsoever, and it wasn't easy trying to pee while you hoped the two year old didn't figure out how to open the door and embarrass you utterly.

The flight dragged on some more. They served another meal, and somehow Eric managed to score an entire second tray of food that was just 'going spare'. I wondered if that meant that someone down the front of the plane had missed out on dinner because our flight attendant had a small crush. Or a large crush.

And Eric certainly wasn't above using it to his advantage either. I was always slightly scared of cabin crew and the power they wielded, but Eric actually wandered over and asked for coffee when they didn't have the trolley out. And he got it. He did bring me one as well, which was thoughtful, but given I'd already worn some of Amelia's Sprite when Sam decided to have a clamber around, I was mostly worried that I was going to end up with hot beverage all over me as well. Still, given the state of my t-shirt now, in addition to the Sprite it was also covered in the snot from where Sam had been crying and some of his ice cream from lunch, it wouldn't really make any difference.

I was wondering how Eric had managed to stay quite so clean though, because I could guarantee if I'd been sitting anywhere near Tray he would have spilt something on me. Eric was obviously better at dodging. And maybe at entertaining because there was very little grizzling coming from his aisle.

"Do you think Bob's OK?" Amelia asked.

"He's fine. He's just…having his own holiday" I replied.

"Snap!" Sam yelled. Amelia and I had been trying to teach him how to play, but he was a bit vague on the rules.

"No, it's not Sam" Amelia said. "It has to be the same, that's not the same."

Sam peered at the cards, and then banged his hand down, hard, on the poor flimsy tray table. "Snap!" he yelled again.

"No" Amelia said. "Mum, tell him that's not Snap. He's useless!"

EPOV

I was fucking glad when we got near the end of the flight because the threat of the Air Marshals was starting to wear off. Felicia had been suspicious for a while that they didn't really exist because she hadn't seen one.

But thankfully they'd passed some of the time by sleeping, which was fucking amazing and meant I could briefly relax. Sookie had stood up at one point during the afternoon and told me that I'd been asleep too, but it wasn't true. It wasn't like I could sleep on a plane, anyway. Maybe I'd closed my eyes for a while, but that'd been it, and all of Sookie's talk about the amount of snoring I'd been doing was just that, talk.

At least she wasn't stuck in an endless round of what happens if I? with Felicia. "So, if I run around and yell, then the Air Marshals come and get me?"

"Yep" I said, trying to read my book. Tray was busy watching the TV. Well, he was pushing all the buttons on the controller and talking to himself. He was OK. I glanced at the screen to see what he'd ended up on. It was the opening scenes from _Saving Private Ryan_. Someone got shot in the head. Oh well, he'd push another button soon.

"And take me to where the suitcases are? Where it's cold?" Felicia asked.

"Yep."

"And when the plane lands they let me out?"

"Nope. They take you to jail."

"But I'm just a kid!"

"Yeah…except we'd be in the States by then. You'd still go to jail."

Felicia looked astounded. "You can't send kids to jail!"

I shrugged. "Listen to your mother sometime. Apparently, in the States they do all sorts of weird shit."

Felicia frowned, but went back to her colouring in. Tray pointed excitedly to the screen where there appeared to be some Germans getting shot and I wrested the controller off him so we could change back to something less gory. He pouted a bit like that, but all I needed was Sookie catching him watching something unsuitable.

So I was kind of glad when we began the descent into Honolulu. The kids were all a bit tired and grouchy now, as it was late at night as far as they were concerned and they'd been sitting around for most of the day. Tray dozed off again and missed the landing entirely, obviously he didn't have any problems sleeping on planes. It looked as though Sookie was having trouble with Sam, who didn't like the plane dropping down and was crying and trying to get out of his seat. Fuck, I wanted to help, but there wasn't much I could do when we had to stay strapped into our seats until we were told otherwise. It was fucking difficult.

And when we had actually landed, the trick was to stop Felicia sprinting off the plane before it had even stopped taxiing. She was kind of excited now. As I think Amelia was too, I could hear her asking Sookie how long it was until they found a carpark for the plane.

Next we had to get through customs, which I discovered wasn't as easy when you were travelling with a bunch of people who had different passports. I also discovered that I had been supposed to fill out the little green cards Fay had given me earlier in the flight for Tray and Felicia. I'd jammed them in the back of my book and not thought anymore about them.

"Honestly, Eric" Sookie huffed, as she stood in the queue filling out the cards. "Why didn't you do this earlier?"

I shrugged. "I don't need one" I said.

"Yeah, that's you. But the rest of us need that visa waiver thingee they put in your passport, so they know we're tourists, not overstayers."

"Illegal aliens" I corrected, as I changed Tray from one arm to another.

"Yeah. Whatever, Eric!" Sookie huffed. She really did sound like Amelia when she was pissy. Or maybe the other way around. Fuck, it wasn't my fault I didn't have any kids that actually had the same passport as me. And Sookie was obviously in a fucking mood anyway. Her period had come a couple of days earlier, and while she said she didn't care, and that it had only been a couple of months, she did. She really fucking did, so now we were all subjected to not only PMS, but…well, whatever the fucking equivalent was if it happened after her period arrived. She was grumpy as shit, but there wasn't anything I could do. Other than maybe keep trying. Surely if we had enough sex eventually we'd get a baby?

Although I wasn't sure how much sex was going to be happening on this holiday. It was all very well trying for a fifth kid, but the four were already had were the worst cockblockers known to mankind, they really fucking were.

We made it through customs with only a few dirty looks and then it was just a matter of collecting all our shit from the baggage claim area. And the over-sized baggage claim area, for the stroller and Sam's booster seat. By now everyone was really tired, and really fucking annoying and trying to keep an eye on the kids and the carousel and the suitcases we'd already claimed wasn't fucking easy.

SPOV

The first thing that happened when we got through to the main part of the airport at Honolulu was that we lost Eric. If I'd had to put money on anyone going missing, I would have possibly guessed Tray, and then maybe Sam. But I guessed they did get it from somewhere, after all. I'd only looked away for a moment to get a water bottle out of my backpack.

"Where's Dad gone?" I asked Amelia.

"Over there" she said pointing. "He said 'wait here and he'll be back in a minute.'"

"Or the Air Marshals will turn up" Felicia added. "And take us to jail."

"Um…OK" I said, looking over at where Amelia was pointing. Eric was walking back over from a newsagent's kiosk with what looked like a large collection of chocolate and sweets. Ah, yes. I guessed he couldn't resist all the American candy he missed. You could buy it in New Zealand, but mainly from the sweet shop in the middle of the Mt Eden village which imported a whole lot of it, but you had to pay through the nose. And of course it wasn't a shop we took the whole family into very often, as you'd never get out without buying a bunch of sugary stuff that was just going to hype the kids up.

Well, I tried not to go there. I knew Eric walked up from his office sometimes and spent God-knows how much on stuff he wanted, and he then stashed it in a drawer at work. Although his stash had been rumbled by the kids on various visits, I think initially by Amelia looking for a better selection of highlighters, and since then he'd had to learn to share it when we visited.

"You ready?" I asked when he got back to us.

"Yep" Eric said, and we set off to look for the shuttle to the hotel. On the drive into Waikiki Tray and Sam both fell asleep, which would have been nice if we hadn't had to wake them at the other end. Felicia and Amelia were excited though. "Look!" Amelia said, pointing out the window into the night. "Palm trees!"

"Yeah, but there's a palm tree in our street, Ames" Felicia countered. "Up at the top of the road."

"But it's not like a…what's the thing…tropical. It's not a _tropical_ palm tree. It's just an ordinary palm tree that someone has in their garden. These are different."

"How are they different?" Felicia asked, but Amelia ignored her totally.

At that point Eric decided to investigate the lollies he'd bought and those got shared around, despite the fact Amelia pronounced them a bit weird.

We reached the hotel and unloaded everyone and everything. At least it was warm, even though it was quite late at night you could feel the warmth in the air as we stood outside the lobby. That was going to be nice. Coming from Auckland in late July I was ready for some warm weather.

A porter came out and helped load our mountains of belongings onto a trolley and then he whisked them away while we checked in. Well, Eric checked in. I hung about with the kids and explained to Amelia that we weren't going to see the beach tonight because it was bedtime.

Eric brought the keycard over and we took the lift up to find our room. Amelia was getting a bit worried about her bag though. "Where's my stuff?" she asked Eric.

"They'll bring it up shortly, Ames" he said, adjusting Sam in his arms. Poor Sam was dog-tired and couldn't keep his eyes open. I had Tray who was faring a bit better and I was hoping that the late nap in the car wouldn't mean he was going to run around instead of sleep because I was pretty much dead on my feet.

"But…that guy took it. The one in the flowery shirt. Are you sure he's bringing our stuff? He might have stolen it?" Amelia looked at Eric.

"Nah, the Air Marshals'd shoot him" Felicia said, sounding completely matter of fact about the prospect of someone being shot.

"Bang!" Tray yelled. "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!" I looked down at him. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination or not, but I'm pretty sure he said that with an American accent.

Sure enough the bags arrived not too long after we'd got to the room. The guy who brought them up greeted us with a big smile. "Aloha! So where have you folks just arrived from?" he asked, while unloading the stuff off the trolley.

"New Zealand" Eric said, taking his wallet out.

"Oh. Tena Koe" the porter said, without missing a beat. Wow, he'd been well tutored in how to greet visitors, and I suspected that he had a range of greetings in all sorts of different languages, although given that Maori and Hawaiian people were supposed to share a common ancestor, this was probably one of the easier ones for him.

However it completely stumped Eric who obviously couldn't figure out how he'd flown for almost a whole day, gone through something clearly marked U.S Customs and Immigration and still ended up with people greeting him in Maori. He just stood there looking a bit flummoxed. Luckily Amelia and Felicia, well-trained from the attempts their school made to inject a bit of bi-culturalism into the syllabus, stepped in and chorused "Tena Koe" back to the poor guy.

Eric shoved some money at him and he left with a final "Aloha!" which Amelia and Felicia repeated back as well.

"Why'd you have to pay him?" Amelia asked after he'd gone. "Does he work for us?"

"No, it's called tipping. You just…you just do it" Eric replied, trying to find a spot for the stroller.

"Why?" Amelia asked.

"Um…just because" Eric eventually found a corner by the door it could squeeze into.

"Because he's poor? Like the guy outside the supermarket Mum gives money to?"

"He's a busker, Amelia" I said, trying to find a spot for the other bags.

"Not the one with the guitar. The one with the woolly hat and the dog." Eric looked over at me, but I didn't look at him. Sometimes he just didn't need to know, but Amelia hadn't grasped that fact yet. One day she would, or I hoped she would anyway.

"No, that isn't tipping" Eric said.

"Well I don't get it" Amelia grumbled. And then she turned her attention to more important things. "Where's my bed?" she asked.

"There" I said, pointing to one of the two double beds in the rather large room.

"Well…where's Felicia sleeping?" Amelia asked.

"You're sharing Ames" Eric said, looking at the beds. He wasn't much happier about the situation than Amelia, but we couldn't exactly fork out for an entire suite of rooms, not when he wasn't going to be here for most of the time anyway.

Amelia looked at Felicia. "I don't want to share with you. You fart!"

Felicia giggled. "Daddy farts too, and Mum has to share with him."

"Everyone is sharing with someone" I told them. Tray and Sam were going to have to have the pull-out couch, which would probably be a disaster, but if we'd got them to put in a cot for Tray, or crib I supposed it would be here, I was worried he'd just knock the whole thing over. He'd had a decent go at doing that to our portacot when he'd last used it at Judith and Calvin's place. I didn't want to see just how good our travel insurance actually was by attempting to run up some U.S. medical bills.

"It'll be fun. Like camping!" I said, trying to rouse a bit of enthusiasm. No one looked that enthusiastic, and Eric ignored me completely. He was busy pulling stuff out of his bag. "I'm going for a shower" he said. "Plane smell."

"OK…well, just don't lock the door…" he'd gone. I hoped he'd heard. There was only one bathroom. And a lot of people had to use it. I surveyed the room; Amelia and Felicia were squabbling over who got what side of the bed and trying to turn the TV on, Tray was rattling the door handle that led to the deck, I hoped it held, and Sam was fast asleep on the couch where Eric had deposited him. I sighed.

How on earth were we ever going to manage a fifth kid? Not that it might happen of course. We were studiously avoiding talking about that. It had only been a couple of months after all, but…it was a novelty that nothing had happened yet. My period had started again a couple of days earlier and it had been hard not to feel disappointed. Although I had my reservations about introducing a whole new person into the family I couldn't help but feel that I had something to prove. I just wasn't sure whether I was proving it to myself or to Eric.

It probably wasn't healthy. And this probably wasn't the best time to dwell on it anyway. Tray was getting awfully close to getting that door open.

EPOV

Hawaii, or Honolulu, anyway, was fucking weird. Supposedly, it was the States, but it didn't feel like it. Sookie had asked me in the shuttle that brought us to the hotel whether it felt good to be back, but, fuck, it wasn't like anywhere I'd ever come from. It was more like the place Sookie was from. With palm trees. Or more palm trees, anyway.

It was pretty fucking clear by the way she was joking around with the big Hawaiian guy who drove the shuttle just how at home she felt here. Mind you I sometimes suspected that Sookie would manage to have a conversation with anyone she fell over. Including, apparently, the guy who begs outside the local supermarket.

And now we were all stuck inside the one room with not enough beds. Or beds that anyone was going to fit in, anyway. Fuck, one of those beds was going to be small for Amelia and Felicia, and Sookie and I were going to be crammed into the other one, which meant I'd no doubt hear it in the morning because I would have slept on Sookie's arm or something. Although I really doubted that I would be able to sleep in that bed anyway.

It was only for one night. One night and then I had to leave them all again, which I really fucking wasn't looking forward to. I decided to take a shower, and Sookie yelled something about leaving the door open. It might have been nice of course if that meant she was joining me, but instead what I got was a steady progression of children turning up to use the toilet and brush their teeth, and, in the case of Amelia, protest rather loudly that they were too big to share a bed with their sister.

I wondered how long she'd been making the same complaints to Sookie before she'd been told to come and tell me instead.

By the time I came out of the bathroom all the kids were in bed. I wasn't sure if Sam had actually woken up yet since he'd fallen asleep in the shuttle, but he and Tray were asleep in the bed Sookie had pulled out of the couch. Amelia and Felicia were in their bed, but there was a lot of pushing and muttering going on and every so often you could hear Amelia say "Stay on your side!"

Yeah, I didn't envy Sookie having over a week of listening to that. She walked past me to the bathroom saying she was heading for a shower and I climbed in to bed and switched off the lights.

"Now I can't see where Felicia is!" Amelia complained. "She might be on my side."

"Well, if she isn't in your way, then it's probably OK" I told her.

"Um…she might be" Amelia said, not sounding sure.

"I'm not!" Felicia said indignantly. "I'm definitely on my side."

"Your foot's not" Amelia complained.

"_Your_ foot's not!" Felicia replied.

"Everyone, just keep your feet to yourselves. And go to sleep."

There was a bit more grumbling, a few murmurs of "Bang!" from Tray and then finally it was quiet. Sookie tiptoed out of the bathroom, pulled back the covers and muttered "Do I get any room?"

"You're as bad as Amelia" I said, as I shifted back, slightly. There wasn't really anywhere for me to go.

The next morning we were woken up by Tray's yell as he fell out of the bed he'd been sleeping in. Tray was pretty resilient though, and he was up and running around soon after. I thought it was a fucking miracle that we hadn't had any kids get in with us during the night, but when I sat up I realised that Sam was sleeping almost completely on top of Sookie.

Well, I figured it wasn't me who was getting complained about anyway.

I looked over at the other bed, where Felicia had spread out during the night and managed to push Amelia almost out of bed. Yeah, she fucking sprawled. I wasn't anywhere near that bad.

Tray, having seen I was awake, came running over to me. "Up!" he chanted. "Up, up, up, up, up!"

"Yeah, we're getting up now" I said to him.

"Well, I'm not" Sookie mumbled. "I'm pinned."

"Not by me" I said to her, as I swung my legs out of bed.

"Well, he gets it from someone" she complained.

Amelia woke up next. "I've got no room!" she announced.

"Yeah, join the club" Sookie said, as she tried to ease Sam off her, which made him wake up. "Wh'am I?" he asked.

"On holiday" Sookie said, at the same time I said "Vacation." It's a wonder the poor fucking kids ever learnt to talk, because half the time their parents couldn't use the same word for anything.

"I want to go to the beach" Amelia announced, but everyone ignored her. "I need wees!" Sam said, which got more attention, and Sookie stood up to take him to the bathroom.

Tray had managed to get himself onto the girls' bed and that had woken Felicia up. "You're a pain in the bum" she said to him.

"Bum, bum, bum!" Tray chanted happily. "Bum, bum, bum."

SPOV

The first morning's breakfast was kind of exciting, but also kind of sad because it was the last time we'd see Eric for a while. Not that we had a lot of time to dwell on it, trying to shepherd four kids through a breakfast buffet wasn't easy for a start.

"There's a lot of food" Amelia commented.

"Uh-huh" I agreed. "So just pick what you like."

"Well…I don't want bacon" she said, screwing her nose up at it.

"I do" Felicia said, piling some on her plate.

We joined Eric and the boys at a table by the garden. "Did you let them help themselves?" I asked Eric. They seemed to have a huge amount of food in front of them.

"They wanted to try it" Eric said, shrugging, as he flagged down a waiter. I couldn't believe that someone actually responded to that gesture by coming over, and not just by making several rude gestures of their own, but I supposed that around here there are tips involved.

Eric asked if we could get coffee. I thought we were supposed to get our own, but the waiter smiled at Eric and scuttled off. Yep, definitely canvassing for tips. The thought always creeped me out a bit, I wanted to know that people were being nice and helpful because it was their job and I was nice to them, but the thought they were doing it for extra cash always made me feel a bit funny. I hadn't enjoyed trying to work out the protocol on the couple of times I'd been to the States before this. But then of course I had been with Bill, who tried to avoid tipping on the principle that we were New Zealanders and this somehow exempted us.

Not sure the Americans who served us felt the same way.

Felicia pointed her fork at Sam's plate. "Sam's got more bacon than me!" she complained.

"Well, you can go back" I said.

"There's a queue now" she grumbled.

"I'm eating pineapple for breakfast" Amelia announced. "Only pineapple."

"You don't want toast, or cereal?" Eric asked her.

"They don't have Weetbix" Amelia complained.

"No" Eric said. "They don't."

"So there's no cereal I want. I'm just having pineapple." I decided to worry about the consequences of a pineapple only diet at some point in the future. She'd probably be OK. I was confident there were probably Hollywood actresses who lived on more bizarre diets.

The waiter arrived back with the coffee. "Can I get some milk, please?" I asked, and the guy looked at me for a few moments before he drawled, "Sure, no problem" and disappeared again.

"That was weird" I said. "I felt really bad for asking." Maybe there were limits to how much a tip would get you.

"It's because you say 'mulk'" Eric said.

"No I don't!"

"Yeah, you do. I'm just too polite to laugh at you" Eric said, while clearly laughing at me.

"You do" Amelia said. "It's definitely mulk."

If I did, she did, but I didn't want to get into an argument with her about it.

"You all do" Eric muttered, but then he looked thoughtful. "Sam" he said, and Sam looked up from his plate. "Say milk."

"Milk!" Sam repeated.

"Yeah…he's almost got it right" Eric said, as the waiter reappeared with a jug of milk. Unfortunately Sam thought that was his to drink now. "Milk!" he said happily.

"That's fine" I said. "I'll just…go over there and get some more. You can tip me later." I stood up from my chair.

After breakfast we went back to the room to get ready. Five of us were going to the pool, and Eric was going back to the airport to fly to the mainland. I was starting to get a bit panicked about managing four kids in a strange country all by myself. It might have seemed like a good idea when I originally made my presentation, but now it seemed like a silly, silly, silly idea.

But I couldn't exactly say that to Eric. He didn't look happy at all about leaving us all on a tropical island and heading off on two flights to go to work. And I had to admit, when I looked out the hotel window at the sparkling blue of the ocean, I could definitely see why it wouldn't appeal.

It just wouldn't be the same having a holiday without Eric.

EPOV

I didn't really want to fucking leave them all, and not just because they were going to be hanging out in Hawaii while I was working. It was never fucking easy leaving them behind and this time was no different, and yet it was somehow worse because they were so fucking close to me. Well, closer than they were in Auckland anyway.

So when I left Honolulu I only said a brief goodbye. For one thing I couldn't really get the kids' attention anymore, they were far too excited about the pool and beach and every other fucking thing going.

I did get Sookie's attention though. Well, for a moment, anyway, and then Tray knocked something off the table and she had to try and Tray-proof the room. Yeah, she wasn't going to have much fucking luck with that, that's for sure.

"Don't forget to tip people" I said as I walked out the hotel room door.

"Yeah, yeah" Sookie said dismissively. "Tray! Leave that mirror alone please!"

And then I shut the door behind me.

By the time I finally reached Indira's front door I felt like shit, and it wasn't just because of all the time I'd spent fucking sitting on planes and not sleeping.

"Wow" Indira said, as she opened the door. "You look like shit. Come in. Jock, don't growl. It's Eric. You like Eric."

Yeah, that fucking horrible cat still had it in for me personally, but I couldn't feel much worse than I already did. Fuck. I just wanted to turn around and go back to Sookie and the kids. I was fucking worried about them, wandering around Honolulu by themselves. Sure, Sookie had been to the States before, but I was sure she'd do better if she had me around. I wasn't convinced she'd tip anyone, and she'd end up with shitty service. That was assuming anyone could understand her anyway. It wasn't just milk that sounded funny, all her vowels were fucking screwed up. And one of the kids was bound to run off and get lost. Probably Tray. I wondered if the police in Hawaii were any good. Fuck, I wished I'd stayed with them.

SPOV

I thought it was going to be really terrible without Eric, but to be honest, it was kind of good fun. I always feel better when it's sunny, and it was sunny here all the time. You didn't get the rain showers like you did in Auckland. And it was hot. So who can miserable when it's hot and sunny?

Amelia tried to be miserable a few times, mostly she pouted about the bed situation, especially when she realised I was no longer sharing one because Eric had left, but she cheered up when we went to one of those ABC stores that were everywhere in Honolulu and bought a large selection of inflatable things and buckets and spades. Well Amelia mostly spent her pocket money on cheap jewellery and trinkets, but it made her feel a bit better. And she and Felicia discovered the joy of pillow fights, that made both of them feel better. A few good thumps and they were good to go each night.

So we spent our days by the pool at the hotel, where we were usually the first family there, and in between times we went to the beach and explored Waikiki. The Japanese tourists loved the boys and they got lots of attention. Luckily their English probably wasn't good enough to realise what Tray was trying to say when he brandished his favourite truck and yelled "Fuck!" at them. Or maybe they could tell, there was a lot of polite giggling.

We tried a lot of fast-food places I'd never heard of, and we ate a lot of pineapple. It seemed to be pretty ubiquitous here. We made several sandcastles and listened to Felicia complain that she really wanted to learn to surf. I said one day she could, but not right now. She pouted a bit, but managed to find some other kids who had a ball they were kicking around and she told them she was great at soccer. I wasn't sure it impressed them, but they let her play.

The hotel had a kids' club for the bigger kids, so Amelia and Felicia went to that a couple of times and went out on trips around the island, which did make it easier for me. I even got a nap one day when both Sam and Tray slept; jumping in the pool by 8am every morning will wear you out pretty quickly.

And mostly the boys were better behaved than I'd thought they might be, although their behaviour was no doubt helped by Felicia's ever-more gruesome stories about the Air Marshals who round you up and take you away never to be seen again. Amelia was a bit sceptical about the story, but the boys ate it up. Especially the part about the guns. And the guns got bigger with every telling.

"There's no guns!" Amelia argued one day. "No one really has a gun."

"He does" Felicia said, pointing to a police officer.

That shut up Amelia up. We weren't used to seeing police officers with guns, and I wasn't sure what their reaction was going to be to Tray yelling "Bang!" at them. They were kind of scary. But they passed us by and everyone was a bit quiet after that.

We had a morning shopping at the mall and buying everyone clothes. I could have done with Eric's help to carry the bags, but we managed. And the guy who drove the trolley-bus who took us out there helped me get the pushchair on and off and then we had a big chat about the difference between New Zealand and Hawaii and what I thought of my holiday so far.

So I was feeling pretty pleased that I'd been able to cope with all four kids, without them killing each other or getting lost. I felt like I'd earned a motherhood ability badge or something. And I'd been right, it was kind of like camping. Well, it reminded me of the holidays from my childhood anyway. Especially when I had to time everyone shower's, although not because it cost 10 cents for each five minute burst of hot water, and when I had to sit and get the tangles out of the girls' hair after they'd been in the surf. I had never enjoyed that as kid either, and usually because I was convinced Jason was off doing something exciting while I was sitting there getting my hair pulled by Mum.

Of course it wasn't all plain sailing. The first night without Eric was probably the worst. Tray had a minor meltdown because he wanted Daddy back, and I ended up cuddling him until he finally fell asleep in my bed. But after a few days everyone was into the swing of it and they were getting excited about Daddy coming back and joining in the fun.

And tipping still stumped me totally. Luckily we weren't exactly eating in any fine dining establishments, and I was pretty sure you didn't have to tip the people serving you at McDonalds, but I was confused about the staff around the hotel. About two days in we turned up at the pool to find they didn't have any towels out yet.

"Swim!" Sam yelled happily.

"Um, hang on" I said to him. "We need towels first."

"What?" he asked, struggling to get his water wings on. For once Felicia decided to take pity on him and help, but it didn't really help me get the message through to him that we weren't swimming.

Meanwhile Tray was edging ever closer to the pool and I had to haul him back. "Swim!" he yelled, echoing Sam.

"Just not yet" I said, trying to look around for someone I could ask.

"I haven't got a towel for my sun lounger" Amelia complained.

"Well, none of us have towels yet" I explained.

"Why not?" Amelia asked.

"Because there aren't any here yet."

"Well, haven't they done any washing?" Amelia was totally dumbfounded that they hadn't washed some just for us.

"We'll have to find someone and ask. No one get in the pool yet!" I warned, and I walked around to where the towels normally were, but I couldn't find any hotel staff. Not wanting to leave the kids alone, especially given Felicia had a ball in her hand and was probably about to throw it into the pool at any moment, which would no doubt send Tray hurtling into the water after it without any water wings on, I walked back to them.

"No towels?" Sam asked.

"Well…not yet. They'll be out soon" I said.

"I wanna go swimmin'!" Sam complained.

"Soon."

"Well, I'm going in" Felicia said.

"No, you can wait too" I said to her, which made her huffy.

Just then I heard a voice at my shoulder. "Do you guys need towels?" someone said, and I turned and there was a young guy wearing the hotel uniform holding out a pile of towels for me.

"Oh, thank you" I said, wondering what the protocol was and really wishing Eric was here because he would know if a tip was required or not. I had no clue.

"It's OK" he said. "You don't have to tip me."

"Oh…right. Thanks." I guessed my confusion had been kind of obvious.

"Is he poor too?" Amelia asked, but I tried to ignore her in the hope everyone else would too. Felicia didn't. "I don't think so" she said. "Maybe he'll sing though."

"Are you guys from New Zealand?" the guy asked. Shit, we really did have a reputation as terrible tippers. In my defence, I thought, it just wasn't how we do things.

"Yeah" I replied.

"It's so nice to see someone from home" he said. "Mostly you get Americans and Japanese."

Ah, yeah. I hadn't even noticed that he sounded like the rest of us.

"Whereabouts in En Zed?" he asked.

"Auckland" I replied, although my gaze slid over to Tray and Sam who seemed to be fighting over the ball. "Gi'i' back!" Tray yelled at Sam, who was wandering dangerously close to the pool. He did have his water wings on though. He might be OK.

"Me too, well Manurewa originally."

"Oh, I was brought up in Papatoetoe" I said. "So we're neighbours!" Although the guy looked all of about 20 so chances are we'd never have crossed paths before. He seemed kind of lonely though.

"Yeah" he said enthusiastically. "I guess we are. I'm Preston" he gestured to his nametag.

"I'm Sookie, and that's…well, my kids. The noisy ones. Having a fight."

"Reminds me of home. I'm one of seven."

"God, your poor mum!" I exclaimed, loudly, to drown out the sound of Amelia sighing and muttering something about it all being so boring.

"Yeah, me and my brothers used to drive her pretty mental! Well, I better get going. Nice to meet you, and just shout if you need anything else!"

"OK, cool." Preston left and I went over to separate Tray and Sam.

"Does Daddy know?" Amelia asked.

"Know what?" I said, trying to get Tray into his water wings.

"That you're talking to strange men. You shouldn't talk to strange men" Amelia explained, like I was the child.

"Yeah…" Felicia added. "Or the Air Marshals might take you to jail."

"Well…I don't think so. Plus he wasn't a strange man. That's Preston. He works here."

"Umm…" Amelia said slowly. "I don't know."

"He's not strange" I said again. "He's from Manurewa."

"Well…OK. But don't blame me if something bad happens" Amelia said grudgingly.

"Yeah, like you go to jail" Felicia added.

"Mummy's goin' t'jail?" Sam asked.

"No, no one is going to jail. But we can go swimming now. Yay!" I shepherded everyone into the shallow end of the pool. Yeah, this whole holiday in Hawaii was one of my better ideas.

EPOV

I hated fucking Shreveport. It was worse every time I came here, it really fucking was. It was hot like hell and there was no fucking reason for it, it wasn't a tropical island. There wasn't a fucking beach. No, there was just fucking work in a shitty office with air-con that didn't even fucking work properly. Why the fuck couldn't Indira and Clancy get that fucking fixed before I got here?

"They're supposed to be getting to it. The building manager. I emailed them" Indira said, when I complained about it. "But you knew that because I already told you."

"Well…maybe you just fucking need to follow it up. It's fucking stifling in here. I can't think" I replied. This had to be against building regulations.

"Fuck, you're worse than ever" Clancy muttered from his desk. "I'm surprised you having fucking asked Ginger to stand there and fan you. Heaven forbid, poor Princess Eric is fucking hot."

"Fuck up Clancy" I muttered. He never fucking changed.

"You fucking started it."

"See?" Indira said, looking over at me. "I miss this when you're not here. All the witty banter I have to listen to. Just hours and hours of witty banter."

I was about to say this was nothing and she should spend nine hours on a plane with a bunch of small kids, but Clancy said "Now he'll fucking say something about his kids."

I didn't reply to that, but just glared at Clancy. He wouldn't look away from his laptop however, so the look was kind of wasted.

"You're just grumpy because the rest of your family is in Hawaii and you're missing out on the vacation" Indira said. "You've been grumpy since you got here."

"No I fucking haven't. I was tired when I got here. It's a fucking long way to fly, half of it with kids."

"Yeah, whatever Eric" Indira said, dismissively.

"Plus your fucking cat keeps trying to destroy my fucking stuff."

"Well, maybe you shouldn't spread all your shit all over the spare room then" Indira replied.

I sighed. No one ever fucking understood what it was like to have to camp out in someone else's house. If the hotel in Honolulu was like camping, this was like fucking…living in a car or something. "I'm living out of a suitcase" I said to her.

"Yeah, so your stuff stays in the suitcase, Eric. Not all over the fucking room. Jesus Christ, I walked in the other day and there was underwear on the floor. How old are you?"

"That was your fucking cat. That stuff was in a pile until he fucking walked all over it."

"What's happening?" Ginger said, walking in the door with lunch.

"They're fighting. Again" Clancy said. "It's worse than just before my parents got divorced."

"Fuck up Clancy" I said. He was really starting to fucking annoy me now.

"Jeez" Ginger said. "It must be pretty bad. Was there no coffee this morning?"

"No, we're on to the state of the spare room. Again" Clancy said, taking his sandwich from her.

"Sometimes" Indira declared. "I regret buying a bigger place. You just get houseguests."

"Well, don't fucking ask me to come over here and get your asses out of the shit, then" I said. "If I'm such a fucking burden, I could just have stayed home, and not had to deal with all of this." We were trying to pitch to a new client, but it was a fuckload of hassle and I wasn't sure of the money we'd actually make at the end of it. Indira was all for it, but I think that was because she had a crush on the CEO. It really wasn't a fucking reason for taking the job.

"Or you could have gone to Hawaii" Ginger added. "Well…stayed in Hawaii." She handed me my sandwich and sighed. "I'd love to go to Hawaii." She looked at Clancy who wasn't meeting her eye either.

"I just can't fucking see the point of going somewhere just to sit in the sun" Clancy muttered. "I mean…why? Why is that fun?"

"I'd like to go" Indira said. "I'd get my own cabana boy who could cater to my every whim." She stared out the window kind of dreamily and stabbed her plastic fork into her salad.

"I'm pretty sure they don't have cabana boys in Hawaii" I said to her. I fucking hoped not anyway. "I think that's…well, somewhere else. Not Hawaii."

"Oh no, I'm sure they do" Ginger said, sitting on my desk, which was actually really her desk, but she'd moved to a table in the corner. Mostly. Sometimes she forgot she had and she still liked to sit here. Probably because it was nearer to Clancy. Fuck, maybe I should have taken the table in the corner.

I didn't want to hear any more about fucking cabana boys, or Hawaii really. I was still worried about Sookie and the kids. I'd had a couple of texts saying things were great, but I was sure she'd just cover it up if they weren't. Fuck, I hoped they were OK.

SPOV

Amelia and Felicia were off with the kid's club, so I was watching Tray and Sam as they splashed about in the shallow end of the pool. Preston came by to say hello and hand me a couple of towels as they'd just brought some out. Officially he was the lifeguard, and he did a good job, having once hauled Sam out for me when he jumped in behind my back, but he always came over and just checked we were OK as well. I definitely thought he was lonely and missing his family.

I was contemplating whether or not I was actually getting a tan on my legs…not that I was stupid enough to try tanning these days, and I had been using sunblock, but sometimes it just happened anyway, of course. All of a sudden a shadow fell over me. "Did you get your own cabana boy, Sookie?" Eric asked.

"What? Preston?" I asked, shading my eyes and looking up at Eric. "He's the lifeguard. And he's from Manurewa; I think he's just lonely."

"So, where's Manurewa? On Oahu?" Eric asked, staring at Preston's back.

"No it's in Auckland." I reached over and swatted Eric's leg. "Tag. You're it. I'm finally rolling over to tan my back. Not that I'm really tanning. I've got sunblock on." I rolled over and Eric sat on the sun lounger next to me.

"So, that's the greeting I get?" he asked.

"Oh yeah" I said. "Hello. Glad you're back." I pushed my face towards him so I could get a kiss. That was nice. I had missed him. "So how were the flights?" I asked.

"Fucking painful" Eric said, kicking off his shoes. "I'm really tired, I feel like I haven't slept for days. I can't fucking sleep on a plane."

It was lucky I had my sunglasses on really, so Eric missed the eye-roll. He was about to get mobbed by Sam and Tray who'd seen him anyway. I did make a grab for a towel, but I couldn't get hold of Tray before he landed straight on Eric, making him incredibly wet.

"Dada!" Tray yelled happily.

"Yeah, it's me" Eric said, hugging Tray back, which was brave because he was dripping wet. I managed to get a towel around Sam, but he kind of shrugged me off and climbed on as well. I decided to leave them to it and picked up my book.

Eric took his bag up to our room and changed, so he could come back down and get in the pool with the boys. At least I didn't have to jam water wings on him, but I did have to apply another layer of sunblock, and there was more of Eric to apply it to.

"So, what's been happening?" Eric asked, while I was layering it on his back.

"Oh, the usual. Sitting around in the sun, going to the beach. The girls have been to kids club several times, they're there now. How was the presentation?"

Eric shrugged. "OK, I think. Indira and Clancy can take it from here. I am on vacation."

"Binned the razor already?"

"What razor?" Eric looked over his shoulder at me and smiled.

"Ha ha. Now go and have your swim before Sam and Tray explode with anticipation. And please, no more stories about the Air Marshals."

"Air Marshals?" Eric frowned.

"Yeah…I know where that one came from. It's kind of useful, I admit, but it's snowballing dramatically, and they've morphed into a kind of Terminator bogey-man that I think is starting to keep Sam awake at night. Well, he keeps getting into bed with me, anyway. And he sleeps on my arm. So if we could tone it down, I'd be appreciative."

"Sure, Sookie" Eric said, kissing me. "Anything for you."

We'd been having a nice time in Honolulu, but it was better with Eric. The boys thought so anyway, he threw them around in the water until they were exhausted and happy to get out and eat lunch. I was going to ask Eric what he wanted, but when I looked over, he'd fallen asleep on the sun lounger next to me. Well, he can't sleep on a plane after all.

EPOV

I didn't get quite the greeting I'd expected. I'm not sure whether I'd really thought that Sookie would have completely gone to pieces without me, but maybe I hadn't quite counted on the fact that it was Sookie, and she tends to make friends wherever she goes. Weird, towel-bringing cabana boys included.

The boys were excited I was there, but I had seen them once get excited over a particularly large puddle in the backyard so I didn't want to think that it made me particularly special in their eyes. Mostly they just wanted me around so I could throw them repeatedly across the pool.

It was good to see Sookie again though. I'd missed her. Shreveport's always shit because she's not there, but it had probably been better that she wasn't. I'd worked some fucking long hours and despite Ginger saying she would have shown them around, they were better off here, with the pool and the beach and the fucking cabana boy who just kept staring at Sookie.

When I finally got the boys out of the pool I lay down on one of the sun loungers and closed my eyes. The girls showed up not long after that. I could hear Amelia saying "Why is he asleep?"

"I'm not asleep" I said, not opening my eyes.

"Yeah, not now" Sookie's voice said. "But you've been snoozing for a while."

I opened my eyes and they were all looking at me. "Where've you been?" Felicia asked, like I'd just been gone for the morning.

"I was away. Working" I said, as I sat up.

"Oh. We've been to the aquarium. They had these really huge turtles there. It was awesome" Felicia sounded really enthusiastic.

"Did you like it Amelia?" I asked her.

"S'alright" she said, shrugging.

"She's just mad because she had to sit with me" Felicia said.

"Well…you're my _sister_" Amelia said, like that explained everything.

"I know!" Felicia said. At least they had something they could agree on. I looked over at Sookie and she was waving at someone. I followed her gaze expecting to see the cabana boy again, but it was a woman.

"Who's that?" I asked.

"Lani. She cleans our room, and it's a lot of cleaning for her. She's great though, we had an accident with some chocolate milk a couple of days ago and she managed to get it out of the carpet."

"Um…OK" I said. I had figured she'd be lonely, but I wasn't sure making friends with the maids was a really fucking great idea.

"Yeah, now you're thinking about how much we have to tip her, aren't you?" Sookie asked me. I shrugged. It had crossed my mind, mainly because I'd met these kids before and one chocolate milk spill was probably the tip of the iceberg.

"Don't worry" Sookie said. "I asked Lani and she said really just a small token would be OK. Plus I've already given her some of my New Zealand coins for her son. He collects them."

"You asked the maid? About her tip?" I asked Sookie.

"Well…yeah. I didn't know how it worked. I didn't want to insult her by not doing anything. It's like Bob…"

"Bob the cat?"

"Bob the guy at the coffee shop we've been to a few times. The Kona coffee is really good, I have to say, we should take some home. But I asked him if he actually gets much in the tip jar he has on the counter, but apparently he does. It's just odd to me that people do it."

"You've been talking to the guy who makes the coffee?" I asked. Who the fuck were all these people? I tried to figure out who I'd spoken to in Shreveport, and mainly it had been Indira, Ginger and Clancy and only because I fucking had to. It would be so much easier if they just did what I wanted them to without all the fucking talking back.

"Yeah, because we're in there for a long time. The muffins are enormous and it takes Tray forever to eat his, but if I try to make him share one with Sam he cries…so we just had to go with it. I think Bob was glad to have the chat, it was pretty empty in there in the middle of the afternoon." Sookie looked at me as if this all made perfect sense, but I was still a bit dumbfounded. Did she really have to learn the life story of everyone she fucking met?

"What?" Sookie asked. "I'm allowed to talk to people."

"Yeah…I just. No it's fine" I said, I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, but I guess she wouldn't be Sookie if she was any different.

The kids were tired so we took all back to the room, Amelia talking most of the way about all the things she'd been doing, and the fish she'd seen, and the other girls on the trip, and what she was going to tell the kids at school when she got back. She barely even paused for breath. Sam and Tray spent the elevator ride trying to push each other over, and Felicia asked me repeatedly if we were going to Disneyland now. I'd kind of forgotten what the wall of total noise was like.

I'd kind of missed it.

When we got to the room Sookie took a deep sniff. "What smells of cat pee?" she asked.

"Yeah, that's my suitcase" I said, pointing to where it was sitting in the corner. "Indira's fucking cat hates me."

Sookie walked over to the case. "Oh, yeah. Really hates you. OK, well I better take the washing downstairs to the laundry and the case will have to go out on the balcony until I can get something to clean it with from Lani." She gingerly opened the case. "He really hates you, doesn't he?"

"It's a fucking vendetta, Sookie. That cat is evil."

"So you're missing Bob too then?"

"At least he's never peed on my stuff." It was true, Jock made Bob look like a fucking saint.

SPOV

The few days we spent in Hawaii with Eric were lovely. Sure, if you left him on a sun lounger in the sun he'd fall asleep, and he kept glaring at poor Preston every time we went near the pool, but it was nice all the same. We got to introduce Eric to all the places we'd been, and we took long walks around Waikiki, including one down to a park to see the Banyan trees. The kids played a game of hide and seek around them, until Amelia got annoyed that Felicia had actually managed to hide really well, and she couldn't find her. "You have to come out now, Felicia!" Amelia yelled, but Felicia wasn't buying that trick.

We went to a luau, although some of it was lost on the kids. They gave us leis as we arrived, but I felt a bit sorry for the girl who was handing them out as it took Eric a minute to figure out what was going on and actually bend down so she could slip it over his head. Tray's had to be removed because Sam kept using it to haul him around and I was worried we were going to end up with a strangled kid, and then Sam took his off too, so he could use it to whack Felicia on the arm with. Felicia retaliated by flicking water at Sam and it was only when the dancing started that Eric managed to calm things down. I just pretended that I never heard the words 'Air Marshals' uttered.

It was a fun holiday, but at the same time it might have been nice to get some time alone with Eric. And not just because we were supposedly trying for a baby, although I guessed that was on hold for the length of the holiday. I was doing my best not to think about it, and I certainly wasn't going to discuss it with Eric. I just…well, if the holiday had shown me anything it was that four kids were a lot and I should be thankful for what I had. Trying to have another one, that was just madness in a way. A stupid idea I'd caught from Eric. I just hoped that by the time it became clear we weren't going to have another baby, Eric had realised that it was a stupid idea too.

But we did manage the odd moment together. The first morning he was back with us, he woke me up, early, which was a feat in itself because I was pretty used to Tray waking me up by running around the room yelling.

"Time to get up" Eric said, kissing my neck.

"Yeah…" I said, slowly. "I've got to pee though."

I raced into the bathroom and was just washing my hands when Eric appeared behind me and pushed up against my back, trapping me between him and the sink. It wasn't exactly romantic. But I figured we didn't have time for romance. Not with four kids asleep in the other room and likely to wake up any minute.

I managed to turn myself around and Eric rewarded me my shoving a hand in my pyjama shorts, and his other hand squeezed my boob a few times. Definitely no romance then. "Is it over?" Eric murmured between kissing my neck and my cheek. It took me a moment to figure out what he meant.

"Yeah" I said. "Period's finished."

Eric's fingers were busy probing me in a rather nice way and I thought I might return the favour, so I reached into his underwear and circled him with my hand. "Fuck, Sookie" Eric whispered. "I've missed you."

"Missed you too" I managed to get out, my mind going a bit hazy from the orgasm Eric was trying to draw out of me. He was really good at this, and I was likely to set a personal best time. Which was good, because we did have to be quick, and I wasn't really up to having sex in a bathroom. Fooling around maybe, because I had certainly been missing Eric when he was away, but I had my limits.

I kind of lost what I was doing with my hand as I just concentrated on the feeling of Eric's hand and the slow escalation of my own pleasure. Eric was very understanding though, and didn't complain when I moved my hand so I could just grip onto Eric's shoulders as I came.

I was kind of breathless, but there wasn't really a moment to waste so as soon as the aftershocks had subsided, I pushed Eric so he stepped back and then I knelt down. That wasn't maybe my smartest move as the floor was cold and hard, so after a second's debate I grabbed a towel and put that under my knees. I hoped Lani had cleaned the floor properly the day before.

I pulled Eric's underwear down just enough and took him in my mouth. He groaned and I was tempted to whack him on the leg to get him to shut up, but we didn't have the time to get into a debate about how loud he was. But despite the fact that Eric hadn't maybe received the message about being quiet, he got the one about being quick and he finished before too long, and just in time, as Felicia knocked on the door. "I need to pee!" she yelled.

"Me too!" said Sam's voice in the background. "I'm first!"

"No, I am!" Felicia replied. "I was here first."

"Why are you all yelling?" Amelia asked. "Who's in the bathroom?"

"Mum mum!" Tray wailed.

And it was back to reality for all of us.

Reality hit home even harder when we had to catch our flight to San Francisco. First I had to try to re-pack everything, and there had been a general explosion of stuff all over the hotel room. It's bad enough travelling with kids anyway, you have to bring things you thought you'd never pack in a suitcase, like the toilet seat insert for Sam. I had drawn the line at the potty though, for one thing I wasn't cleaning it on holiday, and for another we'd had some near misses with Tray's curiosity about what his brother actually did in there. I'd managed to catch the small hand before it actually got near the contents, but I wasn't risking it again and the potty had been banned.

But we had to get everything packed up and back on the shuttle. I felt sad about leaving Hawaii; I'd had a good time.

"Glad you came?" Eric asked, as we climbed into the shuttle.

"Yeah, I am" I said. "It was nice, although I don't think I could live here forever. I'd miss the rain!" Eric laughed.

"So, are you excited about going home?" I asked, and I immediately regretted it. Eric's face shut down and I could see the tension in his neck, and I didn't think it was just to do with the fact that Felicia was currently telling Sam she was going to give him to the nearest Air Marshal when they got to the airport because his foot was touching her leg.

"It will be fine" Eric said, probably just as much to himself as to me. "It will be OK when we get there", and then he turned to tell Felicia that if anyone was handing people over to the Air Marshals it was definitely going to be him.

I was starting to wonder if maybe the next part of the trip wasn't going to be such a good idea.

**A/N Tena koe (ten-ah kway) is, obviously, a Maori greeting. Papatoetoe is pronounced Pap-ah-to-ee-to-ee, or Pap-ah-toy-toy, if we're being more correct, and Manurewa is pronounced Man-u-ray-wah.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	99. Bonus Chapter : Going Back

**A/N So my week was pretty hectic and I got this far with the writing, and though, meh, might as well post it.**

**This week I have learned from my toddler that vampires are scary. She was watching Sesame St and lost it completely when The Count came on, there were shrieks, tears and much thrusting of the remote at me. Thank God Elmo eventually came back on! She has also taken to feeding our terminally confused cat, one cat biscuit at a time. It's quite hilarious to watch as she runs from the pantry to his bowl and back again, roundly telling him off he gets too close to the bag of cat food. He gets cuddles though if he actually eats anything. **

**Disclaimer: Nope, not mine. I just have a toddler and a cat who have made their own little society in the kitchen.**

EPOV

I'd kind of enjoyed the vacation in Hawaii with Sookie and the kids. Sure it had been kind of uncomfortable being introduced to some guy who ran a coffee shop and who already seemed to know the rest of the family, and Sookie's weird cabana boy stalker kept bringing me towels when I sure as shit didn't need them, but other than that, it was great.

It might have been nice with more sex of course. I had been promised trying for a baby instead of 'shit I'm pregnant' this time around, but it wasn't likely to happen when we were sleeping in a roomful of kids who didn't sleep and liked to fight, yell and invade our bed at weird hours of the morning. It hadn't been fun waking up in Indira's spare room with that fucking cat of hers sitting and staring at me, but I wasn't sure it was any better opening one eye so Tray could yell "Bang!" while sitting on my chest.

The worst part was having to fucking leave. Not because I wanted to stay in Hawaii forever, not even Sookie wanted to stay here forever and she'd spent the entire time I was here with them repeatedly sticking bits of her body in my face and saying excitedly "I think I'm getting a tan. I was wearing sunblock, so I didn't really mean to get a tan, but look I did! I think I'm OK though. There seems to be an ozone layer." Yeah, that was just fucking torture when there was no actual fucking going on. But despite the excitement of the tan-that-wasn't-really-a-tan, even Sookie was OK about leaving the palm trees and her cabana boy behind.

It was just the next stop on our trip that was fucking with my head. For some reason, I'd agreed with Sookie that we should see my dad. Because we were going to be in the same country, the same state even. We should see him and let him meet the kids. Because after all, he'd been so fucking pleased when the boys were born. Sookie kind of glossed over that part, of course. She probably thought he'd be better in person.

She had no fucking idea. He was worse in person. So much worse.

SPOV

The flight from Hawaii wasn't great at all. The kids were kind of over planes now, and this one seemed crowded and noisy. Eric and Tray fell out about ten minutes into the flight when I could hear Eric saying "For fuck's sake Tray, just fucking sit still." So that didn't help anyone's mood. Amelia just wanted to know if Amelia Chang had been on this particular plane when she went to Disneyland, Sam was mostly quiet because, I think, he was waiting for his ears to start hurting again. They seemed better due to the nasal spray I'd been loading him up with, but he was suspicious of air travel now and kept asking when we were getting off the plane.

Felicia of course was stuck with Eric and Tray and their never-ending battle. She mostly shut up and laid low, although there was a bit of a tricky moment when she exclaimed "For fuck's sake" when something didn't go right with her drawing, and got roundly told off by Eric for using the phrase in public. I felt a bit sorry for Felicia, who really shut up after that, and unfortunately me turning around, pointing to Eric and going "Pot!" just would have added fuel to the fire. I couldn't quite figure out how someone who had slept most of the afternoons away over the last few days could be quite so grumpy. Although it did seem to be general grumpiness, and got directed towards the stewardess who kept hovering around him. She probably deserved it, but I did feel sorry for Tray and Felicia.

And me, when we landed in San Francisco and I suddenly bore the brunt of Eric's anger. "Why the hell are we travelling with so much shit?" he asked, as we waiting for them to bring out the oversized luggage.

"Well…four kids" I said. It was pretty bloody obvious to me.

"I don't think you needed to bring every fucking thing we own though" Eric spat out.

"Seriously? It's my fault for being the only person even remotely interested in packing for the holiday?" Sam, who was standing next to me, stared up at Eric and me kind of worriedly.

"Well I didn't pack" Eric said, as if that explained everything.

"No, you didn't. And some help, or a…a thank you, might have been nice. Not you standing here blaming me for the fact that we had to bring a pushchair for our kids."

Eric looked like he was going to say something else, but then they brought the pushchair in question out of the cargo bay, and he walked off to collect it, but not before he gave me a significant look which suggested he still thought it was all my fault.

My fault, my arse. If he was Tray or Sam I'd send him to the bathroom until he could be nice to everyone, but I suspected he wouldn't go even if I used my really scary mummy-voice.

And the car was rented in his name. So…bugger.

"Why is Daddy being so bitchy?" Amelia asked.

"Don't know" I said, watching him trying to load suitcases on the trolley. And then I had a thought. "Hang on. Bitchy?" I asked. Where had that word come from? What was she watching on the plane?

Amelia shrugged. "Yeah. Em says it all the time. Like 'you're just all bitchy today aren't you?', when I tell her off for putting her stuff on my desk. She's really messy. Sometimes…sometimes I wish I sat next to Amelia Chang instead."

Wow, that was quite a big admission from Amelia. And another worrying strike against Tanya, because it was pretty obvious where Emily picked these things up from, and I only hoped that wasn't something Tanya actually called her daughter.

"Well, I hope you don't use it. It's not nice to call other people bitchy" I said.

Amelia shrugged. "Sometimes though, they are" she said, and as much as it's not very nice to find out your 8 year old is slowly discovering the worst bits of the world, I couldn't really argue with her. So I just stayed quiet.

Sam was still pretty quiet too. He really didn't like it when Eric and I were grumpy with each other, and I noticed he didn't really want to take his eyes off Eric, but he wasn't going near him either. Tray had decided to empty my bag, probably in the hope of finding food, and he was stationed at my feet currently investigating the properties of lipgloss. From the expression on his face, I don't think it tasted all that nice if you tried to eat it like a lollipop.

Amelia's mention of the girls at school had suddenly alerted her to the fact that life there was going on without her, and she was fretting that everyone was carrying on as normal, or worse, that they were making new alliances in her absence. "So do you think Em is playing with Amelia Chang at lunchtime?" she asked me. I didn't know, but that didn't seem to console Amelia. At any rate, she was sticking pretty closely to me as well.

Eric came back with the pushchair and we all waited for the one remaining suitcase we were still missing, Eric just facing the luggage carousel with his back to the rest of the family. And while most of us might have been giving him a wide berth, Felicia decided to prove that she was often the bravest member of the family and she slowly crept over to Eric and snuck her hand into his. Eric didn't really look down, but he didn't pull away. I just hoped it made him feel a bit better.

And he did at least stop grumbling a little, until we got to the car we'd hired. Well, it wasn't meant to be a car, it was meant to be something large enough to fit 6 people in. Possibly a tank, I wasn't sure. But what we were directed to at the top of the carparking building was definitely a car.

Eric was incensed. Even Felicia moved away from him rapidly as he vented his displeasure on the poor guy who's job, I thought, was to take the form we'd been given by the car-rental desk and hand over the keys. I don't think he'd personally given us this car to make Eric's day worse than it already was. He was following instructions.

Eventually the poor guy managed to stop Eric's tirade long enough to be able to run to a desk with a phone and ring the customer service for help. Or maybe he was calling the Air Marshals, and that would be the last we'd ever see of Eric. And at that point in time, I wasn't all that worried if that was the case. He was kind of embarrassing.

I wandered over to where he was standing. "Just pull your head in, OK?" I said, quietly, which made Eric round on me as though he was going to say something, but I think he saw the four worried sets of eyes behind me. No doubt the kids were wondering at what point Daddy's head was going to pop off.

"Yeah" Eric said curtly, and then he turned away again, to continue staring at the guy who'd tried to palm him off with a less than acceptable vehicle. I went back to the kids.

"Did you tell him it's not nice to yell?" Amelia asked, in a loud whisper.

"Kind of" I said.

That seemed to satisfy Amelia, who was always happier if the tellings-off were dished out fairly, but everyone else was a bit worried. "Are de Air Marshals comin'?" Sam asked.

"No." Silently I added 'because they don't want him either', but I wasn't about to say that to the kids.

"So…why didn't they give us the right car?" Felicia asked.

"Simple mix-up" I told her, again biting my tongue so I didn't add 'which Eric has blown out of all proportion'. "They'll figure it out and we'll be going soon."

"I'm hungry" Felicia whined.

"Me too" Sam added.

Amelia thought for a bit. "Yeah, I am. But I don't want pineapple. I don't like pineapple anymore."

"Ap-pull?" Tray asked, which was his word for pineapple. And also apples. And occasionally mandarins. It could be confusing taking his order for afternoon tea.

"No" I said to Tray. I looked in my bag and found some biscuits. Or I guess they were cookies, given I'd bought them in Hawaii. I handed those around, and then looked over at Eric. He was now standing at the desk with the guy, jamming his finger repeatedly into the piece of paper that I assumed was the rental agreement. Then he pointed over to us, the millstone around his neck and the cause of all his problems, and then he held his hand out for the phone.

Oh goody. He'd found someone else to piss off then.

Tray finished his second biscuit and made a face. "Poos" he announced. Oh bugger, I had wondered if all that dried fruit we'd eaten on the plane was really the best idea.

"Euw! Smelly!" Felicia added. Sam just made a great show of leaning down and sniffing Tray's behind, probably because he'd seen me do that many, many times before. "That's yucky Sam, you don't sniff people's pooey bums" Felicia admonished. Sam just looked at her, not sure what the big deal was, and kind of used to the fact of Felicia telling him what to do anyway. He just plonked himself down on the dirty carpark concrete and waited to see what would happen next.

And that dirty carpark floor wasn't going to be the best place to change Tray, either. If we actually had a rental car I could have put him in the boot or the backseat or something, but I didn't want to use the car we weren't taking to change my child's nappy in. Not when he smelt like that and had a habit of trying to wriggle away from you.

"Um…I'll just have to go and tell Daddy I'm taking Tray to the parent's room" I said.

"I don't think you can leave us here" Amelia said, looking around. "It doesn't look safe. There are _cars_."

Yeah, she had a bit of a point. "Well…I'll take Sam too and you and Felicia stay here where Daddy can watch you."

"Daddy's busy bein'…bossy" Felicia sighed. Sure enough we could hear Eric's voice drift across the carpark to us "And then" he said. Well, yelled. "What you will do is fix this mess you created so that my family isn't left…" I did my best to tune out.

"Bossy isn't good" Amelia said. "No one likes it when Amelia Chang is bossy. I have to tell her sometimes that she is. You should tell Daddy."

She looked at me expectantly. "Um, not right now" I said.

"Norty spot!" Sam said decisively.

"Oooh, that doesn't really apply…" I said, trying to imagine how that would even work. I doubted I could move Eric to the designated naughty spot even if I did want to. Sam looked a bit confused at that, I guess it's not nice to realise that the rules of behaviour don't always apply to the adults too.

"Look" I said, "You'll have to just all come with me." I grabbed the bag with the nappies in them, put Tray on one hip, managed to catch Eric's eye and point at Tray's bum and then at the door that led to the lifts that would take us back to the terminal, and then grabbed Sam's hand and started walking off, hoping Amelia and Felicia were following me.

We followed the little picture signs and found the parent's room, so I left everyone else to mill around while I changed Tray. I had to get him to lie still by giving him my cellphone to play with, and then I had to be super-quick because he wasn't going to lie still for long. And he baulked at me putting his shorts back on at all.

He wriggled around so much, that I hauled him off the changetable, hoping that if he was standing, he'd just step into them. But instead he just cried more. Huge, noisy sobs of utter despair. "Nooo, Mummy!" he wailed, as I knelt on the ground, praying it was kind of clean, and tried to pin Tray against my torso with one arm, while trying to get the two kicking legs into his shorts with the other. I didn't have a hope in hell really, but I was damned if I was walking through an airport terminal with the kid who wasn't wearing any pants.

"I don't think he wants them on" Amelia commented from the sidelines.

"Uh-huh" I agreed, through gritted teeth.

"He's being naughty" Felicia added.

"I no want pants" Sam said, and he looked as though he might take his shorts off. "Don't you dare!" I said, pointing a finger at him, and kind of losing most of my grip on Tray in the process. Sam sighed, but at least sat back down. Tray wasn't listening to me though. He broke out of my hold and started crawling away, crying and wailing "Nooo, Mummy!" over and over. I made a grab for him, just as another mother and her tiny baby girl appeared in the room.

"Hello" Amelia said to the woman.

"Um. Hello" she said, giving first Amelia, and then me a weak smile, as she stepped around me battling with Tray on the floor. I'd been able to grab him again, and I'd got one leg into his shorts, but he was determined to twist out of my grasp. I was busy battling with the other leg, when I noticed that Amelia had shadowed the woman over to the changetable.

"What's your baby's name?" Amelia asked her.

"Um…Melora."

"Oh. That's different" Amelia said, making it sound as though she didn't really like it. I suspected, however, that she was just trying to get to the part where she got to talk about her own life. And sure enough, she carried on talking. "My friend Kennedy is having a baby soon. It's a girl. She's going to call her Kassidy. With a K. So they match. She's done Kassidy's bedroom already, it's really flash. She's got her name all spelled out in these big letters that go on the wall and they're, like, all these different fabrics. But pink. Does your baby have her name in letters on the wall?"

"Um…kind of" the woman said. Yeah, not much could compete with Kennedy's nursery design. I just hoped she really liked the name she'd picked because there was kind of no going back when it was already incorporated into her nursery design. And it was a proper nursery too, unlike the rest of us who put the baby in the spare room; Kassidy was getting something Kennedy had spent hours designing. I was kind of in awe of it all, even though I'd been relegated to the sidelines the day Kennedy had tried to ask me about how I'd set up Amelia's nursery and my answer had been that I'd made Bill move his stash of old computers out of it and set up the bassinet I'd borrowed off my friend. I don't think that counted as interior decorating in Kennedy's book. She was probably right.

"I don't" Amelia said, as I continued to wrestle with Tray and ignore the fact that Sam and Felicia had started poking each other in the leg and it was getting a bit violent as Sam refused to back down when Felicia obviously thought she should be on top.

"But that's OK" she continued. "I'm a big girl now. And the walls in my room are purple. What colour's your room?"

"Um…white" the poor woman answered, not looking up from the nappy she was changing. I guess she thought that if she didn't make eye contact with Amelia, she might leave her alone.

Amateur.

I had Tray's shorts on now and he'd stopped crying and yelling quite so much, mainly because he was getting interested in the battle of wills between Sam and Felicia. I was still persona non grata as far as Tray was concerned, I figured, but I was more worried about Felicia and Sam at that point. What had started as poking had now degenerated into full-on hitting and it was only going to get worse from here on in. "Come on" I said. "We're done" and I scooped up the still-crying Tray and started to walk out.

"Oh" Amelia said. "Bye!"

"Bye" the other mother muttered.

"Sam! Don't do that" Felicia yelled, swiping at Sam's arm as he got up. I assumed he'd tried to get one last blow in before we left.

"You two need to say sorry to each other" I said to Felicia and Sam.

"I didn't start it!" Felicia protested.

"It doesn't matter. You still say sorry. Sam does too." We were at least out of the parent's room and walking through the terminal now.

Felicia gave a huge sigh. "Sorry!" she spat out.

Sam looked at her. "And you" I said to him.

Sam had a go at staring me down instead, like I might change my mind. It was always weird how different expressions completely changed who the kids looked like, because there were times when Sam looked exactly like my side of the family, and then there were times, like now, when he looked remarkably like Eric. "Sam" I warned.

"Sorry" he said, and we carried on back to the carpark, with Amelia wondering out loud whether we would have missed Kennedy having her baby.

By the time we found Eric again, he was sitting inside something that did in fact resemble a tank. "You were a long time" he grumbled. Great, his mood wasn't any better then.

"No…well…" I wanted to say that dragging four kids across an airport wasn't ever going to be quick, but I didn't want to add fuel to the fire. "No" I said again in the end, and we set about getting the kids organised in their seats.

EPOV

It was shitty trip to San Francisco, made even shittier by the fact that the rental car company completely fucked up our booking, and then refused to admit they'd fucked up while they tried to insist I needed to take the piece of shit car they had put aside for me. Because I had planned to leave most of our luggage and possibly one of the children at the airport, after all. What a fucking fiasco that was, and by the time they finally agreed to give me something else that had just been returned and had to be very hastily valeted, Sookie and the kids had disappeared on me.

So I was fucking glad to be driving out of the airport parking lot, although the GPS gave me some fucking weird directions to the hotel we were staying at for one night. That was a piece of shit too, although Sookie pulled a really annoyed face when I told it that it was a piece of shit. Probably because Tray started chanting "Shi'! Shi'!" from the back of the fucking car…or SUV or whatever the fuck this was.

After a while I noticed that Sookie wasn't looking at me anymore, which was a fucking relief, because there were only so many annoyed looks I could stomach and I felt like she'd been fucking giving me annoyed looks since we left Honolulu.

Although it soon became clear that it wasn't just that she'd stopped the annoyed looks, it was that she was pointedly avoiding looking at me altogether. Fucking terrific. I'd been back in California for less than two hours and it was already a total fucking disaster. I fucking knew this would happen. It was a shit idea to visit my dad. A really shit idea.

SPOV

I just gave up on Eric; he was totally past any redemption by the time we pulled up to the hotel. He'd yelled at the GPS, yelled "For fuck's sake, everyone keep quiet!" at the kids when he was trying to hear the GPS, and barely been able to give me a civil answer when I'd asked him if it was nice to be back driving on the right-hand side of the road. I just stared out the window and pretended it was all going to be OK.

At the hotel we had to unload everything and check in and the kids were definitely tired and grumpy now. And hungry. Everyone said they were hungry. Repeatedly. So we dumped our bags and took a walk to see what we could find for dinner. The hotel was just a one night stop near the airport, and near a lot of very busy roads as well.

But we did find a McDonald's. Well, I would have thought it odd if we didn't keep falling over them in the States, after all.

And so we made it through dinner, Eric had gone from being shouty and annoying to being quiet and annoyed. Every time one of the kids acted up, which was about every 10 seconds simply due to the number of kids we were travelling with, he'd pull a face which suggested he'd wish we'd all disappear.

Well the feeling was pretty much mutual at this point. I didn't know why I'd agreed to come. Eric was the worst person to travel with, he really was. Everything made him adopt that same pained expression, nothing was good enough. I'd thought he'd be happy to be here, showing the kids where he was from. I'd thought it would be a lot of fun to do this together.

But obviously I'd been wrong. I'd misjudged Eric completely. He was probably so used to travelling around by himself, with everyone bowing and scraping and attending to his every demand, that we were just holding him back. The kids had completely lost the dad they normally had, the one who sat outside when it was drizzling so the boys could have a run around, who had helped me make them a pirate ship out of old cardboard boxes, well, who spent a lot of time creating the cannons for the pirate ship I made anyway. The one who always took Felicia to soccer and who had listened to countless hours of Amelia recounting who said what to whom at school. The one who did bath times and stories and tickle monster. The one who actually smiled when he looked at them.

No, he'd disappeared somewhere in Hawaii. Now we had the proverbial bear with the sore head. And I was pretty sure they shot bears over here.

After our dinner we trooped back to the hotel and I started trying to find the stuff we needed for the night. And made a rather unpleasant discovery.

"Shit" I muttered, looking in one of the suitcases.

"What?" Eric said sharply, from the other side of the room. There were four chattering children in between us. When did his hearing get that good?

I looked over at Eric. Oh, crap. I didn't want to confess, but I guess I had to. "I left the nappies in the hotel room. I remember leaving them out to pack last and then…well, I guess I forgot them. So I need more. Like, now. I'll have to go out and see if I can get some."

I started to walk out of the room but Eric stopped me. "You can't go" he said.

"I'll be fine" I said. "I'll just ask at the front desk downstairs. There's bound to be some small shop within walking distance." I probably could have driven anyway, but obviously Eric didn't want to trust the hire car he fought so long and hard for to me.

Eric shook his head. "I'll go" he said, and he picked up the keys to the car and walked out the door.

"Where's Daddy gone?" Amelia asked.

"Out. To get more nappies" I said, switching on the TV and hoping there was something reasonably good there.

"Maybe he needs a time-out" she mused.

"Norty spot?" Sam asked.

"No, more like the thinking corner. You know, where you think about what you should do" Amelia explained. Sam looked none the wiser. He operated more on an act now, sit in the naughty spot, and then move on kind of methodology. So did Tray. I suspected that was another trait they shared with their father.

"We don't have the thinking corner anymore" Felicia explained to Amelia. "Mr Pryor says it's better to get the…well, it's better to have a run around instead. So we run, if we're naughty."

"How often do you run?" I asked her.

"Sometimes. I like running." I wasn't sure Mr Pryor's redirection method was really having the desired effect of stopping Felicia playing up, but between 9 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon she was all his problem, and I wasn't about to intervene.

EPOV

I was actually kind of glad to be getting out of the hotel room to go and buy diapers. I asked at the front desk of the hotel for where the nearest drugstore was and headed there, got what we needed and then just…drove around for a bit. I just had to clear my head before I said something I'd really fucking regret, because all I could think about what was my dad was going to say tomorrow. Fuck knows, he was a fucking loose cannon at the best of times.

SPOV

When Eric got back, he seemed to be in a slightly better mood. "What are you watching?" he asked the kids assembled on the bed, and then he glanced at the TV screen. "Oh" he said.

"I couldn't find any kid's stuff" I explained. "So we found old TV shows instead."

"_Bewitched_ is pretty fucking old alright" he said, sitting down, while Amelia shushed him. She was quite taken with it.

I leaned over to whisper "It was old when I was little, so it's really old. But the girls like it and the boys don't care. _I Dream of Jeannie_ was on before and that wasn't so popular."

Amelia turned round. "She kept calling him 'master' and that's just weird. Mum doesn't do that to you."

"I'm not a genie" I pointed out.

"No…but you're home a lot and do the cleaning…so, you know." She finished with a shrug. It probably wasn't much use arguing with Amelia over that one.

Eric looked at me. "I used to watch this one" he said. "When I was a kid…and, well. I used to watch a lot of TV." He looked back at the screen. I guess that was one thing with having a lonely childhood by yourself, you got to be in charge of the viewing. I knew from the minute I started to watch anything it was only a matter of time before Jason came along and changed the channel just to spite me. Unless it was _MacGyver_. God he loved that show.

I watched Eric looking at the screen and suddenly realised two things. One was that the way he was looking at that lead actress, I was pretty sure where the idea for Sam's original name had come from. The other was that I suddenly understood what all this moodiness was about. He didn't want to go and see his Dad. Shit.

Unfortunately, we kind of had to go through with it. Eric's dad was expecting us the next day, and though we hadn't booked any kind of accommodation for the night, in case we could stay there and save a bit of money, if it was too awful we could flag that and just move on. It'd be fine. It was just a visit.

I leaned over and rubbed Eric's back and he gave me a weak smile. If we could just get through tomorrow we'd be alright.

We managed to get the kids into their beds. This room had two double beds and they'd put two roller beds in for the boys, which put Amelia's nose out of joint as she didn't understand why she was sharing with Felicia still. Trying to explain that she got to sleep in an adult bed because she was a big kid didn't quite cut it, although it did shut her up while she regrouped and tried to think of a new argument.

Luckily, she went to sleep before she really came up with one.

So that left only Eric and I awake. He'd been quiet since he came back from his errand, but that was preferable to the annoyed shouting of earlier. I just wasn't sure what to do. If I turned around and said the visit would be fine and not to worry, I was pretty sure I'd get the same kind of disgusted and disbelieving looks I was getting from Amelia earlier. He wouldn't really see it my way either. There was nothing else for it but to hope for the best.

I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed and Eric came in too. I noticed he was just in his underwear now and I wondered where those clothes had ended up. Probably not in the bag I had set aside for dirty washing.

I wondered if he was going to talk to me, but it seemed unlikely when he walked over and kind of grabbed me. I had to push him back because I needed to spit out my toothpaste before any serious kissing was going to take place. I got rid of what was in my mouth, rinsed, and turned back to Eric. He pulled me back to him, and kissed me. The kissing was nice, but I really hoped he wasn't thinking of having sex in this bathroom. I was just tired and really not in the mood. Plus, it was a bathroom. And while I knew we didn't have a lot of privacy on this trip, bathrooms are not the most romantic place.

He was holding me pretty tightly. And I could feel his erection where it pressed against me. And he'd shoved his hands into the front of my pyjama shorts, kind of roughly. So it was getting pretty obvious what Eric's thoughts were on the matter.

But then Amelia walked into the bathroom. I guess Eric hadn't bothered locking the door, thinking everyone was dead to the world for the night. He should be so lucky.

Amelia stopped short and Eric withdrew his hand and jumped back like I'd burned him, but then he obviously thought better of that manoeuvre, or, rather, thought about what view Amelia was getting of the front of his underpants, and stepped behind me so he was facing the sink and I was shielding him. Yeah, I thought. Thanks mate. You just stand back there.

"What's happening?" Amelia asked. She did sound kind of sleepy. I hoped I could palm her off with something. "What're you doing?"

"Brushing our teeth" I replied. "We'll be out in a minute."

"But…" Amelia said, looking puzzled. "Daddy had his tongue in your mouth again. I just…it looks yuck. Why do you do it if it's yucky?"

"It's not yucky" I said, thankful that she'd been looking at where Eric's tongue was and not his hand. "Now…just wait outside. The bathroom will be free in a moment."

But Amelia can be persistent when she wants to be. "Does that make babies?" she asked.

"No" I said, quickly. "No one is making any babies at the moment." To be honest I was kind of going off the baby thing. It was probably never going to happen. I thought that it was a good thing that Eric and I weren't focussing on that for this holiday and when we got back…well, I'd break it to him that I thought it was off the cards.

"No more babies. OK. I need wees though" Amelia said. "I'm busting!"

"Well, hang on, just let Daddy finish." I figured it was probably safe to start hustling Amelia out so I started moving towards the door.

"I won't be long, Ames" Eric said, obviously having recovered from the shock of Amelia's appearance.

True enough he was out in a minute or two and Amelia could go into the bathroom, and then we tucked her back into bed together. Well, Eric pulled Felicia back over to her side and I persuaded Amelia, with a lot of whispering, that it was really OK to get in now and Felicia wasn't going to sprawl again.

Eric didn't seem inclined to talk at all and to be honest it wasn't like we really could without risking waking someone else up. We'd have to go back to the bathroom, and if that happened, then I assumed there'd be no talking either. Eric would have other uses for his tongue.

And as nice as that might be, I was kind of over the whole day. I climbed in beside Eric as best I could, given the amount of room I had left in the bed, while he pulled out his book to read. It was actually my book, and he'd stolen it while we were in Honolulu because he'd read the one book he'd thought to pack and he couldn't be bothered buying another one. But I wasn't in the mood to argue about it tonight, it had been bad enough when I'd realised that there had been an ulterior motive behind the stack of glossy magazines he'd treated me to, and he'd obviously considered that fair trade for the book.

Tonight I was inclined to let him have the book anyway. So I laid my head on his shoulder for a moment and then turned my face up to kiss him. "'Night" I said. "I love you." I couldn't think what else to say that might make it any better for him.

"Love you too" Eric whispered. And then I lay down beside him and hoped it would all be a bit better after a good night's sleep.

EPOV

While I was out buying diapers I'd realised that maybe I'd just been making things shittier because I was fucking stressed. So I tried not to be, but watching old re-runs with a bunch of kids isn't particularly relaxing, and neither is bedtime when half the room's occupants don't actually want to lie down and be still, and there's a fair amount of whining about the sleeping arrangements.

I thought being with Sookie might relax me. I thought sex would really fucking help. But I was kind of intent on that thought and fucking forgot to lock the bathroom door. So that pretty much killed that idea.

So there was nothing for it, but to try to sleep. Except I couldn't. I just sat there pretending to read my book…well, the book I'd borrowed from Sookie. It was kind of shitty but it would do for now.

Before she went to sleep Sookie told me that she loved me. That just made me feel, well, fucking sadder in a way. She loved me and she trusted me that nothing bad was going to happen to her, or the kids. And while it wasn't exactly like my dad was going to do anything to them physically, I was fucking worried all the same.

And sleeping next to Sookie wasn't as comforting as it normally was. Usually holding her was what made it all fucking OK, but not tonight. So I just lay there, and listened to the other five people in the room breathing. The people I loved most in the world, but who were about to get dragged into the shit that was my life before I had them.

SPOV

I'd hoped that things would be looking up in the morning, but it wasn't a good sign when Eric shaved. The shaving really worried me for some reason.

And then he started eyeing the kids critically. "Do you want to wear a skirt, Leesh?" he asked her, while looking at me, I guess expecting me to produce one.

"No" she said. "I don't have one anyway." She looked at Eric like he'd grown a second head, and I really didn't blame her. I couldn't remember the last time Eric had given too hoots about what Felicia was wearing.

"What about one of Amelia's?" Eric tried.

"No way!" Amelia yelled, while Felicia tried to make herself less conspicuous by slowly moving towards the wall.

Eric frowned and turned his attention to the boys. "Where are Tray's pants?" he asked me.

"Over there, but he doesn't want them on" I replied. Eric could wrestle with Tray this morning if he wanted to.

Tray had obviously heard his name and the word pants in the same sentence and had decided to take a leaf out of Felicia's book, only he wasn't so successful, and Eric scooped him up. "Nuh!" Tray yelled, trying to squirm out of Eric's grasp. "Nuh!"

"Will you JUST BE STILL!" Eric yelled, and Tray did stop squirming. Probably having someone yell that close to your ear will do that to you. And then Tray burst into tears. "Oh for fuck's sake" Eric said. "It's not that bad." He started jamming Tray into his shorts.

It kind of was that bad, and it showed just what Eric had bubbling under the surface. This morning he'd been mostly keeping a lid on it, but it obviously didn't take much for it to erupt.

So that was terrific.

I noticed that Eric wasn't catching my eye though, even after he gave Tray a quick hug and released him. Tray wasn't sticking around, but he wasn't pushing his luck by doing anything else that might make Eric upset either, so he stopped complaining about his shorts. Luckily, I didn't think Tray was the type to hold a grudge.

Eric wandered back into the bathroom and Amelia drifted over. "Definitely bitchy" she said, and then she sat on the bed and flicked through a book. "When's breakfast?" she asked.

"Soon" I replied, trying to check under the bed for things we might have left behind.

Amelia sighed, and the volume on the TV shot up which suggested one of the smaller kids had hold of the remote control. I just hoped they couldn't accidentally order any movies. Or porn.

"Yay!" Sam's voice said. "Spongebob Squirtpants!"

"No. It's _Squarepants_" Felicia corrected. "You're so dumb!"

"Not!" Sam protested. "Not dumb!"

"You say chickmunks" Amelia said, from her spot on the bed. "So _you're _dumb. Its _chip_munks. You know, chips like potato chips."

"That makes no sense" Felicia said. "And I'm not dumb. Sam's dumb, I'm not."

"Not dumb!" Sam yelled, at a volume to rival Eric. I stood up to see that he was leaning towards Felicia but she was pointedly blanking him.

"Bum!" Tray yelled, even louder. "Bum! Bum! Bum!" He was waving the remote triumphantly because Sam had abandoned it and he pushed a few buttons and we ended up on some kind of morning talk-show program.

Eric came back out of the bedroom. "What's all the shouting about?" he asked. "And why is the TV so loud?"

I sighed. "It doesn't matter. Let's pack everything up and get out of here."

Eric grabbed a couple of bags, looked at the kids, and then walked past me muttering something about Sam needing a haircut. I just bit my tongue, it probably wasn't worth saying he could take Sam next time and deal with the whinging and moaning about having to sit still for that long. Not when Eric was already in a mood.

EPOV

I didn't get much sleep, although that wasn't all because I was worried about seeing my dad. Some of it was because Felicia needed someone to explain why she couldn't just get up and put the TV on in the middle of the night, and then Sam woke up and needed directions to the bathroom because it wasn't where it was in the hotel room in Hawaii. And pretty early in the morning Tray decided it was definitely up-time and started bouncing on his bed announcing that fact to the rest of us.

So it wasn't like I couldn't fucking think of anything else other than the visit, I could barely think of anything given the volume from four kids talking at once in the same room. But it was weighing pretty heavily on my mind.

And I did my best not to be a total fucking asshole about everything, because I hadn't much enjoyed the way Sookie was looking at me the day before, with a mixture of pity and contempt. Like she felt sorry for me that I was a total fucking dick, but she'd kind of suspected it all along. But sometimes the kids go beyond the fucking pale and…fuck. I hate shouting at Tray. I hate fucking shouting at any of them. But sometimes, it's all they fucking understand.

So we loaded up the rental car again, the one that was certainly a lot fucking nicer than original model I'd rented, which goes to show that you should never go with their first offer when they know they've fucked it up, and drove somewhere nearby for breakfast.

I couldn't even tell you what I ate, what the kids argued about or whether the coffee was shit.

And then it was back in the car and a couple more hours of driving before…fuck. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe he really would be one of those grandparents who like the next generation better.

Maybe he would have slipped into a drunken coma and wouldn't answer the fucking door.

SPOV

Eric was off in his own little world during breakfast, which meant I had to remember to translate for the waitress when Amelia asked her for tomato sauce and she looked a bit confused. But at least the kids mostly behaved themselves, probably worried about what Eric would do next if they didn't. I caught Sam checking out Eric's reaction after he elbowed Tray and I did wonder if maybe the Air Marshals had been replaced in his mind as the persons most likely to swoop down and hand out punishments.

And after breakfast it was a long drive in the car. Well, not that long really. But I spent a lot of my childhood driving around with Dad because it was cheap entertainment. The kids got a bit bored, and there were a few fights, a lot of snacks and eventually, after another stop for lunch and a toilet break, Sam and Tray at least, dozed off.

I looked out the window at the landscape. Most of the time, it didn't look that different to New Zealand. Maybe a little bit more lumpy, rather than hilly. And the foliage was wrong unless you squinted. But it wasn't alien or anything. It was kind of dry, but then so was Northland in February.

I glanced over at Eric, and he was just watching the road, occasionally checking the GPS. But I noticed that after a while he was referring to it less and less and I figured we were getting close.

I wanted to say something to Eric, but everything I thought of sounded really pat and unconvincing in my head. There wasn't really anything I could say. I just hoped Eric knew we loved him no matter what.

And then we finally got there. We started to leave the countryside behind and hit the outskirts of a town. Sam woke up and looked around and said "We's not home?"

"No, we're…um…" I said, trying to think of a way to explain it.

"We're seeing where Daddy came from. Before he came from our house" Amelia said. "He didn't used to live with us."

I guessed Sam looked a bit dubious so Amelia continued on grandly. "I was there" she said. I wondered where there was going to go. "I think he had a suitcase."

"We've all got suitcases now" Felicia pointed out.

"This was _different_" Amelia protested.

"How?" Felicia asked.

"It just was. You don't understand" Amelia huffed.

"You talk rubbish" Felicia argued.

"No! You just don't listen properly. That's why you have to run around the field at school so much. Because you can't listen!"

"Rub-bish!" Felicia taunted. I assumed Amelia didn't have a comeback for that because the car went silent for a bit.

And then we started to drive through streets that had more and more houses, all pretty much looking the same. The houses started to get a bit nicer and bigger and then Tray woke up and started grizzling he wanted milk and while I was turned around in my seat trying to persuade him to have water instead, because I didn't want spilled milk in a hot car, we pulled into a driveway.

**Thanks for reading!**


	100. Bonus Chapter: Moving On

**So this week the toddler's adventures included having a disagreement with the cat (she has a scratch, but they made up. Well she hugged him, and he tolerated it while hoping for food), and eating five pieces of the sample pizza bread at Baker's Delight before the woman serving behind the counter informed me it had chilli on it and was 'far too hot for her'. Toddler didn't seem to mind. Can't get her to eat peas though.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

SPOV

I looked out the windscreen and studied the house. It looked pretty much the same as all the other houses around here. It was a one-level, probably late 1960's house. It was white with a yellow door, and just…well it did look a little shabbier than its neighbours. The lawn was scrubby, the garage door a bit wonky and when I got out of the car and looked at the fence at the front, I realised that definitely needed a decent coat of paint.

But it wasn't bad, by any means.

I looked across at Eric, who'd got out of his side of the car and was just staring at the door to the house, probably wondering if anything was going to burst out of it and attack him. At least, that's what his expression suggested. He looked terrified.

I wasn't sure I really liked the idea of a terrified Eric. I wondered if I could suggest we got back in the car and just drove off. Would that be rude?

But Eric opened the back door and started helping Tray out of his carseat, so I figured we were going through with it.

"Are we here?" Amelia asked me, when I opened the door on the other side.

"Yep" I said.

"S'not home" Sam grumbled.

"We can't go home! We haven't been to Disneyland!" Amelia said to him. Sam just sighed, at not-quite-three he didn't really grasp the huge importance that Disneyland had for the bigger kids. I think he was missing his own backyard.

"Disneyland's still a few days away" I reminded Amelia.

"I know!" she sighed.

"This's visiting. Will there be other kids here?" Felicia asked.

"Um…no" I said. I assumed not, at any rate.

Felicia sighed. "So boring!" she exclaimed.

"Well, you'll have to play with each other" I told her.

"Yeah, like I said, boring!" she grumbled, as she climbed out the door.

"I'm sure you'll cope" I told her, and she shot me a look that suggested she disagreed.

"Well, I have to play with a bunch of small kids. That's no fun for me" Amelia added, as she got out, and then turned around to retrieve her bag.

'You're not so big" Felicia said, looking Amelia up and down.

"I'm _older_. I'm in Year Four. That's senior school."

"Whatever!" Felicia said, looking around.

"Mum! Tell her not to say that. It's mean!" Amelia wailed.

"Yeah…don't say that" I said, half-heartedly, trying to pull all our stuff out of the car. I felt kind of bad we hadn't brought any food or anything with us. I should have asked Eric to stop somewhere, but, to be honest, I hadn't wanted to say anything in case it made him grumpier than he already was. I just hoped Eric's dad wouldn't hold it against us.

As I walked around the car to join Eric and the kids, I tried to study Eric's expression. He didn't look quite so terrified, more like he'd given himself a good talking-to and was resigned to what was about to happen. He turned to me and took my hand. "Remember that whatever happens, I love you, OK?" he said, earnestly. I nodded, while wondering to myself who the hell says that the first time you meet their parent? I don't think I'd even said that to Bill the first time he met my dad. I wanted to say something light-hearted to lift the mood, but I suspected it would go down like a lead balloon. Better to just push on. So instead I nodded, and we all followed Eric up to the front door.

The woman who answered our knock obviously wasn't someone Eric knew, from the way he looked her up and down. She did the same to him, and then her eyes flicked to me and then the kids. "Um…I'm Eric and this is my wife Sookie" Eric said.

"Trudi" the women replied, giving us all another once over. "Huh" she said. "You did bring them all. Stan said you wouldn't…guess he owes me a beer. Come in then." She turned to walk back into the house. Eric stepped inside after her, and I let the kids follow before bringing up the rear.

It was dark inside the hallway, and it smelt kind of musty. The décor seemed to be set in about 1988; it was all nauseating pink walls and grey carpet. Carpet with a lot of cigarette burns, I noticed. It looked old and tired and badly in need of some love and attention.

Eric seemed to know where he was going so we all followed him. He didn't look back to check we were. Amelia turned to me and whispered "Why does it smell funny?"

"Mmm, it's just different" I said, hoping she wouldn't say that to anyone who actually lived here.

"I'm bored" Felicia added, just in case I hadn't realised that one.

"Just be polite" I urged, as we walked into what had to be the living room. It didn't seem much brighter than the hallway, and I wondered how often any of these curtains got opened. Trudi had disappeared from view and Eric had stopped in the middle of the room, so it took me a minute to work out we were all facing someone sitting in a La-Z-Boy with a particularly violent floral pattern on the upholstery. The kids clustered around me trying to work out what was going on, Tray and Sam having abandoned Eric in favour of hanging around my legs.

"You're here" the guy in the chair said.

"Yep" Eric replied. He sounded kind of resigned about that, and I really didn't like the slump to his shoulders. "This is Sookie" he said, gesturing to me. "Sookie, this is my dad. Stan."

I peeled Tray off my right leg and stepped forward, noticing that Stan didn't bother standing up and instead he gave me a very sharp look up and down, and then up again. "Hi" I said, as brightly as I could, holding out to my hand to shake his. "Nice to finally meet you."

He did at least lean forward in his chair to shake my hand, and try to stare me down. Probably trying to work out why I was grinning like an idiot, but there wasn't much I could do, I'd been hit by a large and sudden dose of nervousness. I was really worried about what he thought about me, my kids, all of us. This was Eric's dad. This was _important_.

No wonder Eric had been in such a mood, I was feeling a bit on edge now too, but probably more likely to cry than yell. Crap.

Stan let go of my hand and sat back in his chair. It was kind of weird looking at him, because he both looked like Eric, and didn't look like him at all. Like with the kids, it depended on the expression, and the light maybe. He didn't wear his years well though, that was for sure. "Yeah, you too sweetheart" Stan said slowly.

Eric meanwhile had flopped down on a couch that was at right-angles to his dad's chair. I assumed I was supposed to sit next to him, so I did, but then I realised the kids were still just standing around, so I hopped up again and went over to get the set up with something to do.

"So who're they?" Stan asked Eric and I could have kicked myself for not introducing them, or maybe kicked Eric for not thinking of it first. This was his dad after all.

"I'm Amelia" Amelia said, and I was surprised she'd lasted this long. "That's Felicia, that's Sam and that's Tray. He's just little."

"Yeah…" Stan said slowly, and then he turned to Eric. "I guess you didn't need to take any paternity tests with those two. I haven't seen any kids looking quite that much like you in town, so I think you're good to show her around." He nodded in my direction and laughed. Eric looked at his feet. I felt a bit stunned. Who the hell said stuff like _that_?

Amelia turned to me. "What's he saying?" she whispered.

"Don't worry" I whispered back, while taking the lunchbox of cars and Lego out of the bag for Tray and Sam. They were both kind of stunned and sat down obediently on the floor when I put it in front of them.

Felicia wandered over and sat next to Eric, and I held up the paper and pens I had to see if she wanted to draw something. She huffed, but then she held out her hand for it. Amelia shook her head though. She'd already announced she wanted to do a 'proper visit' like a grown-up.

Amelia and I squeezed ourselves onto the couch and I wondered whether I should get the conversation started, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Trudi wandered back in though, so I thought maybe she would.

"'nother drink, hon?" she said to Stan.

"Yeah" he said, holding out his glass to her.

"Can I get you guys anything?" Trudi asked. I wasn't sure what was on offer, other than alcohol, and I didn't like to ask so I shook my head. "No, I'm good" Eric said, without really looking at her. I got that he didn't really like his dad having a girlfriend, but I did wish that I hadn't suddenly found myself married to a teenage boy.

Trudi left the room and Stan turned back to us. "So how's Australia?" he asked. I paused for a moment, trying to figure out if that was a joke. Eric spoke up. "It's New Zealand. You know that."

"Jesus, don't be so touchy Eric. I know where you're living these days" Stan said and Eric looked up to meet his gaze. Something passed between them, but buggered if I knew what it was all about. I guess maybe Stan was upset Eric had moved so far away. Hard to tell.

"Daddy didn't live in New Zealand until he lived with us" Amelia said. "Did he live here?"

Stan turned his gaze to her. To her credit, Amelia didn't flinch. I'd decided that he was actually a little bit scary when he stared at you like that. He was nothing if not direct. "Yeah…daddy" he said slowly, a hint of question in his voice. "No, he hasn't lived here for a long time now." He kept his gaze on Amelia. "How old are you, honey?" he asked.

"Eight" Amelia replied, really warming up now she was getting the opportunity to talk about herself. "I'm in Year Four and that means I'm in senior school, but Felicia isn't and…"

Stan cut in. "Great, honey. I can see you're an absolute delight." That confused Amelia because she wasn't sure whether he was being complimentary or not, and to be honest, neither was I. I couldn't really get a read on Stan at all.

"So this playing dad thing is really working out for you, huh Eric?" Stan said to him. "That's a lot of kids you've got trailing around after you these days."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eric said sharply.

Stan shrugged. "Just surprised is all. Didn't think that was your bag, all that family stuff." He said the word family with a sneer. I thought. Maybe I was reading too much into it and taking my cues from Eric. Maybe he wasn't that bad. I told myself to just relax and try and be friendly and polite. This could be pleasant, I was sure of it.

Trudi arrived back with Stan's drink and handed it over. "So…Sookie, right?" she said, pointing a long talon at me. She had hair that had been possibly dyed red over blonde and was now a faded pink-ginger colour, and makeup that didn't look quite right even in the dim light we were currently sitting in. She looked even scarier than Stan. "You like it here? In the States? Must be different to what you're used to?"

"Um…not really" I said. It all seemed remarkably similar in a lot of ways.

Trudi wasn't deterred. "But this'll be different, huh? All the houses and stuff? You live on a farm, right?"

"We live in a city" I corrected.

"Really" Trudi said, without much enthusiasm. "Must be hard with all the kids."

"Well…it's kind of like the suburbs really. We have a backyard" I tried, but I didn't think it was really making sense to Trudi. She liked her version better.

"Daddy mows the lawns" Amelia threw in.

That got Stan's attention. "When'd you start doing yard work, Eric?" he said, and as much as I wanted to think that this was just the good-natured ribbing of a parent who'd spent many years trying to get their son interested in actually doing something around the house, everything he said had an underlying layer of menace and it made me really uncomfortable. It was like he was trying to goad Eric into saying something he'd regret.

But Eric just shrugged. "It's a long time since I've lived here" he said.

"Not that long" Stan said. "You're hardly that old." His eyes slid towards me, and I guessed he was evaluating the age difference. I wasn't sure what Eric had told him.

"I haven't been young for a while" Eric said, while slumping down further on the couch.

"I know that feeling!" Trudi said brightly, perching on the arm of Stan's chair and patting his shoulder. He didn't turn to look at her. He was still preoccupied staring at Eric.

"So, um, have you lived here long, Stan?" I tried asking.

"Yep." He said. I waited for a bit, but he didn't say anything else.

"It's a nice neighbourhood. A lot newer though that what we're used to. Our house must be about 100 now."

"Is it _that_ old?" Amelia asked me, and I nodded. Stan didn't comment. Jeez, he was hard work. I kind of wished Eric would jump in but he wasn't coming to the party. They were as bad as each other.

Sam decided to come over to the couch, mainly because he wanted Felicia to rebuild his Lego car for him. She took it off him and sighed, but started to put it back together. Sam looked from Eric to Stan and back again, trying to work out the connection.

"That's your Granddad" Amelia told him. "Like I have Nana, you know."

Sam clearly didn't know, he wasn't used to grandparents really, and he tended to call Lorena Nana when she was around like his sisters did. She sometimes pulled a face, but mostly she put up with it, although I shuddered to think what she subsequently said to Portia and the others about it all.

"Jesus, that's a scary thought" Stan muttered.

"Are you my granddad then? If Daddy is my daddy because he chose us?" Amelia asked Stan. I might have to reassess just who the bravest member of the family was.

"Um…no" Stan said. "Doesn't work like that."

"Oh" Amelia said, but she didn't sound too sad. Felicia muttered something I didn't quite get, but it might have been along the lines of the fact she didn't think she needed a grandfather, and I must admit, Stan wasn't exactly the poster-boy for fun times hanging out with granddad.

"You're daddy's daddy though, right?" Amelia asked, and Stan nodded. "Because Mum doesn't have any parents. They died. She's an orphan. And then my first dad died, he was sad to leave me, but he couldn't help it."

Stan looked at me, and then turned to Eric. "Jesus, Eric. Don't increase your life insurance in a hurry." And then he laughed at his own, terribly un-funny joke and Trudi joined in too. I smiled politely, and Amelia looked unsure about the whole thing. Felicia handed the car back to Sam who wandered back over to sit with Tray, and then she moved slightly closer to Eric, who was still mostly staring down at his feet.

I really did wish he'd say something.

"So when are we getting your life insurance upped, hon?" Trudi said to Stan, and he abruptly stopped laughing.

"Yeah, your fat ass isn't getting anything from me" he said, darkly. So he could dish it out, but he couldn't take it.

Trudi looked a bit shocked, and then she recovered. "Oh, you!" she said.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence and then Tray's voice piped up. "Gi'it!" he wailed. "Gi'i fuck! Fuck!"

Stan laughed. "Oh, Jesus Eric. The mouth on that kid. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, though. God knows I've heard you. Remember the time I found you cussing out that…who was it, Laurie? Lauren?...shit, Lucy? Anyway, you know the one. All because she wouldn't do your laundry. Shit, Mr High and Mighty you were. No wonder she didn't hang around after that." He sighed and took a mouthful of his drink.

Eric just sat there, but I could see him silently fuming. "It wasn't like that" he said slowly, and I was inclined to believe him.

Stan looked back at me. "I'm sure you're doing his laundry" he said to me, and I wasn't quite sure how to take it, or who he was having a dig at with that, me, Eric, or the both of us.

Amelia looked at me quizzically. "Mum's the…" I knew where that was going, and it was really too hard to explain the family in-joke. Not to Stan, who felt like he was far from family.

"I'm definitely chief cook and bottle-washer, yeah" I finished and Amelia huffed and sat back in her seat. "Why don't you and Felicia play cards or something?" I said quietly, and then I turned and said the same thing to Felicia, who nodded. We re-arranged ourselves on the couch so I was next to Eric and I handed Amelia the pack of cards.

I reached down and put my hand on Eric's thigh, but he didn't really acknowledge me. I tried not to feel too hurt. I got the feeling this whole atmosphere had very little to do with me.

At least, that's what I hoped.

"So…how's business Eric?" Stan said pointedly, digging for God knows what.

"Good" Eric replied. They really were a pair, though. Neither of them was exactly offering up free-flowing conversation if they could help it.

Stan nodded. "Does she work?" he asked Eric, which really pissed me off because I was sitting right next to him after all.

"I have my own business too" I said. "I run a Jumping Beans franchise."

"Beans?" Trudi asked, wrinkling her nose. I guess she thought it was food-related.

"Um…we run classes, for babies to pre-schoolers. Help them develop physically through movement and music, stuff like that."

Trudi didn't look any more impressed than when she thought I'd been serving up beans for people. "Must be difficult, with all the kids" she commented.

"Well…I only work part-time and a lot of it I do from home" I said.

"I'd like to go part-time at the nail salon" Trudi mused, "But Stan said it's probably not a good idea during a recession. I should take all the hours I can get, and hope no one gives up getting their nails done!" She laughed, and then not-so-surreptitiously checked out my nails. Yeah, it had been years since I'd had a manicure. I did love it, but it just wasn't a practical thing at the moment. Oh well. Guess she found me lacking.

Next to me Eric snorted. "That's rich" he said. "Dad's been part-time for years."

"I have health issues" Stan said, tossing back the rest of his drink.

"Mmm-hmm" Eric said, without putting much agreement into it.

"So, um, what do you do?" I asked Stan, trying to keep things reasonably pleasant.

"See he talks about me a lot" Stan said, glancing at Eric. "Engineer" he said. "At the plant, just outside town. Builds parts for agricultural machinery."

"So…you've worked there for a while?" I asked.

Stan looked bored. "Yep" he said, and I figured the matter was closed.

There was a pinging sound from another room. "That'll be my cookies" Trudi said brightly, as she stood up. "I'll go and get them."

"I'll come and help" I said, standing up and following Trudi out of the room. I just hoped everyone behaved while I was gone.

EPOV

I fucking hated my father. I'd decided that much since we got here. And we shouldn't have come. There was no fucking point to being here, sitting in this fuckawful house waiting to see what he'd say next.

And fuck knows he wasn't afraid to put it out there. By the time Sookie left the room with his latest piece of ass, I was all but ready to walk out the door. Well, nearly ready. I just wanted...fuck, I just wanted him to say one fucking thing that acknowledged my family properly. And then we could fucking leave.

"I'm sure she'll come back" Dad said, as I watched Sookie leave the room. If she didn't, I probably wouldn't blame her. I'd run screaming too. The kids were doing OK, although they all seemed subdued. Not even Amelia and Felicia had argued over the game they were playing yet, which suggested that they'd picked up on the tension pervading the room. And they'd moved farther away from my dad, with Amelia suggesting they sit on the floor near the boys. Yeah, no one fucking liked being near him if they could help it.

If he'd just fucking die, then we could all leave.

I turned to the other side to see Dad was just staring at me. I hated the way he did that. He'd been trying to fucking stare Sookie down since she got here, like he could get her to break down and confess to some terrible crime. Fuck knows what he thought she was hiding. He was always so fucking suspicious of people.

"So, you're pretty whipped these days" Dad said, by way of making conversation.

"Fuck off" I replied. He really had no fucking clue about my life.

"Jesus, Eric. You can't see it, can you?" He chuckled to himself, like I was the best joke around.

"What can't I see?" I asked. I was kind of tired of his bullshit.

"That she's got you right where she wants you. Fuck. Little Miss Black-widow, or more like Mrs. Fuck. You as someone's toy-boy, that's fucking fascinating."

"You talk a load of shit, you know that" I hissed at him. Fuck, I hoped none of the kids heard him. I glanced over and Amelia's head had bobbed up, but she looked away and went back to the game she was playing.

"You always have to think the worst of me, don't you Eric? Fuck knows, I'm the one who's actually looking out for you. Seriously, this is what you want? Tied down, four fucking kids, a wife who plays around looking after other people's kids and calls it a job? There's no getting out of that…well, there is…"

"No" I said. "No there isn't. And I don't want to. And you don't know what the hell you're talking about anyway."

"I know _exactly_ what I'm talking about Eric" Dad said, leaning forward in his chair. "Jesus, you could have had...well, you did have. You had a chance, to escape all of this. Fuck knows, if I'd had your opportunities I would have taken them."

"I'm not you."

"No, but I brought you up to be fucking smarter than that. Shit, you don't want to get tied down by all these…these…dependants. Fuck, if I'd just had your opportunities…"

"You mean if you didn't have me?" I hissed.

"I mean, if you'd fucking listen, if I hadn't rushed into anything that maybe things might have been different for me. You had that chance. And you blew it." He shrugged, like there was nothing he could do about my shitty life choices.

"I haven't fucking blown anything." I knew it was a waste of time arguing with him, but I couldn't fucking help it at this point. "I'm very happy with my life."

"Yeah, fuck. You look it. Sure she's got great tits, but seriously? What the hell were you on the run from? Or who? Did something happen in Louisiana?"

"No, what the fuck do you think I've done?" He was pretty fucking unbelievable sometimes.

"God knows, Eric. I knew nothing about what you were doing out there. It wasn't like when you lived here, and I used to hear all about your little escapades." I didn't say anything to that, and he just carried on. "Because I really needed Melanie Bowen's mother complaining to me at the grocery store. Stuck-up bitch she was."

"Uh-huh, great. So what's this, a belated intervention for the fact I slept around? Fuck knows you're the one with the cavalcade of girlfriends. How is Robbie, by the way?"

Dad whirled on me. "That thieving little whore is long gone. She was nothing but trailer trash anyway." He thought for a moment. "Trudi's different though" he said. "She gets me."

"Gets you drinks you mean."

"You're so fucking pious these days. It doesn't suit you Eric. Is this all an act for her benefit?" He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. I hoped Sookie came back soon and we could just leave.

"No" I said. I was done wasting words on that asshole.

"Yeah. You think you're so fucking smart, don't you Eric? You think you've got her fooled into thinking you're some great fucking catch, and I've no doubt she's spending your money, but the minute, the _fucking minute_ she realises what a bullshit artist you are, she'll be off and you'll be left wiping their snotty noses for the rest of your life, and that's a shit-load of hassle when half those kids aren't even yours. And the worst thing will be that you could have walked away from it all before you even got in this deep. Fuck, if you had to stay in New Zealand, then fucking stay, but you didn't need an instant family to keep you there. I'm sure there are plenty of other women to fuck. "

On one level I knew what this was, this was punishment. This was my punishment for the fact he got stuck with me. This was him trying to bring me down to his level. But there was a part of my brain that wondered if maybe he wasn't just a little bit right about the whole fucking thing. Fuck. God knows I'd nearly fucked it all up with Sookie on more than one occasion. It was bound to happen at some point. But it wouldn't be me being left with the kids, it would be me stuck in some apartment by myself again, wondering what the fuck they were all doing without me. I had residency now, so I didn't think she could get me deported or anything, but really, without them, what the fuck else did I have in New Zealand? If she took it all away what the fuck was I going to do?

SPOV

The kitchen pretty much looked like the rest of the house, a little tired and quite dark despite the white painted cupboards. I wasn't sure how much of the gloom was real or imagined, but it was certainly starting to make me feel depressed. I wondered how Eric had ever stood living here.

Trudi put on an oven glove, opened the oven door and pulled out a baking tray of chocolate chip biscuits. "You've been busy" I said, with as much warmth as I could muster. Trudi put the tray down on the draining board. "Not really" she said, indicating a discarded wrapper on the bench. "I just cut them up and stuck them in there."

I peered more closely at the wrapper. Huh, I did not know you could buy readymade biscuit dough you just shoved in the oven. Maybe it wasn't quite like home here.

Trudi was now moving the biscuits one by one to a plate. "They smell good anyway. And the kids always love biscuits."

Trudi frowned. "Are you English?" she asked.

"No, I'm from New Zealand" I said, thinking we'd already covered that one surely.

"It's just weird when you talk a bit fancy I guess. Like biscuits instead of cookies."

"We have the same problem with Eric" I said, smiling. Trudi didn't smile; she just looked a bit confused. I decided to let that one drop.

She nodded at the coffeemaker. "You can help yourself if you like" she said.

"Oh, thanks. I might, um…take you up on that…" I said, wondering where the cups were kept. Trudi didn't say anything, so I opened a cupboard at random. "To the right" she said, indicating it with a nod.

"Thanks" I said, as I pulled out two mugs and filled them. "I'll get Eric some I think, too."

"He looks like he could use something stronger. He and Stan not get on?" Trudi asked.

"Um…not all the time. I think it's a father-son thing." Although I couldn't remember there being anything like this amount of tension between my dad and Jason.

I walked to the fridge and inspected the milk, it didn't look fresh. Black would be fine I decided.

"Yeah, I guess families are difficult. I don't talk to half of mine" Trudi said, and then stopped abruptly.

I wasn't sure where to take the conversation next. "So, you are, you do nails?" I asked her.

"Nail technician, yeah. I used to be a receptionist, for a car dealership, but it closed down. And then I worked in a clothing store, but that closed too. So I retrained." She shrugged. "It's OK. I've done worse. And it's how I met Stan, he saw me when he came in to pick up his drycleaning next door. Well, he says he did anyway. Officially we met at a bar. And of course he used to see my older sister a bit…but that was _years_ ago. Like, another lifetime. Before she ran off with that guy who was going to make his fortune selling his computer program to Microsoft. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. So they're up in Seattle now, anyway."

"Oh. Right." I said, wondering if this was the problem with small towns, trying to find someone to date who hadn't already dated your other female relatives. I guess in some circles Stan would be a catch. He probably had a good job, his own house, no kids hanging around and he was over 40. Yeah…still. You'd have to be pretty desperate I decided.

"The kids want any milk?" Trudi asked, picking up the plate of biscuits.

"No, I've got water for them. They'll be fine" I assured Trudi, really not wanting to trust her whiffy milk.

"I don't know how you manage with four kids" Trudi said.

I shrugged. "After the first two or three, the rest are just more noise" I said.

"Yeah…still, I want to have some before I get too old. You must find it tiring."

I wasn't sure what she was getting at. I was pretty sure she was older than me for one thing. "I'm only 39" I said, my desire to defend myself winning out against my inclination not to actually say how old I was in case it gave Stan another reason to have a go at Eric.

"Really?" Trudi asked, her eyes widening. "So am I…I just thought…oh well. I guess some of your kids are little."

"Yeah..." I said slowly. "So…you want to have kids with Stan?" It was a bit rude to ask, but I hoped that my kids weren't getting a whole tribe of aunts and uncles who were younger than they were.

Trudi shrugged, and walked towards the kitchen door. I picked up the cups of coffee and followed her. "Maybe. He says he doesn't need any more kids, but I think he'd like a baby. I mean Eric's all grown up now…" She turned around and looked at me in a way which suggested she thought he'd grown up too fast and saddled himself with an older woman in the process. I guess it was a bit odd that we were the same age and dating a father and son. Best not to think about it.

We walked back into an almost completely silent living room. That was freaky. Even the kids were talking in hushed voices. Felicia had given up playing with Amelia and joined the boys, and Amelia was sitting and playing patience by herself with the cards; I'd taught her in Hawaii and she'd really taken to it.

But worst of all Eric was just staring at the ground. He looked broken. I wondered what the hell had happened.

Amelia glanced up at me as I walked in, and then looked back down at her cards. I really wished I had powers like Samantha from _Bewitched _and I could wiggle my nose and get us all the hell out of here.

But I couldn't, so we'd eat a biscuit or two and just leave. If I had to drag everyone to the car one by one, I'd get them out of here.

I handed Eric his coffee and he looked up at me and said "Thanks" really quietly. He looked hurt, and worst of all, he looked at me like I'd hurt him. Did he think I was siding with his dad in some of this stuff? I didn't know and I couldn't ask because he was sitting right there, so I'd have to tough it out.

Trudi passed around the biscuits. Amelia and Felicia took one each, and then Sam took one. Tray took one for each hand, and Sam, discovering no one told Tray off, grabbed a second one as well. Eric waved them away.

I took one and bit into it. It was OK. "Nice" I said, smiling at Trudi. She looked confused. Well, I tried.

"They taste a bit funny" Amelia said. "Did you think baking soda is the same as baking powder, because it's not? Daddy did that too."

"Well…that's how they come, honey" Trudi said.

"But they're warm. You baked them" Amelia said slowly.

"Um…yes" Trudi confirmed, I guess not really understanding Amelia's point. Amelia was totally confused and went back to her game of patience.

"So your _daddy_ bakes with you, does he?" Stan asked Amelia.

"Oh…um, yeah? Not really. He's not as good as mum."

"I'm not surprised" Stan said. "We had to stop him using the kitchen here, after the microwave caught fire."

"Daddy burned something?" Felicia asked. She had been paying attention then. Crap.

"Yeah…_Eric_ destroyed the microwave" Stan replied, and luckily Felicia didn't pick up on Stan's pointed use of Eric's name.

"Accidentally" Eric said, kind of sullenly. "I was nine."

"You were careless" Stan said.

"You need to be careful with hot things" Amelia chimed in, which really didn't help matters.

"You do" Stan agreed. "Because burning the kitchen down would just be a pain in the ass."

Eric sighed. "I'm going to the bathroom" he announced, standing up and handing his cup to me.

"Do you want to take Sam with you?" I asked him. I figured if we started doing bathroom trips we could go soon. To where, I didn't really know, because Eric and I had stupidly thought that maybe we'd stay here. Eric hadn't really liked the sound of that idea at the time we discussed it, but I'd thought it would save us some money, even if we camped on the floor. It was family after all, of course you stayed.

But now I didn't want to stay here one moment longer than I had to.

Eric sighed, but held out his hand for Sam to go with him. Sam trotted after Eric while watching Stan the whole time. He really didn't seem to like his newly-discovered grandfather. I couldn't blame him.

Amelia came over to sit next to me. "Is Daddy upset because he had that fire?" she asked.

"No, Daddy's fine" I hissed back, aware that Stan was watching me, and listening to me. And then I realised that he and I were the only two adults left in the room, Trudi having drifted outside to smoke, I think. Crap.

Amelia wasn't keen on hanging around Stan, and went over to supervise Felicia and Tray. I looked over at Stan wondering what to say to him. I wanted to tell him I thought he was an arsehole and a bully and I never wanted to see him again. But I didn't, he was Eric's dad at the end of the day. So I smiled politely and finished up the last of my coffee.

"You like him, don't you?" Stan said in the end.

"I love Eric" I replied.

"Mmm…" Stan said, in a way which suggested he thought I was a total idiot for loving his son. "It probably won't help you in the long run."

I decided to ignore that comment, but Stan wanted more of a reaction from me, obviously. "He's like his mother" he said. "He'll go. One day when you don't think it'll happen, it will. And I'll be stuck with him again."

"I don't think so" I said, which was the most polite thing I could think of to say. "I have faith in him."

"Uh-huh. Well that'll just get you a broken heart, honey" Stan said.

"He hasn't let me down yet."

Stan leaned forward in his seat. "There's still time. He's got _years_ ahead of him in which to disappoint you. You and those kids'll be a distant memory and he'll be right back where he started."

I was feeling kind of stunned, he was having a go at everything now, me, Eric, the age difference. Nothing was off-limits.

I looked away from Stan and stared at the wall, trying to will away the tears. I wasn't going to cry in front of him, that was what he wanted. He'd done his best to break Eric and now he wanted to break me too. So I stared at the pale pink walls, long since past their prime and hoped Stan wasn't right, that I wouldn't be sitting there in ten years' time staring at the family room walls which I'd kept the same colour as a tribute to the guy who'd run off and left me.

I wondered where the hell Eric and Sam had gone.

After what did seem like ten years, they finally reappeared in the room. Eric looked slightly better, and Sam looked positively pleased. I wondered how fantastic the bathroom was here.

I sent Amelia and Felicia off to use it next, and started packing up the kids' things while they were gone. Eric had returned to the couch and Sam had bravely decided to climb into Daddy's lap.

Stan looked at the pair of them. "How old is that one?"

"Nearly three. Three in September" Eric said.

"Well…you've got about ten good years left with him then" Stan announced, and Eric didn't reply.

Amelia came back and announced Felicia was taking 'forever!' "Are we going now?" she asked.

"Soon" I said.

"Good" Amelia replied. "I don't like it here." She went to sit next to Eric and I glanced at Stan. Yep, he'd heard her. Tough.

Trudi appeared inside again, and took up her perch on Stan's chair. I ignored her, I was over her too.

Felicia came back, and I grabbed Tray and my bag and went to the bathroom. Away from the atmosphere of the living room, Tray perked up and wanted to investigate the bathroom cupboard and interrogate me by going "Wees? Poos?" while I used the toilet. When I'd done, I laid him on the bathroom mat, which was a very faded pink like everything else in this house, and quickly changed his nappy.

"Mum-mum" Tray said happily, touching my face as I leaned over him. "Mum-mum." He gave me a big goofy grin, and it nearly broke my heart. I couldn't help but wonder if Eric had ever been this happy here, and what that monster in the living room had done to change that.

We had to get out of here.

On my way back to the living room I glanced at the photos on the hall wall. There were a few gaps in the arrangement, which suggested the ones of Eric's mother were missing. I looked a bit closer and I couldn't see any which looked like she was in them. There were ones of older couples, who must be grandparents or great-grandparents, one of a younger Stan in a cap and gown, one of Stan next to a car, naked baby on a fur rug…I stopped and looked at the naked baby again.

It was one of those studio portraits that used to be popular, a naked baby lying on its stomach. Only this baby looked remarkably like Tray, especially around the eyes.

I reached out tentatively and took the photo off the wall and turned it over. On the cardboard on the back of the frame was written _Eric Six Months Old_. I turned it back to look at it again. Yeah, it was.

Tray was kind of bored of this and started squirming in my arms. I went to hang the picture back on the wall, hesitated, brought it back towards me and then stashed it quickly in the bag I had slung over my shoulder. Tray looked at my bag curiously, but it wasn't like he had enough words to really tell on me yet.

As I walked down the hall I had a big pang of guilt about stealing from my father in law, and I nearly doubled back to return it to its place on the wall, but I didn't. I was coming out of this visit with something good.

When I got back to the living room Trudi seemed to be trying to make conversation with Eric, but it was like getting blood out of a stone. He wasn't that great at the best of times, and he really wasn't up to talking about what he did for a living today. Sam was still on Eric's lap, and Amelia and Felicia were sitting on the couch with him.

"OK" I said, with as much authority as I could muster. "We'd better head off before it gets too late."

"You're going?" Trudi asked, looking from me to Eric and back again. "You're not staying for dinner?"

"'Course they are" Stan grumbled. Yeah, he didn't want to make our time here pleasant, but he wasn't above feeling hurt when we didn't want to hang around with him.

"We are" I said decisively, because I could see Eric's expression starting to look a bit torn. I guess he didn't want to disappoint his dad, but no way was I sticking around for a miserable dinner in a miserable house with a miserable old sod who none of us actually liked.

"Yeah" Eric said. "We've got to go." He stood up and put Sam on the floor, and turned to his dad. "Bye" Eric said.

"Uh-huh. Good luck, Eric. I think you'll need it." He winked at me like that statement was some huge joke.

"Bye, Stan. Bye, Trudi" I said, as Eric grabbed the rest of our stuff and walked past me and back towards the front door. I wasn't going to say it was nice to meet them. I could be polite, but I wasn't about to lie.

Amelia and Felicia said some goodbyes. I could tell they weren't really sure what to call Stan, and he hadn't exactly been endearing enough to warrant Granddad, so I didn't bother helping them out. Sam stayed quiet and I let him. Tray yelled "Bye!" to the world at random, and we started heading out the door.

I wondered if Stan might come and say goodbye, but possibly he was glued to that chair. Instead he called out "Sookie." I put Tray on the ground and turned around.

"I guess we'll see, won't we? Whether you're right. You let me know how it all works out for you."

"Um, OK. I will" I said, and then I hurried down the hall and out the front door.

Trudi had gone out to wave us off. Eric was busy strapping kids into the carseats and wasn't looking at her. It was as if he was worried if he didn't get out of here fast enough he'd get sucked into the vortex that circled around Stan's stupid chair.

I helped get the kids settled and then jumped in the passenger seat, although I almost got in the driver's side. This time though, no one laughed at me doing it which wasn't a good sign at all. Even the kids were feeling it.

As Eric backed the car down the drive, Stan appeared in the doorway to watch us. I didn't bother waving; I just turned and looked at Eric. His lips were pressed together and his expression looked pained. I really hoped today didn't get any worse.

EPOV

I wished like fuck we'd never gone there. I just…I never anticipated he'd be that fucking poisonous. Every fucking time I went there he tried to drag me down, and this time was no exception. But I'd let him try his fucking tricks on Sookie and the kids too, and I felt like shit about that. I wasn't sure she'd forgive me, though. For thinking that this once it would be OK. That he'd turned over a new leaf and the presence of his grandchildren would keep him in check.

I'm not even fucking sure if he acknowledged Tray's existence.

And I'd hoped it would get better when we left, but it didn't. Now I felt like shit for going there, and worse than shit for leaving again.

As we drove away Sookie leaned over and asked me quietly if I knew where we could stay. I nodded, but I couldn't really speak or look at her.

So I drove to the only motel I could think of, which was a pretty shitty one, and left everyone sitting in the car while I negotiated with the guy on the desk about the number of beds I'd need in the room. I suspected he thought I had a car full of college students or something, the way he kept asking "So, how many occupants?" and he didn't seem to like my explanation that it was four kids.

Eventually he gave me a key and we drove over to our room, which was on the second story. It meant a lot of carrying suitcases up the stairs, but that was OK, I'd rather have something to do to take my mind off all the shit that I'd heard that afternoon. I didn't want to think about Sookie leaving. I didn't want to think about letting her down. I didn't want to think, fucking period.

I needed to do something else.

We took the kids out for fast food. They were quiet and withdrawn still. I remembered what that was like, dad in a fucking mood and not knowing what to say or do. Fuck, it was exactly what I'd been doing since I left Hawaii. I was fucking like him. They would be better off without me.

Sookie was acting weirdly bright and happy, trying to pretend like nothing bad had happened. I think that worried the kids too. Yeah, we weren't a good combination at the moment. Maybe…

Fuck, I didn't want to think that, I really fucking didn't.

After dinner we walked back to the motel room. It was dark and depressing. Sookie turned some lights on, and started looking through the suitcases to find the stuff we needed. I just…I just couldn't be around them anymore.

"I'm going out. Need to clear my head" I said, and then I walked out the motel room door before she could reply.

SPOV

He couldn't have known of course. He couldn't have known that was Bill's phrase for when he used to disappear on me, all those drives he took to 'clear his head'. But it was pretty clear what he was doing. He'd come back to where it all started, and he was going back to his old ways. He'd gone drinking. Of course he had.

And there wasn't a thing I could do about it. I wanted to scream at him to stop, I wanted to run after him and drag him back. I'd promised I would. I'd promised I would always go and get him.

But I was stuck here, in a strange country with a roomful of kids who needed me with them. So I didn't have a choice. I just had to wait it out and hope he turned up again.

Waiting is a really sucky thing to do.

Surprisingly, without Eric around, the kids started recovering a bit. Felicia asked where daddy had gone, and I said he'd gone to get some things we needed that seemed to satisfy her. By the time I'd given them all quick showers and Amelia had read _But Not the Hippopotamus, _with the other kids all joining in to yell "But not the hippopotamus!", we were almost back to normal. We just needed Eric back.

Amelia did have something to say about Stan. "He was funny, Daddy's…dad" she said.

"He's just…well, we don't really know him" I said, as I tried to make up the fold out beds for Sam and Tray in the limited space we had in the room.

"He looked yucky" Felicia chimed in. "Will he die?"

"Um…probably not soon" I said. I didn't think he was sick…just, missing out on life or something.

"He looked like a baddie" Felicia said.

"I don't think that's right" I tried to tell her, but she looked unconvinced.

"I think so too" Amelia said, and Felicia looked at her in astonishment. Who knew the one thing they'd agree on was that their step-grandfather looked like a baddie.

When it was bedtime, I settled everyone down and sat on the balcony and read my book. I looked at the pages anyway, but struggled to make sense of the words. All I could think about was where Eric was and what he was doing and how I wished he'd come back.

Then he did. I heard the door open and close and a minute later he stepped onto the balcony holding two cups of takeaway coffee. "I got you this" he said, holding one out to me.

"Thanks" I replied, and Eric sat down in the other chair that was out here. We were silent for a bit as we sipped our drinks.

"Kids OK?' Eric asked.

"Yeah, not too much whinging about bedtime or who was sleeping where. Amelia didn't like the shower and Felicia kept telling on Sam for farting, but other than that, they were fine."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, and took another drink. I wanted to make it better for him, but wasn't sure how I could really do that. So I just sat and waited for a bit. Eric didn't say anything else. Just finished his coffee and put the cup to one side.

I finished mine and went over to stand behind him and rubbed his shoulders. Eric leaned his head back into me and we stayed like for a while as the sun slowly set.

"I better go and get ready for bed" I said, kissing Eric's head, and then I left him out on the balcony, hoping he'd finally think his way back to us. I grabbed the pyjamas I'd left on the bed, tiptoed past the sleeping children, and stepped into the bathroom.

EPOV

I'd walked around a bit when I left them, unsure what to do. I just needed a way to blot it out, pretend it had never happened, forget that I had a dad, let alone that I'd just sat there and taken his bullshit once again. But I couldn't think what to fucking do. Drinking was out of the question, no matter how much it appealed for its ability to make me just…numb. I couldn't do that to Sookie. Fuck knows my dad had no doubt been trying to tell her I was a shit who wasn't worthy of her time, I didn't want to show her I was.

Even if that meant I felt like I was playing a role. The role of Eric who wasn't a shit when he really was deep down.

So I walked around and looked at places I used to know, and in the end, I just bought some coffee and took it back to Sookie. I wished I had something else to give her, to show her it was OK. But I didn't.

And I still felt shitty, even back on the motel room balcony, with Sookie sitting next to me. She just fucking felt sorry for me now. Sorry that my dad was crazy, sorry that I was an ass, probably sorry I'd come back and she couldn't just carry on without me.

I didn't want her to be sorry.

I couldn't think of what to say to her, and eventually she left anyway. I just wanted her to know that I loved her. I just wanted her to say she loved me. I just wanted her to prove that she wasn't going to go anywhere.

I stood up and walked through the room to the bathroom.

SPOV

I'd just finished brushing my teeth when Eric appeared in the bathroom with me. No sooner did I hear the lock click to signal his arrival, but it seemed he was right there with me. He did have a terrible habit of sneaking up on me when I had nowhere to go. Not that I really minded, but it was a very small bathroom even with just me in it.

He came and stood behind me, put his hands on my hips and rested his head on the back of my neck. I turned around and put my arms around him. I really hoped we could just forget this day ever happened and carry on with our holiday. Surely Eric would feel a lot better now the visit was behind us?

Eric kissed me, and then he kissed me a bit harder. And then I realised that I was pinned between the tiny sink and Eric. And I really was pinned, Eric was pushing against me quite enthusiastically and it was a little bit uncomfortable having the edge of the sink digging into my lower back.

Eric's hand crept up under my tank top and grabbed my breast, giving it a good squeeze, before running his thumb across the nipple. OK, well I could see where he wanted this to go now, but to be honest, I wasn't so sure. Tiny motel bathrooms are not built for sex; they're barely built for brushing your teeth in.

But I had to admit that it felt nice, rubbing up against Eric like this. Apart maybe from the annoying sink which might leave a bruise. Bits of me had definitely forgotten they were in a hotel bathroom and were thinking more along the lines that it was a long time since we'd had sex.

Which did remind me that there were kids in the other room…"You locked the door, didn't you?" I whispered to Eric.

"Yeah" he breathed out.

"Good" I replied, and Eric took that as his cue to move his hand into my pyjama shorts and start rubbing me in a way which really tipped me over into maybe forgetting about our current surroundings. At least until Eric shoved me further back on the sink and the tap collided with my back. "Ow!" I said.

"Sorry" Eric muttered, only sounding a little bit sorry. He kind of shoved me sideways so I only had one bum-cheek on the sink now. Which was probably a better idea, because God knows, I didn't want to break the sink off the wall. How would we explain that? So I just clung to Eric as best I could, hoping he could manage most of my weight with the one arm he wasn't using elsewhere.

But all this had taken me a little bit out of the moment and although I was still enjoying what Eric was doing, and although I could tell that Eric was really enjoying it by the way his erection was pressing against my inner thigh, I wasn't sure I really wanted to go all the way and actually have sex. I was sure there was other stuff we could do. We'd managed in Hawaii, after all.

I was trying to figure out how to communicate this to Eric, as I was worried that he was starting to get past the stage of actually listening to words and only really responding to me poking a fingernail into his side. He'd managed to push my top up far enough on one side and he was hunched over with my nipple in his mouth, rolling it around with his tongue. I realised if I was going to say something, I'd better do it soon.

But then Eric lifted his head and looked straight at me. "Sookie" he said. "I really want you". And then he just waited for me to respond. I got the feeling there was more to this than just sex.

"I really want you too, Eric" I said. He gave me a half-smile, which was the biggest smile I'd seen from him all day, and then he kissed me, while simultaneously trying to get my pyjama shorts off. The fact I was still half-balanced on the sink kind of hampered that manoeuvre when he only had one free hand, so he pulled me down onto my feet, yanked the shorts down a bit, and then lifted me up again, almost in one quick movement. I was kind of impressed he could manhandle me so easily, because, despite losing a bit of weight, I still wasn't light.

Eric himself was still fully clothed though, so I risked letting go of him with one hand, wedged my leg around his hip to compensate, and tried undoing the button on his shorts one-handed. It took me a moment or two, but I got it undone, and then I pulled the zipper down and gave the shorts a bit of a push, hoping that they'd fall. It might have been easier if I could have seen what I was doing, but Eric had a mouthful of boob again and his head was blocking my view.

And I lost interest in whether Eric still had underwear on or not when he moved his hand back and inserted two fingers inside me. I tried pushing my hips towards his hand, although it wasn't a smooth move as my bottom was kind of stuck to the sink and I had to dislodge it. It felt good though. In fact the whole thing felt pretty good, bathroom or no bathroom.

One of Eric's hands disappeared and I assumed he decided to remove his own underwear. Then he grabbed me and moved me away from the sink, pressing me up against the rather cold tiles and with a bit of adjusting, pushed in. "Fuck Sookie" Eric murmured. "You feel so good."

"Yeah, you too" I said, hoping that he might start moving, because that would be really good I thought.

Eric did start moving, and despite the fact each thrust pressed me back against tiled wall it felt great. It was nice being pressed up against Eric though, and he was holding me so tightly I could feel the heat of his body even through his t-shirt.

And then I stopped even noticing the tiles at my back. Eric had filled up all my senses and there wasn't room for anything else. He sped up and I had to admit that Eric's fervour was kind of erotic.

I managed to get my foot onto the sink and tilt my hips up slightly, which increased the tension I was starting to feel. "Are you close?" Eric murmured.

"Yeah" I said, and Eric took that as my encouragement to move a hand from my bottom so he could put his thumb back on my clit. And that indeed did send me straight into an orgasm. "Oh" I murmured, pressing my face into Eric's shoulder and hoping I didn't dislodge myself from his grasp.

But he was holding onto me tighter than ever now, as his thrusts grew harder and deeper. "I love you" he chanted. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

"I love you too" I said, as I felt Eric's back tense and then the tell-tale shivers as he reached his own finish.

Eric's head dropped to my shoulder and he stood there, panting, and still holding me up. I really hoped his arms didn't give out on us. But slowly he let me down so my feet were on the ground.

"I'm sorry" he said, which was really not what I was expecting.

"It's fine" I said. "You didn't let me go. Honestly, I felt more secure than that time on the nursing chair when you got me to face away from you and I was worried I was going to be flung into the middle of the room."

"No…I, well…" Eric seemed to be trying to say something else. "I didn't let you go" he said in the end.

"No, I trust you not to" I said, smiling at him, and trying to break the sombre mood.

"Yeah…you do" Eric said, seeming a bit puzzled by that.

I reached over and grabbed one of the washcloths so I could clean up a bit before bed. Eric finally got around to removing his clothes properly and brushed his teeth wearing just his underwear. I put my arms around his waist and hugged him. "I love you" I said again. I couldn't really do anything to make his childhood better for him, but I hoped that if he just knew that I loved him anyway, really loved him, it might help him. I couldn't think what else would. And I needed him; I needed him to be the dad who was going to make my kids' childhoods more than OK.

"I love you too, you're just…" Eric turned around to face me. He ran a hand over my cheek. "You're everything." He looked so lovely and so solemn standing there that it just brought tears to my eyes. "But don't cry" he said. "Because that's not the kind of wetness I really came in here for."

"Yeah. Thanks!" I said, wiping my eyes.

"Oh, you're welcome Sookie" Eric said, kissing my forehead and almost sounding like himself.

We tiptoed through to our bed in the middle of the room. Eric paused, and then went over and hauled Felicia back to her side of her bed, and then adjusted Tray so he wasn't half hanging out of his. I got under the covers and when Eric joined me I moved so I was lying with my head on his shoulder and one arm thrown across him, the other one kind of tucked between us.

"Everyone's OK" Eric said quietly, and I wasn't sure whether he was just updating me on the kids he'd moved or asking me a question. "Yeah" I whispered, hoping that covered it. "We are."

EPOV

I'm not entirely certain if I really went into the bathroom to have sex with Sookie. Mostly I just wanted to be near her. I'd felt better when she was sitting on the balcony with me, and when she left all I had were my own thoughts which were pretty shitty ones.

I wished I'd done it all fucking differently. I wished we hadn't come, or I'd told my father what a fucking shit bastard he is. I wished I hadn't been so shitty with my own kids…I wished it had all been different.

But I couldn't change it. I could only move forward. And I just wanted to move on with Sookie because without her…fuck. I'd be nothing. I wanted her to know that. I really hoped she knew that.

And it was better when I was with her. It made the rest of the world just fall away and the only fucking thing left was us, was me and Sookie and the fact that she fucking loved me despite everything.

Only when I woke up the next morning, the rest of the world had disappeared. Well, Sookie and the kids had anyway. Fuck. That was kind of scary. Where the fuck could they be?

I dressed quickly, and noticed that she hadn't at least taken the keys to the car. Not that I thought she couldn't drive in the States, but she'd tried to climb in the driver's door so many times now I was worried she'd drift left and kill everyone.

But there weren't many places they could all be in a shitty motel.

I walked out onto the walkway that ran around the building and I could hear…well I thought it was Amelia. And Felicia. So that was a good sign. I followed the sounds and found them all on a scrubby patch of grass out by the main road.

"Hello" Sookie said, turning around as I approached. "You're up."

"Yeah…I slept through everyone else getting up?"

"You did. Which is kind of a miracle, and I wanted to ring the Vatican, but I had to keep lifting Tray off our bed because he was trying to investigate the noise you were making…"

"What noise?" I asked.

"Breathing. Well…snoring. So I cleared them all out for a run around."

I sat down on the ground next to Sookie and took a closer look at what the kids were doing. Amelia and Felicia had bottles in their hands and were blowing bubbles which Sam and Tray were trying to catch. Tray kept yelling "Bup-pull! Bup-pull!" like the slightly disturbed fish in _Finding Nemo_, and Sam just yelled "Hi'er! Hi'er!" to Amelia, because he wanted to jump for them.

And then Felicia saw me sitting there. "Daddy!" she yelled, running over. "Want to see how big a bubble I can blow?"

"Yeah" I said. "Show me."

She blew a bubble, which probably wasn't the largest I've ever seen. "That's really big" I said to her.

"Yeah, I might have another go" she said, blowing again.

"I can do a _really_ big one" Amelia said, coming over and joining in. Sam watched for a moment and then ran straight for me in a diving tackle, pushing me over onto my back on the grass. I guess he was glad to be out of the motel room. Tray, I think, landed on top of Sam, confident that he was the smallest and no one would mind.

"Oh, watch out! You knocked me and my bubble went wonky!" Amelia complained.

"Rar!" Tray roared, completely disinterested in Amelia's problems.

"You need more stuff, you know. On the blowing bit. That'll make them bigger" Felicia tried to tell Amelia.

Amelia just said "I know!" in a rather annoyed voice.

Meanwhile Sam had tried to turn around to grab Tray and in the process just about put his knee in my eye. "Just be careful with Daddy" Sookie said. "We can't get him fixed if you break him. It's too expensive here."

"I's not breakin' stuffs!" Sam said indignantly, while Tray just roared again, and I tried to hold onto the pair of them before they rolled off me.

"No, but just remember to be gentle."

"I'm OK" I said, moving Sam's leg off my mouth.

"He's OK" Sam announced, trying to shake Tray off.

"LOOK! I made a really big one! Look, look Mum! See it! It's gone right up to the roof!" Amelia yelled, above all the other noise.

"Yeah, that's big" Felicia said, sounding kind of subdued. She thought for a moment. "I think I can do bigger, though" she said cheerfully, and she started trying to show us that she could.

SPOV

Eric seemed a lot better the morning after the visit to his dad's. Well, at first he just seemed asleep, which was kind of miraculous given the fact there were four kids in the room with him and at one stage Tray was almost sitting on his head and only moments away from seeing what happened if you held Daddy's nose while he slept.

They at least all seemed to have recovered from the previous day's visit. I guess because they didn't have to live it every day. And they were young, they could just leave it behind. Plus I'd thought to buy bubble liquid at an ABC store in Honolulu so I got that out and we had bubbles on the front lawn of the motel complex, to some strange looks from the people who passed by. But I didn't care. The kids were having fun, and that was the important thing.

They had more fun when Eric turned up though. Mainly because it gave the girls someone else to show off for, and the boys someone to wrestle who wasn't going to come complaining to me about it. I really didn't know what we'd all do without him, and I was bloody glad I hadn't had to find out the night before.

We grabbed a quick breakfast from a place down the road from the motel, where Sam took a shine to the waitress who kept calling him 'Sweetie' and demonstrated his best sugar packet building skills for her benefit, and then we packed up and hit the road, heading south towards Disneyland. That fact got the kids so excited that I was worried that the next couple of days spent getting down there were going to be a bit trying, but luckily everyone behaved.

Eric seemed to be in an especially good mood, and managed to turn a blind eye to everything that was going on in the back of the car. Maybe it wasn't always the best strategy, especially when I nodded off for a bit after lunch and woke up to discover Tray had tipped most of his water all over himself, but it was better than being stuck with grumpy Eric for any longer than we had to be.

It was only when we got to the motel we were stopping at for the night that I realised we had picked up extra luggage at some point. "What's in that bag?" I asked Eric, as we unloaded everything while the kids waited for us in the room.

"Oh" he said. "Um…just some stuff. From Dad's place. _My_ stuff."

"Like what?"

He pulled the bag towards him and unzipped it. "I said Sam could have this one day" he said, pulling out a baseball glove.

"Oh" I said. "Is that why he looked so happy after you guys went to the bathroom."

Eric shrugged. "It may have been more that I said they could share this." He pulled out a rather battered looking Gameboy.

"You are going to be popular" I said to him.

"Needs batteries" Eric said, putting it back in the bag and zipping it up. "I thought it might be useful on the flight home, though."

"Yeah. Probably sitting around in the airport too." Eric pulled another suitcase out of the boot of the car. I remembered something I'd done.

"I've got a confession to make, about the visit" I said.

"What?" Eric asked, sharply.

"I took something too. Only it wasn't mine…it's kind of yours though…" I trailed off. Eric looked confused.

I reached into my bag, which I had slung across my body and pulled out the photo and showed it to Eric.

"Fuck" he said, taking it from me.

"Yeah. Sorry. I feel really bad about it…just, you know, I felt bad you didn't have anything…from your childhood. And I thought your dad probably wouldn't, um, mind…" Eric was still just staring at the photo.

"I just…fuck. I always hated this photo" Eric looked up and smiled at me.

"It's a lovely photo" I said. "It really captures you. And you had a really cute little bottom."

"Had Sookie?"

"Well, it's still pretty good now. But look how cute you were. And look how much you look like the boys, especially Tray. I think that's why I wanted it. So we can show them, when they're older."

"We're not showing this to anyone" Eric said darkly.

"Oh yeah, I'm hanging it somewhere prominent. Like the family room."

"Mmm, I might just hang onto it" Eric said, looking around for somewhere to put it.

"Give it back! I stole that myself, I get to keep it" I said, but Eric just held it above his head and I couldn't reach it. I jumped a couple of times, but all that did was make Eric say "The bouncing's good" so I stopped that and glared at him. I was considering climbing onto the bumper of the car and having another swipe at it, when he brought it back down and gave it to me.

"Thank you" he said, kissing my cheek.

"What? For stealing naked baby pictures of you. Anytime, mate."

Eric laughed, and shut the door of the boot, picking up a suitcase in each hand. I put the picture away and grabbed two smaller bags. Amelia appeared on the balcony above us and we heard her yell "They're coming now!" into the room, before she disappeared again.

I started following Eric towards the stairs that led up to our room. "You know" I said to him. "I did get one thing out of seeing you with your dad." I immediately regretted saying that as soon as I saw all the muscles in Eric's back stiffen.

"What's that, Sookie?" he asked, without looking back at me.

"You're so different" I said quietly.

We'd reached the bottom of the stairs and Eric stopped and turned around. "Different?" he asked.

"Yeah…you're really nothing like him, are you? I mean…he's…I can't imagine…" I wasn't sure how to phrase 'he's a crappy dad and you're not' without insulting Eric. "You're great, with the kids" I said in the end.

Eric stared off into space. "Why aren't you up here yet?" Amelia yelled.

"In a minute" I yelled back.

"In a minute" Amelia yelled back into the room, as she went back inside. "So that means I'm in charge still."

"You OK?" I asked Eric.

"Tray did POOS!" Felicia yelled.

"I'll be there shortly" I yelled up.

"It smells!" Felicia yelled back at me, before she disappeared again.

Eric still hadn't said anything, and I was getting a bit worried. "So…you don't think I'm like him?" he asked.

"Nope. He was…well, he was kind of grumpy. I mean, you can be grumpy…but not all the time. And look at all the games you play with the kids? Even leaves in the bag kind of counts." Leaves in the bag was Eric's invention, and it involved him sitting with a garden bag on the deck, blowing a whistle, and the boys running and grabbing the leaves off the lawn and stuffing them in the bag, until Eric arbitrarily declared a winner. Sometimes even Felicia joined in, lured by the promise of beating her brothers. I figured he didn't have too many more years before they figured out what was happening, and why it was always played on lawnmowing day, but in the meantime, at least everyone got something out of it.

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. Then he shrugged. "Plus, I have a cute bottom" he said, picking up the suitcases and starting to walk up the stairs.

"Well" I said, following him up while balancing a bag in each hand. "I don't think your dad stood up for me to see, so I really can't comment on his."

"Euw, Sookie."

"You brought it up. I think you'd win anyway. I'd always pick you."

"Mum!" Felicia yelled, as we approached the door. "Mum, Tray's nappy stinks and Sam's done poos in the toilet and needs his bum wiped."

"Rock, paper, scissors?" I asked Eric.

EPOV

The vacation, which Sookie still insisted was a holiday, got a fuck-load better the further we got away from my dad.

And by the time we got to Disneyland, it was a lot of fun. Even with the kids. Well, they were kind of who we were at Disneyland for, really, and I could cope with my hundredth trip on the Buzz Lightyear ride so Sam and Tray could shoot targets, and I could cope with meeting fucking princesses and fairies and riding in teacups and over Neverland for them. Because I loved them. So fucking much. And I'd never figure out why my dad didn't really love me like that, but it didn't fucking matter. He could sit in that fucking chair until he died and he'd never have what I had.

SPOV

The best thing about Disneyland was that it tired the kids out, so they slept really well. We had four full days there which meant multiple trips on lots of the rides. We did have to hide from Tray and Sam how good some of the rides they didn't go on were, but they got wind of the sheer awesomeness of the Indiana Jones ride and were a bit disappointed. "Next time" Eric said. "Next time you guys'll be bigger and you can go on it. So…let's do the Buzz ride again, OK?"

Eric was much keener on the rides than I was. I was better at supervising cool-down time in the hotel swimming pool, and nap-time in the middle of the day. We were staying in a hotel that offered proper family rooms so we actually got our own bedroom for the first time in the whole holiday. That was nice, and I very much enjoyed having sex in an actual bed and not a bathroom.

On our last night there we treated ourselves to dinner at the Blue Bayou restaurant which overlooked the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We'd been on the Pirates ride several times of course, and we'd been persuaded to buy a fair amount of pirates merchandise for the boys.

The restaurant was more Deep South than pirate cove however, and the prices weren't cheap. I just hoped everyone behaved.

"Hi" said the waiter who came over to our table when we'd been seated. "I'm your server, Lafayette. What can I get you-all to drink?"

"I want the special drink, with the cup you get to keep" Amelia informed him.

"Me too" Felicia said.

"Coke" Sam tried. Yeah, there'd been an incident where Sam and Tray had finished one of Eric's drinks and Tray had been exceedingly Tigger-like for an entire afternoon. Sam had been trying to get some more Coke ever since.

"They'll all have the punch" Eric said, and then he looked at me. "Wine?" he asked.

"Um…" I wondered. Technically we were trying. Sort-of. Chances were slim though, really. "Yeah" I said. "Go on."

Lafayette left with the promise to be back soon. "Do you think that's his real name?" I asked Eric. "Or would he have to change it to fit in with the theme?"

"Who?" Eric asked.

"Lafayette."

"Who?"

"The waiter. The one that was just here." Eric looked at me like I'd made him up. In the end he shrugged and went back to the menu.

Our drinks came, and we gave our orders over. Amelia and Felicia were playing noughts and crosses without too much arguing. Sam was watching Eric draw a series of ever more elaborate cars for him, and Tray invented a game by dropping his cutlery so poor Lafayette kept compelled to pick it up whenever he went past.

I sipped my wine. It was rather good.

The only incident to note was when Lafayette tried to remove my salad before my main arrived. "You're not done with that?" he asked.

"No…I wanted to eat it. With my main."

"Your main?"

"Well...entree? Whatever comes next. As a side-salad. With other food."

"Oh. Uh…OK" Lafayette said, letting go of the plate and backing away.

I looked at Eric who was sniggering at me. "What?" I asked. "I just don't understand the whole 'eat the salad separately' thing. I want to eat it with something."

"Yeah…but you looked like you were going to stab him with your fork" Eric said. "Shit, he's going to want a huge tip now because he had to deal with the crazy foreign woman."

"I am neither crazy nor foreign, thank you very much. It's not my fault you guys invented weird rules for eating salad."

"Uh-huh, sure Sookie" Eric said, taking another sip of his wine.

"Anyway, Jason's the only person I've actually stabbed with a fork" I said.

Amelia's eyes went wide. "You stabbed Uncle Jase?"

"He tried to steal my roast potatoes" I explained. "It was totally justified."

After dinner was over, and we'd tipped Lafayette I didn't want to know how much, just like I didn't want to hear Eric saying it was OK his wife was from New Zealand, we walked over to watch them put on the fireworks display.

Tray was flagging, and Eric held him in his arms, until they actually started, when he passed him to me and picked up Sam instead. The kids were enthralled and I enjoyed it a lot too. That wine had really gone to my head. I guess I was out of practice of drinking.

At the end of the display Tinkerbell flew in, suspended on a wire. "Look!" Amelia shouted. "It's Tinkerbell!" Just in case those around us hadn't figured it out yet.

When it was over we walked back to the hotel and put the kids to bed. "I love Disneyland" Amelia said, sleepily. "I don't want to ever go home."

"Not even to tell everyone at school about it?" Eric asked.

"Yeah…maybe for that. And to see Bob. I miss Bob."

"Me too" I agreed.

"I miss Finn" Felicia admitted. "And I kind of miss school."

"Really?" I asked.

"Well…running around at school" she said, shrugging.

"What do you miss Sam?" Eric asked him.

"Mummy's food. I want…shep'erd's pie" he said.

"Yeah, I could go for that" Eric said.

Tray was unlikely to admit to missing anything, but I wonder if maybe he missed the mud in the back garden. Sunshine was all very well, but sometimes you just needed a change.

Eric and I climbed into the bed in our room. "Is the alarm set for the morning?" I asked.

"Yeah…but I doubt we'll need it" he said.

"I know. But it would be just our luck they all sleep in for once and we miss the flight" I replied.

Eric turned off the light and we lay in the dark, facing each other. "So…did you like the happiest place on earth?" I asked him.

"I don't think it is" Eric said.

"What? You didn't like Disneyland?" I asked.

"I did. I loved it. But only because you guys were here. Otherwise…well, it's just another place. I think I like home best. That's my happiest place."

"Wow" I said. "We'd better you get you out of here, you really have been Disney-fied."

"I mean it though" he said. "I love our home. I love you, and the kids. I don't want to ever hurt you."

"I know. And I trust you not to. You know that."

"Yeah, I do." Eric leaned over and kissed me. "I really do" he murmured, as he rolled on top of me and I moved my legs apart so he could lie in between them.

"I love you, Eric" I said, when he pulled back. "And I want you."

"That's good" Eric said. "Because I want you too" and he dipped his head to kiss my neck. "I'll always want you."

**Thanks for reading!**


	101. Bonus Chapter: An Unusual Souvenir

**A/N Yeah, I know! I'm still going. I keep getting ideas...so now, well I have no predictions. My crystal ball needs a decent clean, like most of the stuff around here. But I am still so very, very grateful that so many of you are still happy to journey along with these characters. It really does mean a lot to know you guys are reading and letting me know when you like stuff. **

**Now I wrote some of this with the laptop balanced on my lap. Which would have been OK, except that my female cat thinks she's the official laptop around here and tried to sit on my lap anyway. So any stray letters are entirely due to the paws that were trying to make the whole arrangement more comfortable.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I turned the shower off and realised that I hadn't thought to drape a towel over the door before I got in there. Bugger. I had just intended to have a quick rinse-off before bed while the house was nice and quiet. The kids were, I hoped, all in bed and Eric was off at some work function. So I'd ditched the ironing in favour of a shower as I felt a bit tired and generally under the weather.

I think the trip was catching up with me, we'd been back for about three weeks and I was finally starting to feel like we were getting back into a routine. Well, Tray had stopped expecting me to roll out a new bed for him every night, although it was becoming increasingly obvious that we needed to get him an actual bed and move him out of the cot. He kept trying to climb into Sam's bed and Sam wasn't buying that at all, and was fond of just pushing him off. So far he'd avoided serious injury, but it was only a matter of time.

I stepped out of the shower and realised that the reason I hadn't hung a towel over the shower door was that I'd taken them all out of the bathroom earlier to wash, and hadn't replaced them. Somehow I'd been so intent on a nice shower all by myself that I'd forgotten that bit of the day. Poo.

Eric chose that moment to open the bathroom door. "It's m..." he started, but I just spoke over him. I did actually know who it was. And I was cold.

"I need a towel. Go get me one" I said, pointing past him through the door and hoping that signified the urgency of the situation.

"Oh, well…hang on" Eric said, disappearing again with a funny look on his face, leaving me hugging myself in an effort to keep warm. At least the under-floor heating was on.

After what was probably a minute, but felt like a lot longer Eric reappeared with a towel. It wasn't the right towel. It belonged to a set from the main bathroom, and didn't really work in this bathroom, but I wasn't going to argue with him.

However, as he handed it to me he sort of cocked his head to one side and stared at me, which made me feel quite self-conscious and definitely more inclined to be grumpy with him. "What?" I asked, as I wrapped the towel around my torso and tried to warm up again.

"You're pregnant" Eric said.

"What?"

"Pregnant" Eric repeated, for those of us in the bathroom who were a little slow that evening.

"What? No…just…" I suddenly realised it did kind of make sense. Well, it was a possibility anyway. I hadn't had a period since we were in Hawaii. "What makes you so sure, anyway?" I asked, as I tried to dry myself and Eric lounged against the bathroom vanity.

"Well" he said, looking pleased that I'd asked him to present all the amazing evidence he thought he'd collated. "For one thing, your boobs are bigger."

"Might just be that my period's coming."

"And your nipples are darker."

"Um…" I peered down the front of the towel. I couldn't tell if they were or not, and I couldn't tell whether it made me feel weird or not that Eric could. Or thought he could, anyway. "It's probably just the light in here" I said in the end.

"No, they're much darker than they normally look in here. Plus you can see you're starting to round out." Eric was obviously sticking to his view of the world, but I don't know why I should have expected anything else. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times Eric had ever said 'well actually, maybe I am wrong.' Possibly I'd only even need one finger.

"Round out?" I asked, feeling even more self-conscious now and trying to work out how I could get my pjs on without removing the towel first. I pulled on my pyjama pants, but it was kind of awkward and Eric just sighed, but continued standing there watching me. It wasn't that I was particularly used to privacy, I did have a lot of kids after all, but I wasn't sure I really wanted his scrutiny right at the moment. Not when he was trying to work out if I was pregnant or just fat.

I supposed I could be pregnant. I'd been talking myself out of the possibility of it happening…but it might have.

I dropped the towel and reached for my top. "There, see?' Eric said, as he almost poked me in the stomach. "You can see there's a bump there."

"That's not a bump. That's macaroni cheese." Or just plain old fat anyway.

"There's macaroni cheese?" Eric asked, beginning to lose interest in me.

"Yeah, there's leftovers" I said, pulling my top over my head. "Didn't they feed you?"

Eric shrugged. So that probably meant they had, but he didn't think it counted. I suspected he sometimes got much nicer stuff than homemade macaroni cheese, but he was too polite to say.

"Anyway" he continued, as I took my hair out of the ponytail it was in and gave it a comb through, "the clincher is that you haven't had a period in like…forever."

"You pay _that_ much attention to me?" I asked.

"I do notice the little marks on the calendar" Eric said, huffily. "And, you know, the other signs…"

"Uh-huh" I said, not really wanting to know what the 'other signs' were. "Of course it might just be early menopause." I thought it was unlikely, hoped it was unlikely, anyway, but I didn't see why Eric's version should be the only official one.

Eric looked at me and frowned. I kept on putting on my moisturiser. My skin did seem to be a lot dryer at the moment. "Um…but are you having hot flashes, or, um…dryness or anything?" I looked at Eric. I didn't think that last question was talking about the skin on my face.

"Seriously Eric, I'm not sure I should let you loose with Google anymore. What the hell have you been looking up?"

"Uh…I think that was from TV…" Eric said, scrutinising me again. "But I think you're definitely pregnant."

"Well…I might be, I guess" I conceded. "But let's go and get you your macaroni cheese."

I walked out of the bathroom, but Eric stayed where he was. "You're not going to do a test?" he asked.

"Not in front of you. And I haven't got one anyway." I walked to the wardrobe and pulled out my dressing gown and put it on.

"You haven't?" Eric asked, kind of incredulously, coming into the bedroom. "But we were trying…so wouldn't it have been a good idea to get one in preparation? After last time's debacle with Amelia getting hold of it?" Eric took off his shirt and replaced it with a t-shirt that had seen better days and which had been lying on the floor beside his side of the bed, and then he pulled out a pair of old trackpants which had holes all around the bottom out of his drawer.

"Well maybe in hindsight, but I didn't. So we'll have to wait" I said. I thought waiting might be a good idea. I didn't want to get my hopes up.

"Oh" Eric said, stepping out of his suit pants and into the track pants. "Oh, but I still think you're pregnant." He started to follow me into the hallway.

"You'll have to wait to find out."

"Want to bet on it?" Eric asked.

"No" I said, walking out of the bedroom and into the hallway.

"So I am right" Eric said.

"No, I just don't want to bet on something like that." I didn't want to give this more of a build-up than it already had. I was already dreading what would happen if I did do the test the next day and it wasn't positive.

"Mmm…I'm right though" Eric said, patting me on the shoulder.

"Sometimes you're not" I reminded him. "Remember Samantha?"

"Who's Manfa?" Sam asked. Bugger, I hadn't seen him come wandering out of his bedroom.

"No one you're ever likely to meet" Eric said. "And shouldn't you be in bed?" he added.

Sam shrugged. "You wasn't here" he said to Eric. "For pirates." Pirates had been huge since the trip to Disneyland, and bathtime was prime pirating time.

"Apparently I'm a crappy pirate" I said. "And far too worried about the possibility of the bathroom flooding every time something was being sunk."

"You hafta push dem under, real hard" Sam said, frowning at me. "A-va wise dey don' stay sunken." Sam looked at me like my failure to grasp this important fact was the most baffling thing he'd ever come across.

"But water stays in the bathtub" I pointed out. "That's the whole point of the bath."

Sam sighed. "But we's _pirates_! An' pirates don' care abouts de borin' stuffs. Daddy said…"

"And it's bedtime for you" Eric said, pushing Sam into his bedroom. "Say goodnight to Mummy."

"'night Mummy!" Sam said, blowing me a kiss, just as I heard Tray's voice go "Da-da? Da-da?"

"'Night!" I called into the room, and then I left Eric to try to return the boys to some semblance of sleepiness and went to heat him up some of the macaroni. As I pulled the container of leftovers out of the fridge and scooped some into a bowl, I pondered the pregnancy thing. I hadn't gone off any food yet, or felt particularly sick, so maybe I was just imagining it. Maybe Eric was just imagining it. This was a worry in itself because if he started to wish me pregnant and I wasn't, then he was going to be very disappointed.

But there was still the question of the disappearing period. Surely that was a big sign?

The microwave dinged and I put on oven gloves to pull the bowl out as Eric walked into the kitchen. "Are they OK?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said. "Well, Tray didn't want to lie down again, so I told him if he didn't he'd rock the boat and fall overboard, and Sam kept telling me I have to eat one of the muffins because he made them. Are there muffins?"

"Yep" I said. I put the bowl on the kitchen table and Eric grabbed a spoon and sat down in front of it. I sat next to him. "We made them during Tray's naptime. Well, I made them. Sam ate a lot of the muffin mix, and then said he had a sore tummy." Sam kind of liked it now that he'd decided he was too big for naps and he got me to himself while his brother slept, but it was hard work trying to distract him so he didn't go wandering into their room and wake Tray up, and it was hard work trying to get Tray to go in there without Sam in the first place.

"This's good" Eric said between mouthfuls.

"So they really didn't feed you?" I asked.

"Not much" Eric said, still mainly concentrating on his macaroni.

"Well I'll doubt you'll need a muffin after this" I ventured.

"I promised Sam I'd have one" Eric said, finishing the last few spoonfuls up.

"You can make the coffee then" I said, taking his bowl to rinse and put in the dishwasher.

"Um…" Eric said, turning around in his seat. "Are you sure you don't want tea?"

"No I don't feel like it…oh. Well, we don't know, I don't think I have to be that careful yet…" I opened the container that had the muffins and pushed it towards the coffeemaker.

"But, um…" Eric looked like he was trying to find a way to phrase it. "The caffeine?"

"You are not the caffeine police" I said, sounding a bit stern, even to my own ears. "If you were you would do a better job of keeping Tray away from it, remember he got into your office and drained that coffee you'd left in there?"

"At least it was cold" Eric said.

"Because it had been in there for God knows how many days. No wonder I can never find a clean cup." I took two out of the cupboard and put them on the bench, next to the coffeemaker, and then looked at Eric pointedly.

He sighed, and then got up and walked over to the coffeemaker. "I still think you're pregnant" he said, as he switched it on.

"You're not going to let it go, are you?" I asked, helping myself to a muffin. I was hungry, but that could mean anything.

"Well, not when I'm right. All the evidence is pointing to it."

"Evidence, yeah" I snorted. "It's kind of circumstantial. And vague. What are you going to do next, sniff me?"

"I don't have to sniff you" Eric said, kind of sniffily. "I can see."

"Oh, bollocks Eric. You're seeing what you want to."

"I'm seeing what's there. It's not my fault you haven't noticed."

I sighed. He wasn't backing down. "Well, you missed your true calling then. You would have made a wonderful witch-doctor, wandering around, looking at naked women and divining pregnancies."

"It only works with you" Eric said. "Because I have a comparison, and I get to see you naked all the time."

"Who was naked?" Amelia asked.

"No one" I replied, while she stood in the doorway and looked at me suspiciously.

"Someone was. Daddy said…"

"What did you want, Ames?" Eric asked.

"Well…I had something to tell Mum."

"I hope it's important" Eric said.

"Yeah, it is" Amelia said, and then she came over to me. "Mum, don't let Felicia use my hairties tomorrow."

"What?" I asked.

"My hairties." Amelia was giving me the same look Eric had when he was trying to tell me I was pregnant and I was being kind of dumb about the whole thing. "The ones she had in today were mine, not hers. I didn't like it."

"But they're hairties. You steal mine all the time" I replied.

"No I don't, yours are boring. But Felicia took mine."

"It was probably me, I just grabbed what I could find in the bathroom when I was trying to do her hair" I said.

"Well…don't. That's not right. Use hers."

"There were time-pressures" I said in my defence. "We'd had to find your reading book so it could go back today."

"It was in my room" Amelia said.

"Well, we know that _now. _You swore blind it was in the kitchen because that's where you'd last seen it."

"It was!" Amelia said. "I don't know how it ended up in my room, someone must have moved it."

"Who would have moved it?" I asked.

"Just…someone. Probably Felicia" Amelia said, shrugging.

"It couldn't have been you?" I asked.

"I didn't! I said that this morning. But you were too busy giving my hairties to Felicia."

"Oh, Amelia…" I said, but Eric cut in. "So the upshot is that there's no sharing of hairties, and Amelia, you need to keep track of your schoolbooks. OK, back to bed then."

"But…" Amelia started.

"Back to bed. 'Night, Ames" Eric handed me a cup that seemed to be 90% steamed milk and 10% coffee.

"Oh, alright then" Amelia grumbled. ""Night." She turned around and stomped off down the hall.

"What's this?" I asked Eric, holding the cup up.

He shrugged, and then took his cup and sat down at the table, remembered the muffins, and stood back up to take two out of the container, before sitting back down again.

"You know they think that's standard operating procedure?" I said, sitting down next to Eric again.

"What?" Eric asked, with his mouth full. Lovely.

"One for each hand. You offer something to Tray or Sam now and that's what they take, one for each hand."

"Seems sensible" Eric said, taking a sip of his coffee.

"How's your coffee?" I asked him. "Not too milky?"

"No, mine's good" he replied, smiling at me over the cup.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Felicia slowly inch her way into the kitchen. No one in this house seemed to want to stay in bed tonight. Felicia made eye-contact with me, and then scuttled over to Eric, who had been sitting with his back to the direction she'd arrived from.

"Hello" Eric said, as Felicia scrambled into his lap. "Why're you up?"

"Amelia was up" she said.

"But that doesn't mean everyone has to be" Eric explained.

"Couldn't sleep. I'm hungry" Felicia looked pointedly at Eric's muffin, and he held it out so she could take a bite.

"I don't see how you can be hungry" I said. "You had a big dinner. Plus yoghurt for dessert."

Felicia wrinkled her nose. "Yoghurt's not dessert. Ice cream is dessert, but you said no. Yoghurts just…yoghurt." She helped herself to some more of the muffin.

"Fine, but that still doesn't explain you out here eating muffin when you should be in bed" I said. Felicia didn't answer that one, she just settled further into Eric's lap, like he was going to protect her.

Admittedly, he still did really suck at taking her back to bed when she wandered round at night.

"How was school, Leesh?" Eric asked her.

"S'alright. Mr Pryor said we're going to the museum soon. Are you coming?" Felicia looked hopeful.

"I'll have to see" Eric said. He was over the novelty of school trips these days, but Felicia thought that it was only fair that she got the same treatment Amelia had.

"We're gonna go to the Maori concert they have there and look at the all the things they used to hunt with, and the big waka, and lots of other stuff. So it'll be good." Felicia looked at Eric expectantly.

"It depends on whether I'm free that day" Eric explained, probably trying to work out how he could schedule a day of appointments.

"But I said" Felicia announced.

"Said what?" Eric asked.

"That you're coming. Mr Pryor asked me if you would, and I said 'course you were."

"Oh. Um. OK" Eric said, finishing his coffee.

"Finn thinks it'll be cool if you come."

"Finn said that?" Eric asked.

Felicia shrugged. I suspected that Finn thought whatever Felicia thought, or at the very least, he didn't openly admit to thinking anything different.

"Well. I'll see. Now you'd better go back to bed" Eric lifted Felicia down to the floor.

"I'm not really sleepy."

"Perhaps if you lie down and close your eyes, you'll feel a bit sleepier" Eric suggested.

Felicia sighed, pulled a face, looked at the floor, and didn't move.

"It's bedtime, Leesh" Eric tried again. "You need to go to bed and I'll…well, I'll make sure I'm free on the day of the trip. You'll have to tell me when it is though."

Felicia beamed. "OK" she said. "'Night, Daddy" she leaned over and kissed Eric. "'Night, Mum" she said, kissing me.

"Brush your teeth again" I said.

Felicia mumbled something as she hustled out of the kitchen. Having got Eric's agreement to go on her school trip, she wasn't giving him the chance to change his mind.

"Well, that'll be fun for you" I said, finishing up my cup of milk and taking both cups over the sink.

"Yeah…" Eric said. "I suppose I can just stand at the back and hope that no one needs me for anything."

"Well, you can hope that's how it's going to go, anyway" I said. "More likely you'll lose Finn because he's so quiet you don't notice him."

Eric looked thoughtful. "Do you think I'd be allowed to tie him to Felicia?"

"Probably not" I said, putting the rinsed cups in the dishwasher and then packing the muffins away. Eric wandered over to clean the coffee machine. It was about the only thing around here he ever voluntarily cleaned. God knows what he thought I'd do to it.

"Felicia will like showing you off" I said. I leaned against the bench and sighed. "I worry she gets a bit lost sometimes."

"Lost?" Eric said. "I don't want to have to tie all the kids together; it'll be too hard to negotiate the displays if there are that many ropes."

"No…in the family" I said. It was something that had been worrying me for a while. "I just…well, it's hard to spread myself around. I think the only conversation I had with Felicia today was while I was trying to get her hair in a ponytail and she told me it hurt and she wants all her hair cut off like a boy's."

Eric shrugged. "We could cut it."

"Well, we _could_. But I think she'd regret it. But what I'm more worried about is the fact that I just don't get to spend time with them all alone. I mean, when there were two kids, it was a lot easier."

"So…Felicia got the attention then, rather than now" Eric said, as he rinsed out pieces of the coffeemaker in the sink.

"Yeah…but look at Tray. He doesn't really get much time with just me at all."

Eric shrugged. "I don't think Tray cares."

"He's only 21 months though. He might care one day." I stopped and thought. "I just feel like…like I'm being spread thinner and thinner and the process of taking care of four kids is stopping me actually spending any time with said children."

Eric stopped what he was doing, and looked at me, frowning. "So is this why you won't admit it?"

"Admit what?"

"That you're pregnant. You think another one would be too much work?"

"Well…for starters, I'm not, not admitting it I'm just waiting to do a test and find out for sure. But I am…well, I'm a little worried about doing it with five kids instead of four. I just wonder if there's enough of me to go around."

Eric looked thoughtful. "I'm here too" he said, after a while. "It's not just you."

"Well…us then. Whether there's enough of us to go around." It was one of my biggest fears these days, and I longed to have a conversation with my kids which didn't involve telling them what to do or merely sharing information. I thought I did OK, but sometimes I wasn't sure OK was really good enough.

Eric put all the bits of coffeemaker on the draining board to dry, and then wiped his hands before he put his arms around me. "You're a great mom" he said, and I didn't have the heart to correct him. "And you'll be just as great with five kids."

"We don't know that's happening" I said.

"We don't know if that's happening soon" Eric corrected, and I didn't want to correct him on that either.

"I've got to get dinner ready for tomorrow night." I stepped away from Eric and walked over to the pantry.

"What's going in the slow-cooker?" Eric asked, sounding interested.

"That predictable am I?" I asked, as I hauled the slow-cooker out of the pantry and set it up on the bench.

"Well, it's the tail-end of winter and you're working tomorrow…so, um, yeah. It's kind of a given" Eric said. "Not that I mind of course" he added, hastily.

"Fair enough. It's the Indian-spiced lamb."

"I like that one" Eric said happily.

"Yeah…I think everyone does. Although of course you can't give Amelia lamb if she's been anywhere near the lambs at Cornwall Park. But we haven't seen any yet this year."

"She likes lamb" Eric announced.

"You've really got to tell her that, not me." I thought for a bit. "I hope I've got some diced lamb…bugger. I'm just going to the freezer." I wandered off to the pantry to have a look at what was in there.

I had been certain I had bought diced lamb, but it was diced beef. I couldn't be bothered thinking of a new meal so I'd just do Indian spiced beef. That'd be OK.

I walked back to the kitchen with the packet of beef in my hand, only to find Eric had disappeared. Well, it was nearly bedtime anyway. I put the beef on the bench so it could defrost overnight and started organising the other ingredients. I only had one can of Indian spiced tomatoes and it needed two…but I had Moroccan tomatoes. Close enough.

I was just dicing an onion when Eric appeared in the kitchen again. He'd put a sweatshirt on. And shoes. And he was carrying his car keys.

"Um…are you going out?" I asked.

"Yeah. I thought, well. I thought we could do the test tonight."

"Oh." Part of me wanted to say 'what's this 'we' business', but I refrained. "OK" I said, looking back down at what the knife was doing.

"Um…are you crying?" Eric asked, as I sniffed.

"Onion" I replied. Stupid onion.

Eric came over to look more closely. Nice to see he was that suspicious of me, because really I wasn't upset. I was just…a bit emotional. But that had nothing to do with the fact the onion was making me weep.

It probably had a lot to do with the fact my period was bound to show up at any moment.

"OK, well I'll be back soon." Eric kissed my head and started to walk away, and then stopped. "The supermarket is open, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's 24 hours." That was kind of a novelty here. Eric was still annoyed by the fact that all the shops shut by about six in the evening unless it was a designated late shopping night, and, even then, they'd close by 9 o'clock. He didn't really want to go shopping at night, but it was the principle of the thing, and he felt short-changed somewhere.

He took a few more steps and turned back again. "They do sell them, don't they? Pregnancy tests? At the supermarket?"

"Yeah" I said again, going over to wash my hands now I'd finished the onion. "They do."

"Cool" Eric said. He disappeared around the corner, and then reappeared again. "Where?"

"What?" I asked.

"Where in the supermarket?"

"With the toiletries and medicines. Look for that aisle. You know, the one with the razor blades." He'd really not got around to taking up shaving again since we'd been back, and kept making vague excuses about not having any razor blades, when really, I thought, he figured he'd got this far not shaving so he couldn't be bothered starting again.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, ignoring the remark about razor blades. "OK. Bye." And then he disappeared again. Two seconds later Bob appeared and pointedly sat down next to his bowl.

"Now I know you got fed earlier" I said to him, "because I fed you myself."

Bob just sat there looking at me. "Oh, fine" I said. "I'll get you more biscuits."

EPOV

It was really fucking obvious Sookie was pregnant. Obvious to me, that is. She seemed to be in a state of denial about the whole thing, which I couldn't figure out at all. Surely by now she could work out the signs? No period usually equals pregnancy, for a start. End of fucking story.

But she was dismissive of the whole thing every time I brought it up, so the only way we were going to settle it was if she actually took a fucking test. So that left me, driving around to the supermarket on Dominion Road in order to prove to Sookie that she was actually pregnant.

I'd suspected at least since the weekend. I'd been working in my office and I'd come outside to join everyone else who'd been sent out to enjoy the late winter sun by Sookie. I'd sat on the deck and I'd been watching Sookie weed, which was a frustrating exercise at the best of times. I would have thought that the best plan would be to weed one patch and move onto another when it was clear.

But somehow Sookie never did that. She'd pull some weeds, then see some big weeds further down the garden and move onto those, and then maybe pull out some dead leaves or trim something, and then find some other weeds in another part of the yard, and slowly meander around doing whatever took her fancy. It got done in the end, but it looked a fucking painful way of doing it.

And then part-way through the whole procedure, around the time Tray decided that if I was just going to sit there on the deck, he was going climb on my back in the hope of a piggyback. He wasn't quite as stealthy as he thought he was, and it wasn't the just chubby arms over my shoulders that gave him away, but the giggling and occasional chants of "'old on!" that really alerted me to the fact he was there. So with Tray clinging to my back and hoping I'd stand up, I watched as Sookie wandered over to talk to Kennedy over the fence. Kennedy who was a week overdue and fucking miserable, but who still didn't seem to have a bump that was anywhere near as big as the ones Sookie usually had. But I didn't mention that to her.

She mentioned it enough herself. She'd spent all of Kennedy's fucking pregnancy telling me how lucky Kennedy was for having something she described as a 'long torso' which meant she didn't 'carry so high'. Like it was a contest that Kennedy had won. I had no fucking clue, but she'd look at me, and sigh, and say "Because you know what it's like for me, right? When my boobs pretty much meet the top of the bump and I look like a Weeble. You remember Weebles, right?"

There was never a good answer to any question like that, and I'd learned that was a great time to get distracted by something the kids were doing, or, if they weren't around, to urgently check my email on my phone.

But this time, when Sookie stood up and went over to talk to Kennedy, her top lifted up and I noticed that she did have the beginnings of a bump. I was sure of it. And then I started to wonder when her last period had been, because I couldn't remember when the last episode of tearful stomping had occurred.

And at that point, I realised what was going on. I was going to say something to Sookie, but she was busy trying to reassure Kennedy that the baby would come soon and if not, she was being induced in another few days and it would all be over one way or the other. I debated whether to tell her that sex was supposed to bring on labour. I'd learned that fact when Sookie was pregnant with Sam and I looked a whole lot of stuff up. I'd wondered if we'd get to that stage, but we never did.

Maybe I'd tell Danny if I ran into him.

Tray was getting a bit fed up with just clinging to me and yelled "'ang on! Go, go, go" loudly. So instead I stood up and jogged around the yard with Tray on my back giggling like this was the most fun thing we'd ever done.

"I wanna be nex'!" Sam yelled, coming over from where he'd been making a pile of stones in the corner of the yard. The stones were supposed to be there to make an edge around one of the gardens Sookie had planted, but Sam had appropriated them and I don't think she'd noticed yet.

"What're the stones for?" I asked him.

"S'a fort" Sam said.

"It's a good fort."

"Yeah…I need more stones though" Sam looked around to see what else he could find. Because I'd stopped to talk to Sam, Tray jabbed me in the side with his heels. "Go!" he yelled, so I did. "After it's your turn we'll have a look for something, OK?" I said to Sam.

"OK" he replied.

By the time I'd finished piggybacks, enhanced the fort with some sticks that Sookie had pruned off one of the bushes, watched how high Felicia could jump on the trampoline and listened to Amelia tell us all why it was so much better at Disneyland because spending a Sunday at home was really boring, I'd kind of missed the moment to tell Sookie. But I knew. And that moment when I'd seen her coming out of the shower I'd really fucking known. I just wasn't sure why she was so hell-bent on pretending it wasn't true.

I parked at the supermarket which was almost empty at this time of night. There was a drunk guy sitting outside, but he didn't exactly seem in a position to press me for any money, so I ignored him and walked inside. Aisle with the toiletries, Sookie had said, so I walked down and found the right aisle and then scanned the shelves. Bizarrely, they were beside the condoms, I would have thought people would come in to buy one or the other, so you'd be better to put something else beside the pregnancy tests. Like those vitamins you're supposed to take. I wondered if Sookie had any. I looked around, but I couldn't see them, so I gave up on that thought and looked back at the pregnancy tests.

I wasn't sure which one to buy…did I buy the one with three tests, or one? And what the hell was mid-stream?

As I was standing there, I became aware someone was hovering nearby. I looked to the side and saw a kid standing there; he couldn't have been more than about seventeen. He was holding an empty shopping basket and just staring at me, except when I looked at him, he turned to the side and grabbed something off one of the shelves, it might have been shampoo, and started looking at it like it was the most interesting thing ever.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what his fucking problem was, but he seemed harmless, so I turned back to the tests. Fuck it, I had no clue. I grabbed a box and walked towards the checkout, past the kid who immediately moved over to where I'd been standing.

Of course. I'd been fucking blocking him getting to the condoms. They really needed a better arrangement of the merchandise in here.

By the time I got home again, Sookie was in bed with her book open. She looked a bit red around the eyes and I wasn't entirely convinced it was just because of the onions. I took the test out of the plastic bag and held it out to Sookie. "You go and pee on that" I said. "And then we'll know."

Sookie rolled her eyes and put her book down. "Wow, you say such romantic things to me, Eric."

"It's not romance…it's like, um…chemistry. Or something." I wasn't quite sure how it all worked…there was peeing, and pregnancy and everything in between hadn't really been my concern before.

Sookie sighed, and then picked up the test and got out of bed and walked into the bathroom. "You sure you don't want to come and watch me?" she asked, as she walked past. "You know, like they do for drug testing?"

"Um…no. Think I'll pass" I said, taking off my shoes and putting them away. Because shoes fucking live in the closet and not in a jumbled pile at the bottom of the bed, as Sookie sometimes thinks.

I heard the toilet flush, and the tap run, and then a moment or two later Sookie appeared. "You know you bought the one with three tests, right?' she asked me.

I shrugged. Per test it was cheaper if you bought them like that. Plus I wasn't sure how much convincing Sookie was going to take on the matter. "So now we wait?" I asked, sitting on the bed.

"Yeah" Sookie said, perching on the end of the bed, far away from where I was. "Now we wait."

"You could come and keep me company?" I suggested. "While we wait."

"Yeah" Sookie said slowly, turning around and crawling up to where I was sitting. "I just…maybe we could talk while we wait?"

"About what?"

"Well…I'm a bit worried about Amelia. I think something's happened at school, either while we were away or since we've been back, I'm not sure. But she's been a bit quieter than usual, and she won't really tell me what's up, but every time I suggest having someone over for a play, she gets all shirty with me. I think tonight's tirade about hairties was more to do with that than anything I'd done." Sookie turned and looked at me expectantly.

"She'll figure it out" I said.

"Yeah…but she's only eight. I want to help her…I just don't know how." Sookie looked really upset about the whole thing. "Little girls are really cruel" she said, pressing her lips together.

I put my arm around her shoulder. "It's Amelia, though. She'll figure it out."

"What if she doesn't?"

"Then…maybe she'll figure it out next time. Don't these things usually blow over?"

Sookie shrugged. "Depends. Sometimes they just get really nasty. I just…I wish I knew what was going on. I used to like it when I did know, now I'm not allowed within ten feet of the classroom. I'm waiting for the edict that says I have to walk ten feet behind her with my eyes downcast at all times."

I chuckled, and Sookie almost joined in. "Well she's getting older" I said. "Which is why you might never know."

"Oh, don't say that! That's a horrible thought. This is _Amelia_. The person with no secrets at all."

"I guess she's got to have some sometime." I wasn't sure how to make it better for Sookie. I mean, I didn't want Amelia to grow up either, but it was going to happen no matter what we did. Even the baby that was inside Sookie now wasn't going to be a baby forever.

"So, can we go and check now?" I asked.

Sookie rolled over and looked at her alarm clock. "Oh, um…probably" she said, but she didn't move, she just sat there and bit her lip. "You go" she said in the end. "You go and have a look."

"Oh…um…" I wasn't sure I wanted to go near something Sookie had peed on.

"It's got a cap on it, Eric. You'll be fine, just look at the little display window."

"OK" I said, getting off the bed and leaving Sookie looking pensive. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the little stick thing on the counter by the sink. It had two lines. That was…pregnant? I looked around for the box, and found it sitting on top of the toilet. Yeah…two lines definitely meant pregnant.

"What's it say?" Sookie called out.

"Congratulations" I said, walking back into the bedroom. "You're going to be a moth…oh, no. Fuck. Don't cry." There was a big, fat fucking tear rolling down Sookie's cheek, which she wiped away quickly with her hand.

"I'm not crying" she lied outright. "I'm just…" she stopped talking and stared at the bed.

"Well, you're pregnant for one thing" I said, sitting in front of her on the bed. "It's probably hormones." That got me a foot shoved in my hip rather violently, but I think I preferred Sookie violent and indignant to crying and miserable.

"It's not always hormones, you know" she said.

"I know. But it's something. This is good news…I mean, we were trying this time." And then something occurred to me. "We were, weren't we? We were trying?" Fuck, maybe Sookie hadn't really been on board with the plan after all. There were times, apparently, when it was good to get pregnant, and times there weren't, and I had no control over the whole fucking thing. Had she been trying _not_ to get pregnant?

"We were…kind of, sort of, trying…" Sookie said. "But that was the thing…I didn't want to make it too official, in case…"

"In case what?"

"In case it didn't happen. You know…because I'm 39 now…"

"Oh. But it did…so, um…yay us?" I still wasn't sure what the problem was. Sookie had defeated the mythical age-barrier to pregnancy that seemed to live in her head and now we could get on with our lives. Or not. Because there was more crying now.

"Don't cry" I tried, wishing for once that would fucking work.

"These might be happy tears" Sookie said, sniffing and then reaching for a tissue from her nightstand.

"Might be? You couldn't be more definite than that?"

"I'm confused" she said.

"Yeah" I said. "Welcome to my fucking club." That at least got a smile out of her, and then she blew her nose, noisily.

"I'm just worried" she said.

"About…" I'd learnt never to assume with Sookie's worries. You thought she was upset about the fact she burnt the chicken at dinner, and later on you'd find out that she stressed about the fact we all had to go to Thomas' birthday party or something. It was a bit fucking odd, but it was like the weeding, she just didn't go in the straight line you expected her to.

"Everything" Sookie said which didn't get me any closer to working out the real problem. I was going to have to take a stab in the dark.

"About being stretched too thin across five kids?" I asked. "Because, I said, I'm here too. It's not just you. And I'm sure it'll be fine…I mean…I don't think any of them feel unloved…" I hoped not anyway. I was pretty sure they didn't.

"Oh" Sookie said, sounding surprised. "Well…kind of that, I guess…" she didn't sound convincing. Fuck, just like I thought, her brain had meandered elsewhere from earlier in the evening.

"Well, what then?"

"I just…well, I wonder if our luck will run out?" Sookie said, looking at me through her wet eyelashes.

"Luck?"

"Yeah. With this pregnancy…maybe we won't be lucky this time." She could obviously see I was still trying to work this all out, because she carried on. "Well I'm 39, so what if I lose it. Or what if…" Her voice dropped down to almost a whisper. "What if it's not OK? I mean, we were lucky before. With Sam. And then probably with Tray. And this time, we might not be. I just feel like maybe we tempted fate…" And then it hit. The full-force, shoulder-shaking sobs that I'd been trying so hard to fucking avoid, started up.

I wondered whether saying 'don't cry' had any chance of fucking working now, but it probably didn't. So instead I moved so I was sitting beside her and just held her. "I don't think we have" I said. "I don't think it works that way."

Sookie lifted her head and looked at me. "Shitty things happen all the time, Eric. Doesn't matter who you are, or what you do." And yeah, you could see it there, in her face. A lot of shit had happened to Sookie, and most of the time she kept the pain pretty fucking well-hidden.

"Yeah" I agreed, because she wasn't saying anything that wasn't true. "They do."

"So…maybe we've had our quota of good stuff?" Sookie said. "Maybe we're about to get hit with a deluge of shitty stuff and if we just hadn't…if we just hadn't even tried, we would have been OK…but now…now if it happens we'll have no one to blame but ourselves…"

Sookie sobs had started again, and were probably never going to stop at his rate. If you sat and worried about everything that could happen, then, fuck, you would hide in the bathroom and fucking rock for the rest of time.

"Sookie" I said, kissing her hair. "Sookie it's OK to be scared…but I think you've got to, I don't know…just look at all the good stuff we do have and let the stuff we can't control just…fuck. Just take it as it comes…" It was really hard to come up with something that didn't sound fucking trite.

"So, what? We're supposed to be thankful for the fact we have four kids, who are fine?"

"Well…yeah. And all the other stuff we have. And if something…shitty does happen, then that wasn't because we tempted fate. Like you said, it just happens. Nothing's going to stop it happening."

"Even if I lose the baby?" Sookie asked. She seemed to want to goad me into admitting all the terrible things that could happen. But they hadn't fucking happened yet.

"Well that would be horrible" I said. It would, and I really didn't want to think about it if I didn't have to. "But well…I guess it was horrible when it happened to you before?"

"It was" Sookie said. "I thought I'd had enough death in my life by then, but that…" she didn't finish and I didn't press her. I just tried to think about what to say next.

"I think…well. You're so strong. I really admire…"

Sookie cut me off. "So, what? It's OK if bad stuff happens to me because I can cope with it?"

"No…just. That's not what I was trying to say. I just think that it's not about tempting fate. Fate doesn't give a flying fuck one way or the other. It's a risk, but it's always a fucking risk. It's a risk just fucking walking out the front door sometimes. But…you're the only person I'd risk any of this with. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be risking anything."

I looked at her, and hoped she got it. Because it was true. If it wasn't for Sookie there wouldn't be any kids, I wouldn't want any with anyone else. Had never wanted them. I wouldn't want to risk turning into my father and fucking them up beyond any redemption. So if losing a baby or having a baby that wasn't perfect was the risk Sookie was taking, that was mine. I was betting everything on the fact I'd be an OK dad, and, if I wasn't, that Sookie would fucking be there for the kid.

Sookie leaned back on her pillows and sighed. "It's all a risk, isn't it?"

"Yeah" I agreed, laying down on my side facing her. "It is. But at the end of the day, we've got each other to help us get through it. And I think that's all we can ask for."

Sookie reached over and stroked my face. "When did you get so good at this?" she asked me. "At saying the right things?"

I shrugged, kind of awkwardly. And then I remembered something Sookie had said to me once. "I think it only works with you" I said. "Fuck knows most of the kids don't listen to me."

Sookie laughed. "Felicia listens to you…well, after you've agreed to do what she wants."

"Yeah. Christ, the museum _again_. And it's not even like you have anything really old in your museum."

"Some of its pre-European" Sookie said indignantly.

"Yeah, you guys haven't even been here for 200 years yet. Fuck, it's just weird."

Sookie laughed. "When I take them, we go through the toy exhibit and I point out all the stuff I had, and the doll that looks like Mum's doll Shirley and the kids are really confused. Mostly they like the stuffed elephant."

"Rajah?" I asked.

"OK, you have been there too often if you know the name of the elephant. Right, I'm going to get ready for bed." Sookie got off the bed and went into the bathroom. When she returned I took my turn, and changed into some sleep pants before climbing in beside her. Sookie turned off the light and rolled over to face me.

"So, really pregnant?" she said. "Huh. Another baby. There goes the guest room."

"We don't have that many guests. Although…if it's a boy, maybe we can put him in with Sam and Tray?"

"I think three in one room might be too much."

"Get Amelia and Felicia to share?"

"Yeah, you negotiate that one. I'm staying well out of it. Can you imagine the drama there'd be, given Amelia's tirade over the hairties?"

"Yeah…that might not work out so well" I said, picturing having to spend a lot of time negotiating space allocations and adjudicate over who owned what. Fuck, yeah. The guest room could go.

I reached over and put my hand on Sookie's stomach. Yep, definitely rounder. But round was a bad word when applied to any part of Sookie's anatomy, so I didn't tell her that. Instead I asked "How far along?"

"Um…I think six weeks…yeah, that'd be right. It must have been when we were away."

"Well thank fuck for the separate bedroom at Disneyland. I wonder if the baby will be born with mouse ears?"

"Oh God, I hope not. It's bad enough pushing a normal sized head out. Although Sam had a huge head when he was born. That was hard work."

"It looked like it" I agreed. It looked like more than hard work, but I wasn't going to make Sookie despair about doing it again if I could help it. Maybe if fate was on our side this baby wouldn't be quite as big as its brothers.

"Of course" Sookie continued. "It could have been...um, well…before that. That'd work better…with my dates…"

"Oh" I said, getting when she meant. After we'd been to see Dad. Fuck. "Well, it's an unusual souvenir at any rate" I said. "Although considering all the other crap we brought back with us, I guess a baby is one of our better fucking trophies."

"You like the pirate swords" Sookie teased.

"Not so much when they x-rayed the suitcases and I had to explain the fucking things" I said.

"I think I was a souvenir" Sookie said. "I mean…I just remember that when I was about 8 or 9 we were at some barbecue and Dad was talking about a fishing trip he'd been out on when camping and he turned and patted me on the head and said 'And the fish wasn't the only thing that came back from that trip.' I was mortified. It was…weird to think about."

"Mmm" I said. "I think Jason told me about that once."

"Oh, crap. Jason knows?"

"Jason was there. It was part of his lecture on what not to do in a tent."

"Oh my God. That's just…why do the men in my family like to share?"

I laughed, and Sookie poked me in the chest. "Don't laugh" she said. "It's not funny. It's my _parents_. I like to think they only did it twice. And totally by accident."

Yeah, I'd fucking like to blot out some of the shit I knew about my dad, but it wasn't going to happen.

"Oh God" Sookie said. "I'm going to have to do the whole baby thing again with Amelia. She's bound to want more details. And…maybe we should tell Felicia?"

"Maybe we should wait and see if Felicia's interested?"

"Mmm, well. You can tell her." Sookie rolled over so she was facing away from me, and I carefully arranged myself around her back.

"Tell who? Felicia?"

"Yeah."

"I think she's too young."

"We told Amelia when she was five."

"Well…we'll see." Fuck, I was not going there with Felicia. I didn't think she really needed to know anyway. I doubted she paid any attention to that kind of stuff.

I was nearly asleep when I heard Sookie say "I am happy. I'm scared…but I'm happy at the same time."

"Me too" I agreed. It was true. Life was fucking scary sometimes…just making sure I didn't fuck everything up. That visit to my dad had shown me how far I'd come, but also made me realise it might not take much to go back there. But I was happy. I was happy here. Happier than I had been before.

"'Night" Sookie said. "I love you."

"Yeah. Love you too."

**A/N Waka is the Maori word for canoe (pronounced wok-er). But in modern usage, it also denotes car.**

**Rajah the elephant arrived at Auckland zoo in the 1930's (I think) but he'd had a hard life and was aggressive, so he was, um, dispatched and then stuffed and given to the museum. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	102. Bonus Chapter: Wet Day Fun and Games

**A/N OK, I'm back. I managed to talk myself down off the ledge to get this written. I find the longer I go between updating the more I panic about ever being able to write anything again. And then I couldn't get this loaded for a while, so went to the supermarket so the toddler could yell "Dor-wah!" really loudly in the chilled food aisle when she saw Dora branded yoghurt and throw raisins from the trolley. She's a joy.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, I just stuck them all inside on a wet day.**

SPOV

I was actually happy when I started to get some morning sickness, mainly because it's meant to be such a good sign. When I'd miscarried that had been the first sign it had gone wrong, in hindsight anyway. I'd stopped feeling sick. And then there had been bleeding and well…there wasn't much good after that.

So for about two whole days I was happy about the badly named morning sickness. And then I was over it. Over it utterly. Pregnancy number six seemed a really dumb idea when you were stuck throwing up into the toilet.

It was Sam who saw it first, when I had to make a dash to the bathroom one afternoon. Well, Sam didn't know it had been a dash; he'd just wandered along to find me. "You a'right?" he asked.

"Yeah, just a bit sick" I replied.

"Mummy sick?" Sam asked, coming over to pat me on the back. "Dat's no good."

"No" I agreed, before another burst of vomiting took over. The patting stopped and when the vomiting did as well, Sam had moved over to the other side of the bathroom.

"Um…not good" Sam said.

"No. But I'll be OK" I said, as cheerfully as I could muster, hoping that would be that.

"Don' be dead" Sam replied, still looking at me mournfully.

"Well, it hasn't killed me yet" I said, thinking he sounded a lot like Amelia. Sam still looked worried. "I'll be fine" I said, trying to be reassuring. Aside from the actual vomiting I never liked the throwing up part because it tended to scare your other children half to death.

Tray came into the bathroom at that point and looked from Sam to me and back again. "Wees?" he asked.

"No. We're just leaving now" I said, standing up and going over to the basin to brush my teeth.

"Mummy's sick" Sam announced, solemnly.

Tray looked thoughtful for about five seconds, and then I assume he just didn't know what to do with that statement. "Eat?" he asked.

"Um, yeah. Let's get afternoon tea" I said to him.

I walked into the kitchen with the pair of them trailing behind me, Sam looking kind of worried and Tray mostly oblivious to anything that was going on. Of course when I'd been pregnant with Tray, Sam had been completely oblivious to all of it as he was just a baby. I really missed that.

"What do you want to eat?" I asked the boys.

"Eat" Tray said, pointing to the pantry.

"Eat what?" I tried again, but Tray just ran to the pantry door and then looked back at me hopefully. I really wanted to keep the pair of them out of there if I could, otherwise they trashed everything on the shelves and usually found whatever inappropriate snacks I'd hidden in there.

"I wan' um…I gotta show you" Sam said, the promise of food having made him temporarily forget that I might be in danger of keeling over at any moment.

"OK, fine" I said, pulling Tray back a bit so I could open the doors. The pair of them almost got wedged in the doorway, because they both tried to enter at the same time, but they made it through and scanned the shelves as fast as they could. "I wanna bistick" Sam said, pointing to some that were in a container. "Bistick!" Tray echoed.

"Fine" I said, handing them two each, thankful that at least I'd learnt to buy the mini sized biscuits these days. They might have demanded one for each hand, but they didn't seem to care about actual ratio of hand to biscuit. They should probably be having something healthier, but I couldn't be bothered arguing given I felt like crap and I'd just heaved up a large amount of the tuna sandwich I'd had for lunch. I was kind of off tuna at the moment.

"Mummy havin' a bistick?" Sam asked.

"No…I just. No." I said, sitting down on a chair and trying to figure out if I had enough energy to do anything else this afternoon. It was pouring with rain, which didn't help. If it was fine I could open the backdoor and just let them run around outside, but inside required more creativity. I needed Eric here, he was always great with thinking up new games for inside, like balloon baseball in the hallway or the one that required a lot of jumping out of wardrobes and trying scare people, or the one that involved a lot of running around yelling, or my personal favourite, which involved the kids lying still and pretending to be dead and Eric timing them to see who could do it for the longest. It was kind of morbid, but it did make the house nice and quiet, even if it was temporary.

Although it had occurred to me that Eric's ability to devise entertainments at short notice suggested he'd spent a lot of years stuck at home entertaining himself. I'd had Jason to boss me around and hadn't come out of childhood with quite the same skill-set.

Sam looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything else. Mainly because he'd shoved half a biscuit in his mouth.

I sat there and stared at the rain beating onto the windows. I wondered what to do. And I wondered whether I was feeling less sick or not yet. And then I wondered if maybe I shouldn't eat something. Yeah…maybe I did feel like eating something.

"Who wants cheese scones?" I asked, and Sam's hand shot up. Tray looked at Sam, crammed nearly a whole biscuit in his mouth, and then put both hands in the air.

"Great" I said. "But you guys have to help me make them."

"OK" Sam said, while Tray nodded, his mouth still full of biscuit.

So I got out the ingredients and a bowl and the measuring jug, and sat the boys at the high stools at the counter so they were opposite me, which meant that if Tray decided to launch himself into thin air I wasn't going to be any use to him, but hopefully he'd learnt that lesson by now and, I had to admit, that the bruise on his knee had been kind of impressive the last time he'd landed on the floor from that height.

The boys kind of enjoyed the cooking process, but scone mix isn't the best thing to eat so that was a bit disappointing. Working my old sifter was fun though, and Tray ate a fair amount of the bag of grated cheese I got out, not really caring that the cheese was still frozen.

And when we had the scones in the oven they got some enjoyment out of watching them rise. For a minute or so anyway, and then they disappeared off down the hall and I pretended that I couldn't hear them running around with Amelia's Polly Pocket aeroplane. She had almost outgrown that hand me down from Tara's daughter Charlotte now, but wasn't particularly keen on handing it on herself. Sam and Tray, though, thought the large purple plane was kind of awesome, despite the fact they had no interest in opening it up to reveal the fashion runway inside, and much more interest in using it as a battering ram against each other as they took turns flying it around the house.

I just continued to sit on the kitchen floor and watch the scones. It was about all I was up for at the moment. When they were ready I pulled them out and yelled "Scones!" in the direction I'd last heard footsteps.

I'd taken most of them off the baking tray and got the butter out of the fridge by the time Sam appeared, carrying Amelia's plane which he dumped on the floor near the table. I made a mental note to make sure that got returned to her room because I wasn't up to the inquisition when she came home.

Tray appeared a minute or two later, quite slowly because he was shuffling along wearing Eric's shoes on the wrong feet. So that meant they'd been in the wardrobe, which was a worrying thought. Tray giggled to himself, and then promptly tipped over, landing face-first on the floor.

"You alright?" I asked.

"Yup" he replied, as he disentangled himself from the shoes and struggled to get upright again. He abandoned the shoes where they were and came trotting over to see what Sam and I had. "Cak?" Tray asked.

"Scone" I told him, slicing three open and spreading butter on them.

Tray frowned. "Cu'cak?"

"Scone!" Sam repeated. Tray didn't look any the wiser. I just put there ones on some plates and put them on the child-sized table we had in the corner. Sam and Tray trotted over obediently and sat down. "Cak!" Tray said happily, trying to sit down without actually pulling his chair out first. I helped him get into the chair while he picked up the scone and took a big bite, sending a shower of crumbs everywhere.

Sam was tucking into his, so I took mine and sat at the big table and ate. The boys were quiet, apart from a bit of pushing when Sam decided Tray had kicked him on purpose.

"Mor?" Tray asked when he'd finished his scone. Well, most of it anyway. There was a fair pile of crumbs on the plate in front of him. And around it. And in his lap, and on the floor. I briefly wondered what had actually made it to his mouth.

"Yeah" I said. "Well, they won't be any good tomorrow, so we might as well have another one each."

Sam smiled at that, which might have been a better look if his mouth wasn't stuffed full of scone. So I buttered another three scones and handed them round. Tray made it half-way through this one, and then abandoned it to go and do something else. Sam trudged on through his, looking less and less enthusiastic, and when he judged he'd had enough, he ran off too, wiping his hands on his trackpants. I finished mine and went back for a third. And a fourth.

At least I wasn't feeling hungry anymore.

I cleared up the dishes, put the rest of the scones away for Felicia and Amelia, and returned Amelia's plane to her bedroom. I might have been less hungry, but I still felt queasy. Queasy and tired.

I put the TV on in the family room for Sam and Tray and the sound of annoying kids' shows brought them running. I thought it might be nice just sitting down and being quiet for a while. I was probably the only one who thought that of course, but it was worth a shot.

I sat on one of the couches and the boys sat next to me, and there was a lot of pushing and shoving, but they weren't too bad. I thought if I just closed my eyes for 10 minutes no one would really notice.

And I'm not sure they did notice. I didn't think I'd fallen asleep, I was pretty sure I was still half-paying attention to what was going on in the room around me as Sam and Tray dug through their box of toys and Sam tried to stop Tray destroying all his Lego creations, but it was only when I heard the knocking at the door and Sam going "Mum! Mum!" that I realised that maybe I was more out of it than I thought.

And that I seemed to be wearing some Lego. And a toy car.

I felt groggy and dazed and wandered down the hallway to the front door. "Where were you?" Amelia asked, sounding grumpy.

"Just…back there" I said. I was having trouble forming sentences.

Amelia sighed. "Well…we were waiting. And it's cold out here." Amelia walked past me and stood dripping in the hall, while Felicia followed her.

"How was the walking bus?" I asked.

Felicia frowned. "It was…raining?" she said, a bit confused. I realised I'd meant to ask how school was.

Amelia spoke up though. "George was naughty and Mrs Hodges had to tell him that if he didn't behave she was going to tie him to her because she wasn't leaving anyone else's kids behind. And Melissa isn't talking to Ingrid, but I don't know why. And Mrs Hodges didn't realise that Pravinda is away this week, so we had to wait at the beginning while she phoned the other mother who sends out the lists…and, oh…um, well…um…."

"OK, um, great" I said, hoping to cut Amelia off. "Just, um, put your coats in the laundry and get changed."

"I don't think I've told you everything yet" Amelia huffed. "I'm sure something else happened."

"Simon" Felicia said, kicking off her shoes.

"Oh, yeah. Simon walked through a puddle but it came up to his knees and he was soaked through and then he burst into tears because he was so wet. Well, he's only _five_. He's just little, eh Mum?"

"Yeah…" I said, as Felicia stared at Amelia as though daring her to apply the 'only little' epithet to her.

"So he can't help it" Amelia declared.

"Cool…well, coats off, and then get changed" I said. Felicia had already headed off, hopefully towards the laundry and Amelia followed her. Sam poked his head out of the family room to see what was going on.

"I'm OK" I said to him, as I walked into the kitchen. I pulled out the scones and buttered some for Amelia and Felicia and then tried to get Amelia to talk about her day when she re-appeared wearing leggings and a tunic top.

"So, what happened today? Apart from the walking bus?" I asked.

"Uh…not much."

"Did you learn anything?"

"Not really. Just, you know. Stuff. Stuff you do at school."

"OK. Um, who did you play with?"

"It's not really playing…"

"Hang out with then."

"Oh, um. Amelia Chang."

Huh, well there was probably a story there, but I wasn't going to push for it. Felicia arrived wearing shorts and her singlet only, as though it was a tank top.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked her.

"Nope" she replied, taking up a spot on the stool at the counter next to Amelia. "What's that?" she said, pointing to the plate in front of her.

"Cheese scone" I said.

Felicia took a bite and we were all quiet for a bit. The nausea was really coming back now. I reached into the pantry and grabbed a couple of crackers and ate those, trying to ward it off.

"So, Felicia, did you learn anything today?" I tried.

She shrugged. "Finn's a dumbass" she said. I wanted to correct her, I really did, but encouraging the five year old to actually say the word arse was probably against the mothering code of conduct, or something. So I let it slide.

Amelia didn't. "You shouldn't say mean things about other people" she said to Felicia. "Especially when they're not here."

Felicia shrugged.

"What did he do?" I asked.

"Oh…he wanted to play with Harry…which is really _dumb _because Harry's dumb."

"So what did you do?" I asked her.

"I played with Hannah and Caitlin. It wasn't that great though. There was a lot of sitting down, which is booooring." Felicia took a big bite of her scone and Sam appeared to stand by the doors to the deck. "Ou'side?" he called.

"Raining" I called back.

"Bob's ou'dere!" Sam tried.

"Bob's a cat"

"No rai'coat tho'" Sam observed.

"He's got fur, he doesn't need a raincoat" Amelia said, dismissively.

"I no'got fur" Sam grumbled.

"You've got a raincoat" Felicia told him, while I tried to make 'shut-up' hand motions at her. She just looked at me, frowned and then said "What?"

"Nothing" I sighed, as I watched Sam go running off. I knew exactly where he was headed. Sure enough, as Amelia hopped off her stool and came around to put her plate in the dishwasher, Sam re-appeared dragging two raincoats. "Which id mine?" he asked. That was the problem with the pair of them being so close in age, there was only a subtle difference in the size of the two coats and Sam had no hope of working out which blue raincoat was his. In the meantime of course I had Felicia grumbling that she was stuck wearing the hand-me-down pink one which used to be Amelia's while her brothers got ones in a way better colour.

"You're still not going outside" I told him, as he came over to me, dragging a coat from each hand.

"Dat's not fair!" Sam protested. "Dey went out!" He pointed to his sisters.

"They had to walk home from school."

"It was yucky" Amelia said. "I had to share my umbrella with Felicia, so I was half sticking out. My backpack got really wet."

"Where is that?" I asked, and Amelia shrugged.

"If it's that wet, empty it out and put it in the laundry too. And you Felicia." They left the kitchen and Sam just stood there looking at me expectantly. "You're not going out" I said, thinking that it was mainly because Mummy didn't want to sit in the rain when she felt so blah.

Sam sighed, looked at the floor, frowned at me in a perfect imitation of his father, and then stomped off, leaving the coats on the floor. I bent down to pick them up when Tray arrived.

"Coes" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Coes."

"Cows?" I couldn't remember if the toy farm was out or not. Or maybe he wanted it out.

Tray shook his head for no. "Coes."

"I don't know what that is."

"Coes" he said a final time, and I had to admit defeat. I was never getting to the bottom of that one.

"I'm sorry" I said. "I just…I have no idea." Tray looked disappointed, so I gave him a quick hug and then went to return the coats to the wardrobe in the boys' bedroom, with Tray following me. That's when I realised what Tray had been talking about. "Clothes?" I asked him, and he nodded. Sure enough, there were clothes everywhere. I'd left a basket of clean washing in there prior to my trip to the bathroom earlier and hadn't yet managed to put it all away. However, in his search for raincoats, or perhaps just for the sheer hell of it, Sam had pulled them all out of the basket and strewn them all over the room.

Well, possibly it had been Sam. I looked down at Tray, who was now wearing a pair of Sam's underpants on his head and grinning at me, and figured that maybe he wasn't a completely innocent bystander.

So I tidied up the clothes, helped a lot by Tray. Although his help consisted mostly of running off with the stuff after I'd refolded it and before I'd put it in a drawer. It wasn't that helpful really.

And then, when I had that tidied away I found Amelia trying to do some homework and had to listen to her reading, and then Felicia's reading and then do Felicia's spelling words, while Amelia tried to butt in and spell them herself, which really didn't help at all as she liked spelling and Felicia didn't. So I had to ban her from the room for a bit, which caused a lot of sulking and a fair amount of Amelia coming back to report on what Sam and Tray were doing and give me updates on the stand-off between Sam and Bob, as Bob tried to get in the catdoor and Sam blocked it by sitting right in front, hoping for the rain to stop. So in the end I had to go and move Sam out of the way, and then find an old towel to dry Bob with, because he looked like an otter having sat out in the rain for so long.

And when I'd got through all of that, feeling ever-more queasy the whole time, I was struck with a sudden thought. Dinner. Crap. I'd been going to make the chicken pie with the potato pom poms on top…except that I forgot to take my pre-cooked chicken out of the freezer and now…now it was nearly dinnertime and I was running out of energy and enthusiasm anyway.

I caved and rang Eric. "Can you bring dinner home?" I asked him.

"Dinner?" he asked.

"Yeah, um. You know, takeaways." I'd learnt in the past that it paid to be fairly specific. Saying 'dinner' left Eric with a lot of options, like arriving home at 5pm with a bag of lamb shanks that had been on sale at Nosh and presenting them to me like he'd killed them himself. And I had no way of cooking lamb shanks for 6 people in less than an hour, let alone what else I was supposed to magic up to go with them. I think we'd ended up with baked beans on toast that night and Eric had been a bit grumpy about the whole thing, wondering why I wasn't cooking up his hard-won trophies.

"Oh…um. Fish and chips?" Eric asked.

"Yeah. That'd be nice." Well, the salty chips would probably help the general air of queasiness.

"OK, well I'll be leaving soon." Eric said, and I registered the noise in the background. He was out having drinks with Andy and Calvin. Not that any of them really drank when they were driving home. Mostly I think they talked. Or something.

"Great" I said, "See you soon."

"Bye" Eric said, and the phone went dead just as Sam ran past going "Wees!" kind of urgently. I checked he was OK and found Tray in the bathroom with him. Sam was OK, but Tray had got his own trackpants half down and was hobbling a bit, so I did a quick nappy-change and pulled them back on. I dreaded the day he figured out he could get a nappy undone.

"What's for dinner?" Amelia asked, coming into the bathroom.

"Fish and chips. Daddy's bringing it home."

"Oh. OK" she said, and she left again.

By the time Eric arrived home, I was feeling pretty exhausted. I couldn't believe I had…I did a quick mental calculation…approximately 32 more weeks of this. It was ridiculous. Pregnancy and four kids don't mix at all. And I was tired of doing stupid things like forgetting to make dinner for a start.

Eric carried the newsprint wrapped package into the kitchen, but promptly tripped over his shoes as he did so. "What the fuck?" he said, stopping to look at them. And then he looked at me. "Have you been wearing my shoes?" he asked.

"No! That was Tray. And I don't leave shoes in the middle of the kitchen, anyway."

Eric shrugged. "But the middle of the bedroom is OK?"

"I put them under the bed. If your feet weren't so enormous it wouldn't be a problem" I huffed.

Eric looked unconvinced, but he put the food down on the kitchen bench as I kicked the shoes to one side. I dished it up and we got everyone sitting at the table fairly quickly. It was funny how takeaway food worked that way.

I enjoyed it to start with, and certainly the chips did alleviate the nausea. But after a while I suddenly started to feel…less good. Really not good at all. I looked at the fish that was leftover on my plate. Yeah, that might have been a mistake. It wasn't agreeing with me, any more than the tuna at lunch had.

"I, uh…I'm just going to the bathroom…" I said, as I stood up from the table.

"You alright?" Eric asked me.

"Yeah. Yeah, just…um. Well, you know…" I started backing out of the room.

"What?" Amelia asked. "What does he know?"

"Never mind" Eric tried, but I could hear Amelia still questioning Eric as I walked as quickly as I could to the ensuite.

Ten minutes later I had decided I was definitely off anything fishy for the foreseeable future. And possibly off chips for the next day or so. And so I sat there, enjoying my quiet time with my new best friend the toilet, when Amelia burst in.

"What does Daddy know?" she asked me. And then she stopped, and took in my position crouched near the toilet. "No" she said.

"I'm just not feeling well. I think I got a bad piece of…"

"You said no more babies!" she spat out.

"When?" I asked, hoping to God I hadn't been talked into signing anything.

"When we were on holiday. You said no one was making any babies…"

"Oh. I, um, meant right at that minute…" I said, hoping that covered it, without the need for details.

"But how do you make a baby in a bathroom?" Amelia asked puzzled. "I'm sure there's a bed. In the book there's a bed."

"See, there you go" I said. "We weren't then."

"But you did sometime!" Amelia accused.

I didn't really have an answer to that one. It was kind of obvious.

"I want to see the book again" Amelia said. We'd brought it out for another quick scan-through when I'd been pregnant with Tray, and Amelia had been vaguely interested, but I think she thought she knew it all at that stage. But now, well now I assumed she thought I was hiding something else from her, some previously undiscovered details that she'd missed when she'd been six.

"Yeah, fine" I said. "We'll do it at bedtime." I didn't have it in me to argue really.

Amelia left and after a while of sitting there I figured I should probably get up and see that everyone else was coping without me. I wandered back to the kitchen, which was now deserted, and started cleaning up dinner. Bob arrived and I gave him the leftover fish, which made him quite purry and smoochy.

I figured Eric had taken the boys off for a bath, and sure enough when I stuck my head in the bathroom that's where they all were. Eric turned to look at me "You alright?" he asked.

"Yeah, just…you know." Eric did know after all, and at least Sam and Tray weren't old enough yet to question what exactly it was he knew.

"I din't go out t'day" Sam complained to Eric. "I'was rainin'."

"Yes it was" Eric agreed.

"I don' like rain" Sam said sadly.

"No" Eric agreed. "It kind of sucks."

"Sucks?" Sam asked.

"Yeah…you know. Not good" Eric explained.

"Oh" Sam said, looking thoughtful.

"Suss!" Tray yelled at top volume, which was pretty loud. I worried that one day Tray was going to rival Eric for the title of loudest person in our house.

"I'll leave you guys to it, then" I said, backing back out of the room.

Amelia was puttering around in her room. "Are we doing the book now?" she asked, when I appeared.

"After your shower, so find some pyjamas."

"I want a nightie."

"Well, find that then." I started to leave the room. "And you'll get the book?" Amelia called after me.

"Yeah" I said. The nausea was back, which was annoying. The first little bit of time after you threw up was great because it all went away again for a while…and then, well. Then it was back to the constant seasickness.

Mother Nature really was cruel sometimes.

Felicia was in the family room watching TV. "Go and grab your pyjamas and you can have a shower next" I said to her.

"What?" she said, not looking away from the screen.

"Go and get ready for your shower. You need pyjamas."

"Have I got clean ones?"

"Have you looked?" Felicia looked at me in disbelief. After all, surely that was my job. She sighed and stood up and shuffled off. "Not summer pyjamas" I called after her and she muttered something I couldn't understand.

I went back to the kitchen to get started on lunches for the next day, and realised that I didn't have Felicia and Amelia's lunchboxes, so I hunted those down in the laundry and went back to making sandwiches. It was hard to come up with ideas when I felt so sick myself, but I was sure that they didn't really want just plain biscuits.

I made Sam's morning tea for pre-school, and heard Eric letting the boys out of the bathroom and telling Felicia it was her turn. I went in to tuck the boys in with Eric. It was always kind of nice to see them in the five minutes after their bath when they were actually clean and tidy and not covered in unidentifiable substances.

"Good pirating?" I asked them.

"Pyra's!" Tray yelled.

"It's quiet time now" Eric reminded him. Tray looked a bit confused at the use of the word quiet.

Eric read the _Hairy McClary_ book where you had to make the different bark for each dog, and then we tucked them both into bed. "Rainin' tomorro'?" Sam asked me.

"Um…I don't know" I said.

"Hope not" he said. "Rain's sucky."

"Yeah…" I said. "It is."

When I kissed Tray, who refused to lie down in the cot and who really needed a bed when I could get around to organising him one, he shout-whispered "'Nigh-nigh!"

"Yep, goodnight" I agreed.

Eric did the rounds and then we backed out of the room and pretended we couldn't hear Sam telling Tray he had to lie down and be good.

"So…you're really OK?" Eric asked me.

"Oh, yeah. Just the usual throwing up."

"Cheese?" he asked.

"Fish…I think. The fish at dinner didn't agree with me. And I lost the tuna I had for lunch."

Eric frowned. "You shouldn't be eating tuna" he said.

I sighed. "Stop reading stuff on American websites. We've never had any problem with mercury levels in canned fish. Trust me. Look that up if you want to."

Eric pursed his lips and I could see the wheels turning in his head which probably meant he was making a note to do just that as soon as he could remember where he'd put his phone.

"I'm just making sure you're OK" he said a bit huffily. He stared at my stomach, and normally I would have said he was a bit premature to see anything, but God help me if I wasn't popping already this time around. My poor abdomen knew where this was going and had decided it was just going to save time and expand now.

Eric put a hand on my tummy and kind of smiled to himself. He might have been able to magically divine when I was pregnant but I could always see the change in him when I was, suddenly he got this silly 'Look what I did!' expression on his face every time he looked at me, like he was really pleased he'd managed to knock me up. Again.

It was kind of sweet, really.

"Is Felicia in the shower?" I asked.

"Yeah…I'll go and check" Eric said. I heard him talking to Felicia and telling her to hurry up as I walked into our bedroom and looked through the wardrobe to find the book, picking up a pair of Eric's socks while I was in there. Eric turned up with the shoes that had been abandoned in the kitchen, and made a big production of storing them away.

"Of course" I said to him. "The fact that you tuck your socks away in your shoes after you've worn them, rather than putting them in the wash where they belong, kind of negates the whole holier than thou 'I always put my shoes away' thing."

Eric didn't say anything to that, just looked at my shoes at the end of the bed, which were only the pair of shoes I wore when I was running in and out around home. And my sneakers for work were there. And the jandals that had been there since summer. And my spare slippers for when it wasn't too cold. But all my other shoes were put away.

We heard Felicia yell "Finished!" rather loudly at that point and Eric went off to deal with her. I did a bit of tidying until Amelia was out of the bathroom and then I went in and sat on her bed.

"Book?" she said, kind of imperiously, as she arranged the covers around herself.

I handed it over and waited while she looked through it again. "See?" she said, pointing to one of the pages. "There's the bed. I told you there was a picture of a bed."

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"So you make babies in bed" Amelia said, although it was almost a question. I figured she was working it through in her head and just nodded. She didn't need to know any more details until she was older.

Amelia flicked through the book, frowning. And then the she looked up at me. "But why?" she asked.

"Why…what?"

"Why do you keep doing it?"

"Oh. Well I like babies, um, kids. And, you know, the kids we have are great so…"

Amelia waved a hand impatiently. "No, no. I _know _all of that. You said it before. But…you have to do this. Sex. To have a baby. Isn't it weird?"

"What? Um…" I wasn't sure how to answer that one. I wanted to say yes and put her off it for life, but she might resent the fact I'd done that when she was 30 and married. I tried to think of what to say, but Amelia continued on.

"But…the man's penis goes in you. I mean…if someone sticks a finger in your ear, that's odd not nice. What makes this nice? It says it's nice. On the page where the bed is in the picture. It says it feels nice. Does it?" Amelia looked at me expectantly and I wished for the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

"Um…yeah…" I managed to whisper. I felt sure this should be the other way around and Amelia should be embarrassed.

"So that's why you keep doing it? You like doing it, so you do it, and then you end up having a baby?" I briefly wondered if Amelia wanted to join the police force still, because she had the interrogation thing down quite well. I nodded yes.

"I still don't see how" Amelia grumbled. "How could it be nice? There's another person, like, sticking things into you. It sounds awful."

"Well…" I said, trying to come up with a response. "There's, um, kissing and cuddling too. That bit's nice."

"And then you have to let them stick their penis in you" Amelia said. "Is that why Daddy always wants to kiss you?"

"No. No, the kissing is just kissing" I said, trying to back out of this topic.

"But you said there was kissing? When you make a baby."

"Well, yeah. But there's kissing at other times too. Just…just because, really." Amelia frowned and didn't look convinced.

"I still don't get it" she grumbled. "And you keep doing it."

"Well I like kids" I said, trying to get the focus back to the outcome and not the act that led to it.

"Uh-huh" Amelia said. "And you like sex too?" I hesitated, and Eric chose that moment to walk past the open bedroom door. I pleaded with my eyes as best I could, but he kept going.

"Well, it's really more a grown-up thing, and not something you have to worry about right now. One day you might want to. And, um, just remember that no one can make you do anything you _don't_ want to, and no one should touch the private parts on your body if you don't want them to." I felt a bit safer on that topic.

"I don't!" Amelia said vehemently. "I don't want anyone to touch me."

"Well that's fine."

"But you do. You want lots of people to touch you" she accused, and I let that one drop. Mainly because Felicia came wandering in.

"Is there a story?" Felicia asked.

"I thought Daddy read to you?" I said.

"No. I did my reading with him" she said, climbing up on Amelia's bed, which made Amelia say "Watch my feet!"

"You did your reading with me earlier" I said. "Didn't you?" The way things were at the moment, it was entirely possible I had that one wrong.

"Yeah" Felicia said. "But Daddy wanted to hear me read." I figured that meant she wanted Daddy to hear her read. "What're you guys reading?"

"Nothing" Amelia said, trying to hide the book, while Felicia cocked her head to get a better look at the title.

"Is it about babies?" Felicia said, looking at the picture on the cover.

"Yeah" I said, figuring my night couldn't get any worse. "It's about how babies are made."

"Oh" Felicia said. "So…that's that magic cuddle thing?" I guess with Amelia spouting off on it for so long she was bound to hear about it at some time.

"Yeah…kind of" I said. "Are you curious?"

"She can't know. She's little!" Amelia protested, but I held my hand up to shush her. "You were five when you first looked at the book" I reminded her.

"Really?" Amelia said. "I was?" I guess from the lofty heights of 8 it was hard to remember back that far.

"Yeah" I said. "So, Felicia if you want to look at the book we can do that."

Felicia looked a bit confused. Amelia decided to fill the silence by announcing "Mum's having another baby!"

"Are you?" Felicia asked, sharply. "Another one?"

"Yeah…well. We have to wait and see."

"But you said you were!" Amelia protested.

"Um…well, you just have to make sure everything is OK. So, um, don't tell anyone, OK? No one at all, no one at school or anyone else we know." I hoped they understood, although I suspected that Amelia's definition of telling no one actually meant only telling three people instead of everyone she met.

"OK" Amelia said, and Felicia nodded. She was just looking at the book as though it might blow up in Amelia's hands.

"If you don't want to look at the book, that's OK too" I said to her.

Felicia looked from me, to Amelia, and back again. "Fine" she said in the end. "Let's do it."

I got Amelia to hand the book over, and lie down in bed, and said she could have 10 minutes of reading time, and then I told Felicia to go to her bedroom and I'd be there in a minute.

Eric was hiding in his office. "You know that I can find you in here, right?" I said, as I poked my head around the door.

"Mmm" he said. "Everyone in bed?"

"Not quite. We need to go and tuck Felicia in."

He turned around. "But I did. She was in bed."

"She got out. So, I'll see you there in a minute."

"Yeah" Eric said. "I'll just print this out."

"I wish you wouldn't kill trees inside the house" I grumbled, and heard Eric say "There's nothing but fucking trees in this country" as I walked off.

Felicia was in bed when I got to her. "We don't have to do this tonight" I said.

"No, it's OK" she said. "I'll read it."

So I handed over the book and I started reading it to her and after a few minutes Eric arrived. "Oh" he said. "I'll…um, come back in a minute."

"No, you can stay" I said to him, as his back foot edged slowly out the bedroom door.

"Yeah, stay Daddy" Felicia said happily, patting the bed. Eric sat down, and then looked increasingly pale as we got further through the book. He may have thought that reading sex scenes was suitable bedtime reading for the two of us, but he didn't really like hearing the basics of reproduction read to him. Not in front of the five year old, anyway.

When we got to the end, I turned to Felicia. "Have you got any questions?" I asked. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Eric shaking his head, but I ignored him.

"No" Felicia said. "I think…no. But just…that's the magic cuddle, right? The one Amelia talks about?"

"Yeah" I said. "It is."

"And it makes babies?"

"Yep. Just like it said in the book." Felicia wrinkled her nose at that. I guess she didn't think it sounded like a lot of fun either.

"And you guys do it?" She pointed from me to Eric, who looked like a possum frozen in the headlights, just before it became roadkill.

"It's what you do to make a baby" I said, congratulating myself on making that answer nice and impersonal. Felicia was so much easier to deal with than Amelia.

"Oh" she said quietly.

"So, anything else you want to know, or go over? You can ask Daddy if you like." I offered, and Eric glared at me like I'd actually run over his possum.

"Yeah, um. Just, um…well. Can you do it quietly?" Felicia asked.

"What do you mean?" I said, thinking that in the picture of the woman having the baby it did look as though she was yelling.

Felicia sighed. "When you're doing it. The magic cuddle…or sex, or whatever! Can you be quiet?"

"_Can_ you be quiet?" I repeated.

"Yeah. You guys. Can you be quiet" Felicia repeated slowly. "Because, you know…you're not…"

I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times and nothing came out. I looked at Eric and I was pretty sure he'd stopped breathing. I was a little bit worried he might pass out entirely.

"Not quiet?" Eric said, amazingly quietly.

"Yeah…just. Well, I hear you. And, um, Amelia said to me once...about the magic cuddle…and that it looked like wrestling. In bed. So I thought…when I hear you, kind of making noises…so, yeah…" Felicia stopped and just looked at the duvet cover, obviously figuring she wasn't getting the response from her parents she'd wanted. I was still a bit too stunned to speak, but Eric seemed to recover himself.

"OK" he said. "Sure. We'll, um. We'll do that. Lights off now."

Felicia handed me the book and lay down in bed and Eric and I both kissed her goodnight. She looked a bit worried still. "It's OK" I said. "You didn't say anything wrong."

"You went a bit funny" she said. "I just…sometimes it's hard to get to sleep. My room's close."

"Yeah, well. OK. We'll try to remember that" I said.

Eric and I left the room, not really looking at each other, and then I popped my head in to see Amelia and say goodnight, and Eric did the same.

Afterwards I went to the bedroom to return the book and Eric disappeared. Probably to brick himself into the office and never come out again. About an hour later he appeared in the bedroom, where I was sitting in bed reading. He sat down and looked at me. "How's the sickness?" he asked.

"Ugh. Don't ask. It's awful."

"You do look a nice shade of green" he said.

"Better than the shocked white you were before in Felicia's room" I teased.

"Mmm" Eric said, looking like he didn't believe my story. "I think I might have to buy you a gag" he said, leaning over to kiss me.

"Wait, hang on" I said, moving away from him. "Me?"

"Well…yeah. I think it's you she can hear."

"Oh no" I said. "No, no, no. It's you. _You're_ loud. The loudest person living here. Currently, anyway. It's definitely you."

Eric frowned. "No" he said. "No, it's all 'oh, Eric' the whole time. Definitely you."

"Not me. No way, no how. It'll be you shouting 'fuck' all the time that she's hearing. If we'd been luckier she might have thought you just tripped over my shoes a lot."

"So you admit your shoes are a hazard?" Eric asked quickly.

"I'm admitting nothing. You tripping through not looking where you're going is not my concern and you can't sue because this isn't the States and we don't do that sort of thing here."

"Yeah" Eric said. "It's a weird fucking country."

"We just have better things to do than sue each other over hot coffee."

"I think that's an urban myth, Sookie" Eric huffed.

"Which, to us, sums you guys up perfectly"

Eric looked at me. "If we get the gag, we could use it for more than just sex." And then he smirked.

That was it. I might have felt really grotty, but I wasn't taking that. I sat forward, grabbed my pillow and thumped Eric with it. I would have got him on the head, but he moved and I got his back.

"I could tie you up too" he said, as he picked up his own pillow.

I looked at him. "You can't hit me" I said. "I'm pregnant."

"I don't think that works in this country" Eric said, as he brought his pillow down on my head, moments after I'd ducked to avoid the blow.

"Not nice!" I protested.

"You started it" Eric accused.

"You sound like Sam. He's convinced Tray starts everything. Tray doesn't have enough words to form a proper defence yet."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, whacking me on the back with his pillow and making me squeal. "Stop it!" I said to him. "We were even!" I tried to get him with my pillow, but he dodged away and I think I got his knees only.

"Sit still!" I complained. "Otherwise it's not fair."

"Why would I want it to be fair, Sookie? I'm not the fucking New Zealand government, all concerned with not upsetting anyone."

"Oh, sod off Yank" I said, as I tried to hit Eric again, but failed. Meanwhile he'd ended up behind me again and was hitting my back and head, just gently, but enough to be annoying, so I kind of curled over to avoid the pillow as much as I could. I didn't therefore see Felicia arrive in the room, and Eric was, I assumed, too busy with his assault on me to notice as well.

"You guys are noisy" she said. "I told you you were."

Eric stopped hitting me with his pillow and I sat up straighter. "Oh" I said. "Well…sorry. It's a pillowfight. Um…it's a wet day and Daddy's been inside all day…"

"I'm winning" Eric said, and I glared at him, and then tried to get him with my pillow again, but he rolled to the side and dodged me.

"Um. OK. But I can't sleep" Felicia said.

"Well, we'll be quieter" I promised. "Daddy's going to sit down quietly on his side of the bed and not bother me anymore."

"She started it" Eric whispered over my head, pointing to me, and Felicia giggled.

"So back to bed" I said to her.

"Fine" Felicia said, heading out the door. "'Night".

"'Night, sweetheart" I called after her.

I put my pillow back in its place and turned to look at Eric. "You are loud" I said.

"No that was your squealing that did it."

"Well, you kept hitting me. Your poor pregnant wife. Meany."

"So…there's no lawsuits, but name-calling is allowed?"

"Definitely" I said.

Eric looked thoughtful. "You know" he said. "We should have come with the pillow-fight defence earlier, when Felicia kept telling us how loud we were. I don't think she can tell the difference."

"Yeah" I agreed. "Bugger."

"Yeah…" Eric said. "Bugger, indeed."

"Hah!" I said, triumphantly, pointing my finger at him. "We're finally assimilating you. You'll be one of us yet."

"Does that mean you'll stop calling me Yank and beating me up?" Eric said, heading into the bathroom to get ready for bed.

"Phfft" I said. "Don't count on it anytime soon."

**A/N The Hairy McClary books are by Lynley Dodd, the one referenced here is _Caterwaul Caper_. **

**Potato pom poms are frozen potato things, they're like little balls of mashed potato with a crunchy coating. Very good as a topping for pies instead of pastry. The actual recipe is found at www(dot) foodinaminute (dot) co (dot) nz/Recipes/Winter-Chicken-Pie.**

**Also, my husband went on a mission to Christchurch the weekend before last to rescue some servers from a building in what's called the red zone, which is the CBD. It's all controlled by the army, who escort you in, and you can only go in there if you have a civil engineer accompanying you. He said it was really eerie and he expected zombie hordes at any minute. If you're interested in how it still looks down there (complete with snow, because hubby complained about the cold too), check out this video-**

**www (dot) nzherald (dot) co (dot) ?c_id=1&gal_cid=1&gallery_id=120556**


	103. Bonus Chapter: Daddy School

**A/N OK doing my happy 'I got a chapter finished' dance now. It's getting harder to do, but it's a nice feeling to get there. In the meantime of course I'm ignoring the fact the toddler has decanted the water from her sipper cup into the tea set cups and my coffeetable looks like a lake.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I always hated watching Sookie go through that first stage of pregnancy, the one where she was constantly sick and tired and just…well, she looked fucking miserable. She'd try to hide it but I'd find her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and breathing slowly. That was never a fucking good sign. Nor was finding her in the bathroom, slumped against the toilet. That was pretty fucking horrible, because there was nothing I could do. I couldn't tell her to pop a pill, or lie down because it would soon be out of her system or any of the other fucking things you told someone when they were sick.

All we could do was wait it out. Because it was one of those things that came with a pregnancy. And we were both pretty good at knowing what we were in for now. Sookie would be tired and grumpy and barf every fucking day, she'd worry that she was getting too big and everyone would tell she was pregnant. There was the inevitable visit to see Russell, and this time he looked kind of surprised to see us both again. I guess he'd figured we were done. He didn't seem above taking sides though, as while he was going over the questions with Sookie, I seemed to be on the receiving end of a few glares from him that suggested he thought the whole thing was my fucking fault.

He recommended we do further testing because of the previous result we'd had with Sam, and because of Sookie's age. Russell might have been matter of fact about her age, but I could see Sookie bite her lip and look down at the ground. I understood it was his job, but I really wished Russell would shut the fuck up about the age thing. It wasn't something we could change, and it was just going to make Sookie miserable.

She hid the misery quite well though, and mostly stuck to worrying about whether other people knew she was pregnant. With Amelia and Felicia knowing though, soon pretty much everyone knew. We all went next door to visit Kennedy and Danny and their baby and the first thing Kennedy said was "Congratulations! I'm so excited for you guys!"

Sookie just turned to look at me, but didn't say anything other than "Thanks" to Kennedy. We had no fucking way of knowing who had let the cat out of the bag this time. Most likely culprit was Amelia, but she'd been beaten to it by Felicia in the past, and for all we fucking knew it could have been Sam shouting in the back yard that "Mummy's doin' vomits!", that let Kennedy in on what was supposed to be our secret.

"I can't believe you guys want a fifth" Kennedy said. "I don't think I've had a minute to myself since Kassidy was born! How on earth do you cope with more than one?"

"Uh…you just do" Sookie said, while I looked at Kassidy who was propped up in her bouncer in the corner of the living room wearing what appeared to be three tutus, she was just pink ruffles and a head. How the fuck you ever managed to dress a baby that small in something that complicated I had no fucking clue, I just hoped Kassidy didn't shit all through it in a hurry. I'd seen that happen a few times now and how well you came out of that situation depended entirely on how easily the outfit came off. Nothing was worse than discovering all you'd managed to do was spread it all over the poor fucking kid's head.

She didn't look like that much work though. Sometimes they weren't at that age. They were pretty content just to hang out and take it all in. I wasn't sure that Kennedy really knew what was coming later on when Kassidy started moving around, because they get fucking fast fucking quickly, and, in Tray's case at least, have absolutely no sense of personal safety. And then of course, they touch everything you own. Repeatedly. As it was I could see Tray and Sam having a poke around in a toy box in the corner to try to find out what toys Kassidy had. They didn't seem particularly impressed with the selection of pink fluffy things that rattled.

"So, um, it's going OK though?" Sookie asked.

Kennedy sighed. "Yeah, although…she doesn't really sleep at night." Kennedy turned to look at her daughter and only seemed mildly alarmed that Tray was standing there staring at her. I managed to swat his hand away though before he actually stuck it in the middle of Kassidy's face. I guess the toys here were really boring if the baby was the most fascinating thing in the room.

"Well, that's fairly normal for this age" Sookie said. "It gets better."

"When?" Kennedy asked, and even I could hear the sheer desperation in her voice.

"Oh…it depends…" Sookie said.

"Depends on what? What should I be doing?" Kennedy asked quickly, and Danny, who'd been dispatched to bring refreshments, sort of stopped and hovered, waiting to hear the answer.

"Oh, well…depends on the kid really. Mine were all different." Sookie finished with a shrug and Kennedy didn't look any happier at that answer. Yeah, I remembered spending a lot of time trying to find the answer when Sam had been a newborn. The problem was there wasn't a fucking answer other than time.

"Mum has a lot of babies" Amelia said. "She likes the bit where she makes them. I guess you don't? If you've only got one?"

"Um…" Kennedy said, while Sookie shook her head to suggest she didn't have to answer that one.

"Babies are booooring!" Felicia exclaimed. "Where's Max?"

"Out the back" Kennedy said, and Felicia took off, with the boys running after her. "Why don't you go too, Amelia?" Sookie suggested. Amelia frowned, probably trying to work out who needed her input the most, us or her sister and brothers. In the end she opted for being the kid in charge of activities. And the way the conversation degenerated after that, into all sorts of fucking topics like breastfeeding and stitches, I think I might have liked to go with them.

SPOV

It was all very well being pregnant again, and having to put up with the fact that I was considered an over the hill specimen by Russell, but I maybe hadn't quite figured out what other people's reactions to the news was going to be.

I went out for dinner with Tara, at a French restaurant in Remuera near her house. Unfortunately we had a French waiter as well, who tried to get us to order wine almost as soon as we'd sat down.

"No, I'm good" I said, smiling at him.

"Really?" Tara asked, looking at me like I'd grown another head.

"I'm driving, remember?" And I wasn't risking anything. I still felt guilty for that glass of wine I'd had at the restaurant in Disneyland. For all I knew the baby was growing something important that day and I'd screwed it up forever. I knew it was a silly, irrational worry, but pregnancy was full of things to worry about and most of them you couldn't control. I could have said no to the wine.

"Yeah…but it's just a glass" Tara said, dismissively. And then she turned to the waiter and pointed to the wine list. "I'll have a glass of the sauvignon." She tried to hand me the wine list, but I waved it away.

"I'm really OK" I said. "I'll have…um, a cranberry juice."

The waiter nodded, and then left. Tara just kept looking at me. "Are you up the duff again?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Yeah" I said. There was no point denying it.

"Oh" she said. "Oh…well. Oh. I thought maybe you'd eaten too much American food." OK, well that made me feel wonderful. "Sorry" she said, quickly. "It's just I could see…but I didn't think…"

"That I'd want five kids" I finished for her.

"Yeah…just I can't imagine what it would have been like if I'd kept going after Lachie."

"Well I don't think they let you have that many caesareans for a start" I said.

"True, but even if I could have. I mean, Charlotte's no picnic now she's 13 and thinks she's ruling the world but at least she's fairly self-sufficient." She paused. "Is Tray still in nappies?" she asked.

"Well…yeah" I said, feeling a bit defensive. "But I don't think he will be for long. I mean, he always follows Sam to the bathroom…so I think he's got the idea."

Tara looked at me sympathetically and then reached across and patted my hand. "I'm not being judgmental" she said, although it was clear she was, just a bit anyway. "But just…is this really what you wanted?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well…look at us. We're nearly 40. Do you really still want to be having babies? I mean…was this Eric's idea?" She looked at me and I wasn't sure what to say. I think Tara took my silence for an admission of guilt, or something, because she continued on. "I'm not sure that you should feel like you need to keep having kids to keep him around…"

"It's not like that" I said, a bit sharply, while wondering if it was. Was I that insecure? Did I think that Eric might run off with the first nubile bimbo who wanted to have his babies?

"Well…just. I never thought you were that keen on lots and lots of kids" Tara said, pursing her lips. The waiter brought her wine and my juice over and she thanked him, but said we weren't ready to order yet and he left again.

"I always said I wanted a big family. I just didn't specify numbers" I huffed.

"You used to say Lorena was a fool for having five kids" Tara reminded me.

"Well…she's my mother in law. You don't like yours either. And some of her kids are nutters. Plus the fact she drove her husband off…probably. I've still got mine. One of them anyway…" Oh God, that was a horrible thought. Maybe I'd sucked all the life out of Bill and I was due to the do the same thing to Eric any minute now, just like Eric's dad had predicted.

"Sorry" Tara said, noting my expression. "I didn't mean to upset you…I just…Well, I don't really understand it. I mean, we had it all planned out. When we got old and our kids abandoned us, we were going to go on endless cruises, remember? Drink a lot and wear animal print." She smiled at me.

"Was this after we'd buried JB in the backyard?" I said.

"Well, first he'd have to come home long enough for me to do him in" Tara said. "I barely see him at the moment."

I nodded in sympathy. "Well, we can still do that" I said. "Eventually I'll be able to drink again. I just might have to run to the loo every five minutes."

"Yeah" Tara said. "But the chances of being abandoned by five kids are a lot less than being abandoned by two."

"I don't know" I said. "I hear from Amelia that I'm pretty embarrassing. _Especially_ because I keep having babies."

Tara laughed. "You wait. It gets worse. Charlotte told one of the other girls in her class that her real parents died and I'm only her aunt. Her _poor_ aunt. The mother bailed me up at pick up time and wanted to know the gory details of what killed Charlotte's parents. It was kind of embarrassing and I don't think the woman really believed me that there wasn't a story to tell. And that I wasn't really the poor relation. Well…I guess I am compared to that woman, but not to the rest of my family."

Yeah, that didn't sound like a lot of fun for Tara at all. The waiter came back and we quickly made our choices, I made sure none of mine included anything that could remotely be described as seafood. I really hated the limited food choices that came with pregnancy.

Dinner was lovely, and I think Tara and I got past the weirdness at the beginning. I guess it was only natural that she should wonder why on earth I'd want another baby, sometimes I wondered myself. I just hoped that I could get rid of the nagging feeling that I was doing this to keep Eric, because that would be really dumb. And I liked to think that I wasn't.

Because surely, if anything, having more kids was likely to drive Eric away. Straight into the arms of one of those women like that Dawn person he'd been working with a while back. The women with careers and no sticky handprints covering their clothing. The ones who didn't spend part of each day cuddling the toilet. The ones who could hold an entire conversation without losing their train of thought and being interrupted by a child who couldn't find its shoes.

The ones who didn't look like a big, fat blob.

So the fact that Eric actually signed up for all this. Actively campaigned for it, even, had to be a good sign, didn't it? I couldn't really decide, so in the end I just concentrated on enjoying my food and my time with Tara and hoped she didn't tell me too many stories about Charlotte's antics as a teenager. I wasn't looking forward to that stage.

We were just finishing up dessert when my cellphone rang. These days I was carting around Eric's discarded iPhone and it was big and annoying and I wasn't the best at working at. Felicia was. I think spending all that time chewing it as a baby somehow helped. I usually got her to deal with it when I was out and about and she could send a text to Eric to say we were on our way home much quicker than I could.

"Hi" I said, hoping Eric had just rung so the boys could say goodnight, or at the very least, to check on who got what in their lunchbox.

"Are you nearly done?" Eric said. He sounded kind of panicked, which wasn't a good sign.

"Why? What happened?" I asked, while Tara looked at me across the table with her eyebrows raised.

"Vomiting" Eric said. "Every fucking where. Some of it got on me." Oh. Poo. Eric was officially Not Good with Vomit.

"Who?" I asked.

"Sam" Eric said, "Just after I thought they were all asleep. Shit, it's all over the rug in the hall. And my leg. I'll probably get it next."

"Mmm. Or Tray."

"Fuck." Eric sounded a bit desperate. I didn't blame him.

"OK" I said. "I've got to go."

"Yeah. Just…see you soon." Eric hung up and I turned to Tara. "Sounds like there's a stomach bug at home" I said, scooping up the last mouthful of my chocolate brownie.

"Oh God" Tara said, looking horrified. "Really?" She looked at me worriedly. Yeah, Tara was Not Good with Stomach Bugs. I remembered all the pleading I'd had to do to get her to come and bring me supplies when Eric was in the States and the stomach bug ran rampant through our house.

"Well…I don't think I've got it" I said. Tara looked unconvinced. "I better go anyway. I'll probably be needed at home."

We paid up and I gave Tara a quick goodbye hug. "Good luck" she said. "With the bug…and everything." She looked down at my stomach.

"Yeah…thanks" I said, before I walked back to my car. On the way home I figured I might get supplies, so I went to the supermarket and bought potato chips, apple juice and lemonade popsicles. And then I went home to face the music.

I let myself in the front door and the hall light was on, giving me a lovely view of the rug and the orangey kind of stain on one side of it. I guess that was the remains of the spaghetti bolognaise then. I suppose at least the dinner I'd made them got eaten.

Eric came out of Sam and Tray's room. "How is he?" I asked.

"Asleep. Now." Eric looked back at the door as if he was terrified that was about to change. I registered that Eric's trackpants were missing and he was only wearing his t-shirt and underpants.

"So there's washing I take it?" I said to Eric. "I'll put this away, put the washing on, get changed and clean the rug." I started to walk towards the kitchen and Eric followed me.

"Um…" he said, following me into the kitchen. "I don't think you can."

"Can what?" I asked, as I put the stuff I'd bought at the supermarket in the pantry and the fridge, before moving into the laundry to stash the popsicles in the freezer and survey the pile of washing which was just dumped on top of the machine.

"The washing…and stuff." I looked at Eric and he was staring at the pile of dirty clothes rather morosely. Yeah, I wasn't looking forward to rinsing it all out and putting it in to wash either.

"No, it'll be fine" I said. "I mean…I feel sick most of the time anyway…"

"But…you can't get sick" Eric said. "Not sick like this. I'm probably already going to get it." Eric sounded kind of defeated on that point. I wanted to tell him he was wrong…but he probably wasn't.

"Well…if I wear gloves I'll be OK" I said.

Eric kind of pulled himself together. "No" he said. "No. I can do it. I mean…it's just cleaning, right?" I wasn't sure if he was really asking me, or just talking himself into it, so I nodded. "I already got the worst bits off the rug" he said. "It didn't look that much different to when I served it up at dinner."

OK, that probably fell into the category of things I didn't need explained to me, but I guess it was Eric's reality for the meantime. "If you're sure?" I said, closing the lid of the freezer.

"Yep" Eric said. "I'll be fine. I'll just get this laundry in the machine, clean the rug…"

"Just use soap and water and I'll deal with any remaining stain later on" I said.

"OK. So I'll do that and then I'll come to bed. No problem." Eric was at least sounding positive now, but it was kind of forced.

"OK. Well, just rinse that stuff and put it in a normal wash…do you want me to stay and set it for you?" I asked.

Eric looked a bit huffy. "It's just a washing machine. I've used one before."

"Yeah…just you know. I think it's fairly easy to follow."

"I'm sure I will be fine" Eric said curtly.

"Because there isn't a book…not that that helped you with the oven…" I trailed off. The oven had been bought new when we moved into this house and, in his attempt to understand why he couldn't open the door, Eric had actually resorted to reading the instructions for once. Unfortunately he could only find the ones that were in some kind of Scandinavian language, and it didn't really help him at all, despite the fact he became convinced that _Obs!_ was 'oops' in Danish. Because oops pretty much summed up the situation once I located the English instructions and we found out he'd set it to the cleaning function and the door was locked for an hour. Eric didn't seem to understand that pressing random buttons wasn't always the best solution.

"I'll be OK" Eric said. "So…just go to bed and leave me to it." Now he sounded grumpy, so I was probably best out of there. I really hoped he was OK. Stomach bugs were sucky, and I wasn't sure he realised that fully.

EPOV

Stomach bugs fucking sucked. It wasn't so much the fact that Sam vomited all over me, although that was kind of unpleasant, but the clean-up afterwards was worse. Spaghetti sauce makes everything a weird fucking orange colour apparently, and as tempting as it was to contemplate just buying a new rug that didn't have a weird fucking orange spaghetti sauce stain on it, I did my best to clean it up.

I sat back on my heels and looked at my efforts. I didn't think that rug was ever going to look the fucking same again. Maybe Sookie could fix it…sometime. At the moment I didn't want her anywhere near anything Sam was regurgitating. I just couldn't believe that much had come up…he hadn't eaten that much at dinner. Had he? It was fucking weird.

And it might have been nice if he'd given me some warning so we could actually make it to the bathroom.

I carried the bucket of water back to the laundry and looked at the washing machine which didn't seem to have done anything. Lights were flashing but I could hear any of the usual washing-type noises. What the fuck? I'd pressed the programme button and…shit; maybe you had to press the start button too. I tried that and the thing whirred to life and the sound of water filling it was a promising sign.

I wondered how long it was going to take before it had finished. Oh, fuck it. The stuff could go in the dryer in the morning.

I switched off the lights and left the room, and then checked that the door was locked and everyone was in bed, asleep. Thankfully they all looked OK for now, although Sam was squirming a bit in his sleep. Poor little guy. Hopefully he'd be better in the morning.

Felicia was hanging half out of bed, so I pushed her back in, and Amelia had fallen asleep with a book still open which I needed to move because the corner was liable to poke her in the eye. With Sookie out of the house tonight she'd decided to play 20 questions at bedtime and asked me whether I liked making babies or whether it was just Sookie who did. Fuck. I really didn't need to answer that. Well I thought I didn't. Amelia had looked at me expectantly while I'd tried to figure out a way to answer it that got her completely off the topic of sex, and then Felicia had walked in the room and said it didn't sound like I liked it because mostly I said bad words. Yeah, they really fucking knew too much now and I wished we'd never opened that particular can of worms. I kind of got that Sookie didn't want them to be ignorant and uninformed…but I could have done without being permanently embarrassed by the girls. I hadn't yet decided what was worse, being trapped in a house with my Dad and his succession of noisy and slutty girlfriends, or having my own kids way too interested in my sex life.

Tonight though, mostly I would have liked to have had no vomit. It wasn't my favourite thing to clean up, and getting it all over me because Sam staggered out and said "I don' feel good" before he christened my leg, my foot, the rug and part of the wall…shit. I hadn't seen that splash before when I'd been cleaning up, and I just really fucking wanted to go to bed and this day to be over, but I'd told Sookie I'd deal with the clean-up and fuck knows, she was unlikely to be impressed if there was still vomit on the walls in the morning.

I could just pretend I still hadn't seen it, I thought.

No I couldn't. I'd fucking seen it now and there was no going back. I went back to the kitchen to get a cloth and some of that spray that kills every fucking germ known to humankind. Except the only one we had was organic as well. I didn't really think that would work. I felt sure that some chemicals would kill the germs a lot better than fucking daisy juice, but it didn't appear that Sookie felt the same way.

I cleaned up the mess on the wall and returned everything to the kitchen, before finally heading off to the bedroom. Sookie was already asleep, which didn't surprise me. She was lucky if she could stay awake past about 9 o'clock most nights at the moment. And I wasn't feeling that shit hot myself after spending the best part of the evening dealing with four kids and a pile of barf. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with Sookie…but I didn't want her to catch any germs I might have picked up when the fucking daisy juice didn't do what it was supposed to.

So instead of just getting into the bed, which looked fucking inviting about now, I headed to the shower and scrubbed as much as myself as I could, hoping that would wash away all the germs and in the morning it would all be a distant memory.

When I was clean and dry and wearing clean underwear thanks to a visit from the Underpants Fairy who must have been making her rounds at some point during the day, I finally crawled into bed and pressed myself against Sookie, who rolled slightly backwards, but didn't wake up.

It felt good lying there, just listening to Sookie breathe. It was always comforting holding her. The most comforting thing in the world really. I had just started to doze when there was rather fucking piercing shout of "Mummy!"

Sookie sat bolt upright, which was impressive considering how out to it she'd been before. "Sam" she said. "He's probably been sick again."

"No" I said. "No, he can't be…" I figured he couldn't possibly have any dinner left in him.

"Yeah" Sookie said, swinging her legs out of bed. "He'll have to get it all out of his system."

"What? No." She had to be wrong. I watched as she started to walk out of the bedroom, and remembered that I didn't want her near the germs. Not while pregnant. Shit.

"I'll go" I said, as Sam yelled again, and Tray yelled just after him. Surely he couldn't be sick too?

"I think he wants me…" Sookie said, staring down the hall.

"You can't" I said as forcefully as I could, considering how groggy I felt having been woken up before I got properly to sleep. "It's not…just don't risk it." Fuck, we had enough worries with this pregnancy. Between the fact that Sookie worried about her age, the risk of miscarriage and the potential problems that might be thrown up when we could finally have that amnio, I didn't want her worrying about catching a stomach bug. It was bad enough she was still upset she'd had a glass of wine at Disneyland. And to be honest, I had no fucking clue what the potential risks were. I knew listeria was bad…but a stomach bug…fuck. I realised I should have Googled it.

"Um…OK?" Sookie said. She didn't sound completely sure I could handle it. I walked past her and down the hall into Sam's room. The nightlight was on in there and the scene wasn't great. Sam had thrown up again, covering his bed and himself. The smell was pretty horrific. Poor fucking Tray. No wonder he was awake and grizzling.

"I did more vomits!" Sam wailed tears and snot running down his face. "I want my Mummy!" he said and he looked so fucking miserable sitting there that the thing to do would be to hug him and tell him it was OK, but quite frankly, I have never wanted to hug someone less in my entire fucking life.

I held my breath and hugged him anyway. Fuck. The smell was atrocious.

"It's OK, buddy" I said.

"Where's Mummy?" he wailed.

"She's, uh, she's still out. But I'm here, so we'll clean this up and get you back to bed." I carried Sam into the bathroom and put him on the floor where he looked small and miserable. "I'll be right back" I said, and I went back to his bedroom and just bundled all the bedding up.

"Lie down, Tray" I said.

"S'a'right?" he asked me.

"Sam's OK. He'll be OK." I assured him. "Lie down and go back to sleep." Tray didn't look convinced, but eventually he sat down at least. There wasn't much I could do, I wasn't sure how much vomit had made it onto my previously clean t-shirt and I didn't want to get too near him, so I left and hoped if he was alone he'd eventually go back to sleep.

I dumped the bedding in the laundry, where the previous load had now finished, but I thought I'd deal with that later. When I got back to Sam he was sitting shivering on the floor and I wished I'd thought to put the heating on before I left him.

I got him undressed and into the bath for a quick shower, making a pile of his clothes and my t-shirt on the floor. He was as pale as fucking death and had big circles under his eyes. "Sowwy" he said, as I washed him down. Mostly his hair seemed have borne the brunt of it. No wonder the smell had lingered.

"It's OK" I said. "You couldn't help it."

"I felt sick!" he cried. "Like Mummy!"

"Yeah." Poor fucking Sookie as well. Although at least she made it to the toilet.

"I no wanna be sick" Sam said.

"Nope" I agreed. "No one does. Mummy doesn't like it at all."

"No" Sam agreed. "Makes her sad."

"It does."

When he was cleaned up, I switched off the shower and wrapped him up in one of the towels. He looked fucking dead on his feet. And…I realised I hadn't brought him clean pyjamas. Fuck this night was never-ending.

I left Sam wrapped in the towel and tip-toed into his room to grab something. I'd have to get him clean bedding too, I realised. Tray looked like he was asleep so I hoped it would stay that way, as I eased a drawer open and looked for something that looked promising. Anything would have been good, pyjamas with cars, dinosaurs, fucking rugby players, I didn't care. There didn't seem to be any pyjamas in any of the fucking drawers I was looking in.

I tried the other set of drawers in the room and managed to find a pair in that fuzzy pyjama material. They were pale blue, but they had pictures of Dora the Explorer all over them. Huh. They may not have originally been bought for Sam. But they would do. I just wanted to get back to bed.

I hurried back with them and found Sam was almost asleep on the floor. I got him into the pyjamas and discovered they were a bit on the small side and although they maybe hadn't been Sam's first, they were almost definitely Tray's now. But at least he was covered.

I carried him back to his room and noticed that there was a pile of clean bedding and a metal bowl sitting outside the door. Thank fuck for Sookie, because finding the pyjamas was bad enough, I really fucking didn't want to have to locate sheets. And the bowl was a good thought.

If Sam managed to use it…although, he had to be finished now. He wasn't that big, there had to be a limit to the contents of his stomach at any one time, surely.

I sat Sam on the floor, made up the bed and tucked him again. "If you feel sick again" I whispered. "Try and get it in the bowl."

"Uh-huh" he said with his eyes closed, and I had no idea if he'd heard me.

"'Night Sam" I said, kissing his forehead. He mumbled "'Night", and then I started to walk back to our bedroom to find another t-shirt and get into bed again…except I remembered all the fucking laundry. I grabbed the clothes from the bathroom, and took them to the laundry where I pulled one load of laundry out of the machine and put it in the dryer, which at least seemed to have a fairly fucking easy set of controls. It was just a shame Sookie wasn't here to see me figure them out, because she thought I was a fucking moron ever since that incident with the oven. It wasn't my fault the button with a P on it looked like an F and I thought it was a temperature setting. And Sookie laughing her ass off because temperatures aren't set in Fahrenheit in this country, really didn't fucking help.

And now that I'd used the washing machine once, I had the hang of that too. Feeling quite pleased with my progress, I walked back towards the bedroom. Only to stop short of the door, suddenly wondering if I'd added laundry detergent to the washing machine.

I was tempted to just leave it, but I turned back and opened the lid to look. The machine was working, and the water looked vaguely sudsy…but maybe there wasn't enough? I added more and then finally, fucking finally, I could crawl back into bed myself.

"He alright?" Sookie mumbled, as I got in.

"Yeah" I said. "I think he's good now."

I didn't fucking realise that 'now' meant for another three hours. In the early hours of the morning Sam cried out, and although he'd got most of it in the bowl, and there wasn't a lot this time, there was still a bit of clean-up and I'd been told by Sookie to make sure he had some water, but not too much. So I let him have about three sips and then had to cuddle him while he cried when I took the water away again. But he did fall asleep pretty quickly. And I didn't have to do anymore laundry.

Until Tray threw up at 6am. He'd stood up in the crib and managed to cover the wall, the crib, the bedding, and then the floor when he turned around to yell "Yuggy! Yuggy!" to signal his distress.

It had been a long fucking night and I wasn't sure the day was going to be any better.

SPOV

I felt so bad for Eric. He was up most of the night with Sam, and then Tray's bug kicked in just as it was nearly time to get up. He looked exhausted, and I wondered how long until he'd succumb to it.

It was horrible, and it was especially horrible when I could hear Sam crying for me, but Eric was right. It was a bit of risk if they vomited on me. And I was doing all I could not to risk this baby.

So in the morning Eric and the boys remained in isolation in the family room, while Amelia, Felicia and I had the kitchen to eat our breakfast in. I missed having Eric puttering around making coffee and feeding spoonfuls of his Weetbix to Tray, who was prone to appearing in front of Eric and just opening his mouth like a baby bird.

"So…why can't we go in there?" Felicia grumped.

"Because Sam and Tray have been throwing up. You don't want to catch it" I said to her, while trying to face my toast. It had seemed like a good idea, and now I was right off the thought of eating. My stomach was bad enough as it was.

"But Dad's in there" she continued.

"Well…he'll probably get it too" I said. That was just the way it worked.

"Yuck!" Amelia said vehemently. "I hate throwing up." She really did. She got so upset every time she had a stomach bug, which, thankfully, wasn't all that often. The tears were often worse than the actual vomiting.

"Well, hopefully you won't get it this time. So just…steer clear of the people who are throwing up."

Amelia gave a little shudder. "They won't vomit on me, will they?"

"Not if you're not near them" I said.

"Well I'm not going _anywhere_ near Sam and Tray" Amelia said. "Not when they're germy."

"Someone threw up in the hallway" Felicia commented. "The rug's, like, really soaking."

"Euw!" Amelia exclaimed. "That's _so_ gross. Boys are just gross!"

"You threw up on the deck once" I reminded her, but she looked kind of disbelieving.

"No…I don't think so. Probably it was Felicia" Amelia said.

"Nope. Definitely you. I had to hose it down myself. Daddy was away."

Amelia looked at Felicia, who just shrugged. "No" Amelia said in the end. "Remember? You forget stuff when you're going to have a baby."

"Um…not really that much…" I said, wondering if I had actually forgotten anything important today.

"Uh-huh. You do" Amelia said, nodding. "Like yesterday, you forgot we were coming home with the walking bus."

"Well…I just forgot what day it was really…" I said, trying to defend myself. It had only been Sam's shout of "Ames!" from the back seat that had alerted me to the fact they'd just walked past the car as I was parking it on the street outside school. "Anyway" I continued, "go and get ready for the walking bus now."

They both sighed and shuffled off; with Felicia still muttering that she wasn't sure Daddy was OK with all the sick people. I hoped he was OK. I felt bad about leaving them to go to work, but there wasn't much more I could do. I'd emptied the dryer and folded the stuff that was in there, and put the load from the machine in the dryer, but I really wished I could do more.

Just before I left for the day I breached the cordon around the family room and stuck my head in. "Hey" I said.

"Mummy" Sam said weakly. "Mummy I fought you's not 'ere."

"Well, I was out last night."

"I did vomits. So did Tray." I looked over at Tray who had fallen asleep on Eric's lap. When he was running around the place it was easy to forget just how little he still was, but at the moment, he barely looked older than a baby.

"Yeah" I said. "You did, poor thing."

"S'not good" Sam said, seriously. I sat down on the couch next to him, and pushed the hair back from his face. He looked pale and there were big dark circles under his eyes.

"Do you want a drink?" I asked him.

Sam nodded. "Daddy said only sips. I'm so firsty."

"I know, but you can only have sips. Otherwise your tummy won't like it."

Sam took a sip of the water I handed to him. "My tummy di'n't like dinner" Sam said. And he looked thoughtful. "I don' fink it was your cookin' tho. I fink it was de bugs."

"I think so too" I said. I looked over at Eric who was just watching me warily, as though he was keeping an eye out to see if any germs were trying to get to me, and he could leap in and prevent them before they got me. It was a nice thought, but I didn't really rate his chances.

"I don' wanna be sick for my burfday" Sam said plaintively. Yeah, it was his party at the weekend, although that wasn't his actual birthday. Sam couldn't really separate the two though and to him the birthday was the party.

"I'm sure you'll be better by then" I said, thinking that worrying about it wouldn't help him at all.

"Mummy's got to go to work now" Eric said, a hint of warning in his voice. Yeah, he really didn't want me hanging around here.

"OK" I said. "Well, I hope you feel better soon." I gave Sam a quick kiss on the forehead, and then with a small wave to Eric, and a "Good luck", I left them all to it.

Work took my mind off them a bit. In fact between making sure everyone was taken care of in the classes, feeling constantly nauseous, and occasionally hoping that Eric was coping with it all, my mind was kind of occupied. So I shouldn't have had time to worry about Tara's comments from the night before.

But I still did. It was ridiculous really. But was I just doing this to keep Eric?

When we had a break between some of the sessions, I had a run to the loo to dry heave over the toilet and then walked back to the kitchen to join Judith for a cup of tea. "You still feeling that blah?" she asked me.

"Yeah" I said. "Got a few weeks yet, I guess."

"Mmm" Judith said. "I hate that stage." As much as I'd wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret there was no hiding it from Judith.

"Me too" I agreed. "I'm starting to wonder why I'm doing this again. I must be mad." I stared at my tea.

"Well…no more mad than my mum was" Judith said cheerfully, which didn't really cheer me up at all.

"I think even she'd stopped by my age" I said.

Judith shrugged. "Well, my dad left" she said. "So I guess she had to…I mean, I think she would have kept going, you know, because of her beliefs…"

"Oh, yeah." That was kind of a sobering thought. I wonder how many more sisters Bill would have coped with.

"You're not the only one" Judith said brightly.

"Well…no. I guess there are lots of women my age having babies. Although usually it's not their fifth baby." I briefly wondered whether it had been Eric's life plan to have 5 kids before he turned 34.

"Uh-huh" Judith said. "And then there's me."

"And then there's you what?"

"Pregnant" Judith said.

"Oh" I said. "Really?" I kind of knew they'd been trying for a while after waiting to get their finances sorted before going for number three. I'd also wished I hadn't known, because it was the kind of details about other people's lives that I just didn't need to know sometimes. But I hadn't noticed that Judith was actually pregnant. I guess I was kind of consumed by own pregnancy.

"Well, duh! Yeah. I feel sooo sick!"

"Yep. That'll be it then. Well, congratulations. I bet Calvin's stoked."

"He is. I think he was getting worried because it took so long this time. I mean, you never seem to take any time at all to get knocked up. But it wasn't so easy for us."

"But you are now. So that's good" I said.

"Yep. Although fingers crossed it all goes OK" she said. I guess we all had that worry. "Still, we get to be pregnancy buddies! That's kind of cool."

"It is" I said. "So how far along are you?"

"About five weeks now."

"Cool, well congratulations again" I leaned in and gave her a very tentative hug. "This really doesn't work when everyone involved has sore boobs, does it?" I said, and Judith laughed.

"I hope Eric and the boys are OK" I said, as I finished my tea and washed out my cup. "If he gets it, we're screwed."

EPOV

The day with Sam and Tray was like living through hell. Tray was fucking hopeless at predicting when he was going to vomit, or vomiting into any kind of container. He got me, the couch, his blanket, his teddy bear, the floor and the remote control which was a major fucking worry because if the TV was set on the goddamned kid's channel forever I was going to go insane.

It felt like my entire day was spent watching them vomit, cleaning vomit and then trying to limit their intake of food and drink so they didn't vomit anymore. By lunchtime Sam seemed to be rallying and he complained of hunger so I let him eat some toast. Big fucking mistake that was. It came back up about a half hour later and made him more miserable than ever. "My burfday cake" he cried. "I won' be able to eat my burfday cake. And it's a pirate one!"

"Yeah, you will. You'll be better by then" I assured him, hoping that I wasn't lying. Surely these things didn't last more than 24 hours?

I really fucking hoped that was the case when I started throwing up mid-afternoon. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for what Sookie had to go through. I felt fucking wretched, but I was the only one home with two other kids, so I had no choice but to pick myself off the bathroom floor and stagger back to the family room.

"You a'right?" Sam asked me. He was brightening again after his earlier episode losing his lunch. I wasn't about to make the same mistake again though. And I certainly didn't want to fucking look at any food at the moment.

Tray woke up and looked groggy. "Firsty" he whispered, so I handed him his sipper cup. "Just a bit, buddy" I said to him, and I had to prise it out of his hands, which made him cry. "Shhh" I said, hugging him. "You're OK."

SPOV

When I got home, after running a few errands, things looked pretty bleak. At first I could only find Sam and Tray. "Where's Daddy?" I asked.

"Doin' vomits" Sam said. He sounded pretty matter of fact. I guess it was kind of normal in our house at the moment.

"Oh" I said. "OK." I found Eric in the ensuite. Well, I heard the noises that could only be Eric doing what Sam described through the door of the ensuite. "You OK?" I called out.

"Yeah" Eric said, and I figured I would just leave him to that one.

I didn't therefore have much choice but to step in for Eric after that. I made him go to bed, as he looked pale and sweaty and pretty sick. He tried to protest, but I pointed out if he keeled over somewhere other than bed, he was staying there because I wasn't dragging him around the house.

Sam seemed to be feeling a bit better, he was definitely interested in something to eat so I pulled out a lemonade Popsicle and gave him that. Tray just wanted water, and then he nodded off on the couch.

No one had much dinner. I had to separate the girls off again and Amelia looked scared that I might infect her. I made omelettes for the three of us, and ferried more Popsicles to Sam, and gave one to Tray, although he brought some of it back up.

Eric just slept right through.

I didn't bother trying to bathe Tray and Sam, we could worry about that tomorrow I figured. I got them into bed and read a quick story. "I don' wanna be sick for de party" Sam said quietly.

"You'll be fine. The bugs don't stay very long" I assured him.

He frowned. "You still got your bugs" he said.

"Mmm. Mine are kind of different."

"How?"

"They just are. Don't worry about it. But yours will go, you wait and see."

"How'd you know dat?" Sam said, frowning.

"I just do. They teach it at mummy-school." I hoped that would work.

"Dere's a mummy-school?" Sam asked.

"Yep. Of course there is. They don't just let you have kids, without training you first."

"Oh" Sam looked thoughtful. "Is dere a daddy-school too?"

"Definitely. Now get some sleep."

I left their room and crossed my fingers they were OK for the night. And that Eric was too. I went into our bedroom and found him coming out of the bathroom. "I've got the shits now, too" he grumbled.

I discarded my first response of 'thanks for sharing' and went with something a bit more sympathetic. "Poor you" I said. "I'll get you some water." I brought back a glass of water with a straw. "Just sip it" I said.

"I know" Eric said gruffly. Yeah, he really didn't like being this sick. He had a mouthful of water and put the glass on his bedside table. "I just…I don't want to make you sick" he said.

"Oh, I'll be fine. I trust you not to vomit on me."

"I should sleep in the spare room" he said. "In case."

"No, it's OK. I will, if you like. Make the most of it while we have it still. You stay here with the ensuite."

It was odd sleeping in the spare room. I guess the baby would get used to it eventually. When it was actually the baby's bedroom. I hadn't given a lot of thought to the end of the pregnancy and the actual baby arriving, I'd been so worried about the pregnancy itself. Eric and I hadn't even taken bets on what sex it would be. But lying here, in the room that would one day be this kid's bedroom I started to feel just a little bit more connected to the person who, hopefully, would be arriving to fill that imaginary spot on our bed that Eric believed he could detect.

Buggered if I could see it. Guess they taught that one in daddy-school only.

But that didn't mean I wanted this baby any the less. And lying here, thinking about how we were going to have to get rid of this bed and maybe trade it in for a single one for Tray, I was actually getting kind of excited. It would be, well, maybe not fun to have a newborn again. Maybe not fun all the time. But exciting, anyway. I was looking forward to doing it all again. With Eric.

EPOV

I fucking hated being sick like this. It was the fucking pits. Every time I thought I might be OK, I had another attack and there'd be more vomiting or something infinitely worse. Fuck, I hoped it was over soon.

So I lay there, lonely without Sookie, drifting in and out of sleep and making regular trips to the bathroom hoping each time that this would be the last time.

I wondered if that was how Sookie felt about pregnancy.

By morning I'd had fuck all sleep and I was pretty wretched. Sookie appeared in the doorway. "You OK?" she whispered. I lifted my head off the pillow, and wished I hadn't because it was pounding worse than any hangover I'd ever had.

"Yeah" I said. "I'm still alive."

"Well, that's something I guess" Sookie said. "Can I get you anything?"

"More water?" I asked.

"OK" Sookie said, walking over to get my glass. "I'll be back soon."

When I next woke up a new glass was on the nightstand and the sun was blazing through the curtains. I must have slept a fair amount of the morning away. At least I'd been in bed and not in the bathroom.

Sookie looked in to check on me again. "You're awake" she said.

"Yeah. Sorry."

"Don't be. You needed the sleep."

I sat up and had a mouthful of water hoping it would get rid of the headache. "How're the boys?"

"Well, they've both stopped. I think. Fingers crossed anyway. Tray's still pretty tired and not really eating apart from popsicles. Sam's moved on to apple juice and potato chips, but I've cut him off until we find out how the first serving sits with him."

"OK" I said.

"So you just rest up. We're OK." And then she disappeared again. I lay back down and closed my eyes.

The next thing I knew I opened them to find Sam staring at me. "No more vomits?" he asked me.

"Don't know" I said, my voice sounding croaky and my lips feeling incredibly dry.

Sam looked at me. "Wha's daddy-school like?" he asked, which made no fucking sense at all. "What?" I asked, but before he could reply I hear Sookie hiss from the doorway "Sam! Sam, I said stay out of there. Daddy's sleeping." Sam scuttled off and I turned to see Sookie give me an apologetic smile, before she disappeared too. Fuck, I kind of wished she'd stay. I was starting to feel like a fucking leper.

I napped some more and lost track of time, until I woke up and discovered it was dark. I realised that I maybe didn't feel quite so bad anymore. I sat up and turned on the light and managed get myself to the bathroom to pee, before shuffling back to bed like I was eighty. I propped up the pillows and switched on the TV, feeling more awake than I had in a while.

Sookie arrived again a little while later on. "You want anything?" she asked, sitting on the end of the bed.

I shook my head. "No."

"How long since you were sick?" she asked.

"Hours" I replied. "This morning."

"OK. Well, let's try a Popsicle, OK?"

I nodded, and Sookie left and came back with a Popsicle balanced in a bowl. I kind of liked it when she took care of me, but I really wished I didn't have to be so fucking sick to be nursed. I couldn't really enjoy it properly.

Sookie sat with me while I ate it and updated me on the day's events. It appeared the boys were recovering and so far no one else was showing any signs of it, although Amelia's quick side step of Sam had been quite something to witness apparently.

When the Popsicle was finished, I gave the bowl to Sookie, feeling like I'd passed some kind of test. "You want a shower?" she asked. I really fucking did, but I wasn't sure of the strength in my own legs at the moment.

"Um…" I said. "I don't know if I can." Now I had the idea though, it really appealed. I felt sweaty and dirty and fucking gross.

"It's OK" Sookie said. "I'll help you get in there. And there's the seat, remember?"

Yeah, I hadn't exactly planned out buying a shower with a seat for when one of us was sick. I'd had other plans for the seat. And the reality had been fucking better than what I'd planned, but I figured I didn't have a lot of choice.

"Sure" I said, "Let's do it."

Sookie came over and helped me up and held my arm as we shuffled slowly to the bathroom. And then she pulled my t-shirt over my head and my underwear down. I liked her undressing me, but maybe not in these circumstances. Not when I was fucking worried about making her sick too. And the baby. I didn't want the baby to be sick.

"I don't think I should be breathing on you" I said, as Sookie turned the water on.

She shrugged. "We don't know that it's airborne" she said. "OK, get in. And just…sit down. If you fall, you're stuck there."

"Thank fuck the hot water's gas heated then" I said, stepping in. And sitting down as I'd been instructed.

The shower did feel fucking great. It was nice to finally be clean again. Sookie brought in fresh underwear for me, and placed it on the toilet, and when it was done she helped me out and helped me get dressed. I felt a bit low being so dependent on Sookie, but I figured it was a good sign she wouldn't abandon me when I was really old and couldn't look after myself, and that was a nice thought.

Until I wondered what would happen if she died first. Fuck, I really hoped she didn't die and leave me alone.

I walked back to bed to find Sookie had changed the sheets and the cool cotton was incredibly soothing when I slipped in between them. I looked at Sookie, who was fussing with the pillows, and I wanted to ask her to get in with me…but I couldn't risk it. The baby was too important. After all, she was putting herself through all the fucking awful parts of pregnancy and labour, the least I could do was not infect her.

So Sookie drifted in and out for a while, checking on me and seeing if I wanted anything. I didn't. She sat and watched some TV with me, and then eventually, after using the bathroom, she disappeared off to the spare room, and I spent another lonely night by myself.

But at least I had fucking stopped throwing up.

SPOV

It took Eric a lot longer to recover than it took Sam and Tray. I guess they had youth on their sides. In fact Tray bounced back almost completely by the second day and I found him in bed with Eric showing the magic trick he'd devised himself. He'd pull his arm inside his sleeve and go "'ere arm?" expecting you to look shocked and ask if he'd lost his arm, at which point he'd push his hand out his sleeve and yell "Ta-da!" And then repeat it about six more times.

Even looking tired and sick, Eric still managed to play along with that one. And he dutifully watched TV with the boys from bed, even if I think he did fall asleep for a while during Sesame Street. I'm pretty sure their rendition of _Old MacDonald's Farm_ woke him up though, because I could hear it from the kitchen. Tray was a bit sketchy on the words, but he liked yelling "Fum!" every time you were supposed to say farm. He was nothing if not enthusiastic.

Felicia was relieved when she was finally allowed to go in and see Eric and she could tell him about everything she'd done at school. She really didn't like to be parted from Daddy and still wasn't convinced that the bug hadn't been some elaborate plot conceived by her brothers to steal Eric from her.

Amelia wasn't going near any of them, and was quite fond of yelling "Don't breathe on me!" at her brothers, who wanted to do more than breathe on her after they realised the power they had over her, and I think it was Sam licking her hand that caused all the shrieking I heard from her bedroom. But thankfully, she didn't get the bug.

And neither did I, although the fact I threw up the next day made me incredibly nervous. And Eric too, who kind of hovered behind me asking me if I felt sick. Well, yeah. I did. But I had no way of separating stomach bug from morning sickness, unless I started throwing up repeatedly. And I didn't.

Eric managed some dinner. Well, chicken soup. With crackers. I'm sure they weren't quite the right crackers, but it was all I could manage. Eric seemed to appreciate it. I sat on the bed and watched him eat and hoped he was on the mend.

And I figured it was safe to sleep again with Eric at night. It felt much better when he cuddled up my back and breathed on the back of my head. He put his hand on my tummy and whispered "I missed you guys."

"Yeah. We missed you. The baby didn't mind its room, but I got lonely."

"Me too" Eric said.

"Of course we kind of need to change it into a baby's room and not a spare room" I said. "I was thinking we'll trade the old bed in, get one for Tray and then move the cot. And if we move the nursing chair in there we could put a small table in the boys' room and maybe set up the train set on it for them."

"Uh-huh" Eric mumbled. "Sounds good."

I might have been mostly talking out loud to myself, but it felt good anyway. I figured he was probably on the same page with me. We'd done this before, after all.

EPOV

By the time we got to the weekend, I was almost feeling normal again. Sookie kept telling me that I looked pale, and it was true I still felt tired and didn't have that much of an appetite, but I figured I'd be OK soon. And it wasn't like I had much of a choice. Sookie kind of needed me for those moments when she had to throw up, so that someone could look after the other four kids.

So I found myself at Sam's party, which we were holding at one of those indoor playgrounds so we didn't have to worry about the weather and Sookie didn't have to prepare any food. There were a lot of kids there, not just the ones with our party, and it was noisy and hot and the so-called party room was cramped.

"You sure you're OK?" Sookie asked me, as we arrived.

"Yeah" I said, as she stuck a label on my shirt. It said _Sam's Dad_. "I really have to fucking wear this?" I asked.

"Yeah" she said. "So they can find us if there's a problem."

"Where's yours?" I asked her, and she pulled her sweater to one side to show that it was stuck on her t-shirt, but hidden by the sweater. "Well how are they going to find you?" I asked, but she'd gone off to greet some parents who'd arrived with a small boy. I assumed they had, anyway, because as far as I could see it was just two adults and a pair of shoes that arrived in the party room. I guessed their kid was out playing with the other kids. They put the shoes in the box we had for them, and added their present to the pile in the corner.

Felicia came running in. "Dad" she said. "Dad, Tray got stuck."

"Where?" I asked.

"Up the top" she pointed to the big climbing frame that was way too fucking complicated for someone who wasn't yet two. But he'd probably followed his siblings. It had happened before.

"Yeah, OK" I said. "I'm coming."

SPOV

I was glad that everyone had recovered by Sam's party. Well, mostly recovered. I think the after-effects of the bug had been dragging for Eric. It was worrying that he was still a bit off his food, but he was up and about and managing to hold it together for the party.

Watching Sam you couldn't tell he'd been sick earlier in the week. Hyped up by the joy of being the centre of attention, plus all the junk food he could manage, he tore through the playground with Tray hot on his heels. Luckily, Eric was shadowing them most of the way.

Calvin and Judith arrived, with Jessica and Thomas. Judith looked really green around the gills and almost immediately took off to the ladies' room, leaving Calvin clutching her handbag. Jessica turned to the Felicia, who'd drifted into the party room to poke Sam's presents and said "Mum keeps throwing up. It's gross."

Felicia shrugged. "Everyone in our house keeps throwing up all the time. The boys are really gross. Come on; let's go down the big slide!" They ran off, and after a moment's hesitation, Thomas followed them. I was just thankful Jessica had decided to tell Felicia and not Amelia who might have put two and two together and announced Aunty Jude's pregnancy on her behalf.

While I chatted to the other parents, and made sure they had coffee or tea, and looked after the presents, and made sure that kids who couldn't find parents were reunited, Eric did actual playground duty, lifting kids on and off the climbing frames and the carousel, and making sure Tray didn't bounce himself, or anyone else, off the bouncy castle.

He looked absolutely shattered by the end of the two hours, and I figured it wouldn't just be the boys having afternoon naps. But I think I had finally figured it out. I'd thought and I'd thought about what Tara had suggested, whether I was just giving Eric more kids so he wouldn't leave and I'd realised that although she meant well, she was really far off the mark.

I didn't have kids to keep Eric. I had kids because I knew Eric was the guy who'd stick around. The one who'd deal with stomach bugs and noisy kid's parties when he really wanted to lie down somewhere quiet. The one who subbed in for me when I was feeling crappy and the one who held me at night while we planned out how to turn the guest room into a kid's room. I had babies because I wanted them, and I felt secure in doing it, because, really, I was just one half of a great parenting team.

I loved my kids, and I loved Eric, and at the end of the day, that was all that mattered.

As the last guests grabbed their son's shoes, and carried him off, waving at us as the kid yelled "Not going HOME!" Eric turned to me. "All done?" he asked.

"Yeah, let's get going." I said. I turned to watch Sam and Tray jumping around randomly, while Amelia told them they needed to put their shoes on, and Felicia tried to sneak off for another turn on the slide. "I think I'm about all partied out for one day."

"Alright guys!" Eric yelled in his most authoritative voice. "Butts on the ground and shoes on. Leesh, don't wander off."

"That's what I've been saying!" Amelia complained, but she was ignored by everyone.

"Good work" I said to Eric. "Learn that one at daddy-school?"

"Yeah" he said. "What is this daddy-school thing? Sam keeps asking me about it. He wants to know if it's where you get to be tall."

I laughed. "Don't worry. Let's just say I think you passed."

Eric frowned. "Only just passed?"

"Well…top of the class then."

"That's more like it" Eric said, kissing my forehead. "After all, I haven't lost one of them yet."

"No, but Felicia's making another break for it" I said, nodding in her direction, as I bent down to pick up the shopping bag I'd packed some of the presents into.

"Leesh! Don't you dare!" Eric warned.

"I wasn't!" she huffed, and then she decided to try another tactic. "Please? Pretty please? Just one slide?"

Eric hesitated. "Oh, go on then." Felicia didn't hang about after that one, and Sam and Tray watched her go, and then immediately abandoned putting their shoes on to take off after her. "Hey" Amelia protested. "You can't just run off!" And then she ran off as well.

"Yep" I said, patting Eric's back. "Definitely top of the class."

**Thanks for reading!**


	104. Bonus Chapter: Happy Pretend Holiday

**A/N Back again, having survived sitting on the trampoline while the toddler runs in circles around me. If only I could take myself out of that equation, but I worry that if the neighbours see I've zipped my toddler into the trampoline's net so she can exercise they'll alert the authorities. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

As it drew nearer to the time for my amnio, I tried to come up with a list of things I could do that were going to take my mind off the situation. For starters I finally got around to organising a new bed for Tray. He was thrilled with it, but Sam was possibly less thrilled that Tray spent a lot of the night yelling "Aaaah!" and launching himself from the bed into the middle of the room. Sam would wander in to where Eric and I were watching TV and complain "Tray's no' sleepin'. He's doin' supers heroes again." At which point I would have to dispatch Eric to go and explain that even superheroes have to sleep sometimes.

But the bed thing didn't really require that much attention. So I moved on. I cleaned out some cupboards, washed all the duvet covers, which caused a huge amount of work for Bob as he systematically went through all the beds in the house and re-furred them. I went through all the kids' drawers to work out what clothes were being stored or handed down. I surreptitiously went through Eric's half of the wardrobe and managed to re-stock my collection of rags. I cleaned out and defrosted the freezer, the result of which was an interesting buffet-style dinner comprising various leftovers and a few odds and ends like half a packet of spring rolls and some vegetable croquettes. It was a bit different than our usual fare, but everyone coped.

And then I set my sights a bit higher. I rearranged the furniture in the living room and in the process got to vacuum behind everything. I washed all the bedroom curtains when I had a fine day, and on the next fine day I did the living room, kitchen and family room ones. I had a go at trying to straighten Eric's office but it wasn't appreciated and the reward at now having all my cups returned to their rightful place in the kitchen wasn't really worth Eric's huffing and his worries that I might have touched an important piece of paper. Because, God knows, they were all important pieces of paper. Even the ones with the two line emails printed on them.

But none of it really distracted me for that long. At the end of the day I was still stuck worrying about the amnio and the risk in having it and the potential results we could get from it. It shouldn't have made any difference that it was an amnio this time, and not a CVS, but somehow I felt like it did. And I was really worried about my age. This was a hopeless line of thinking. I really needed something else to think about.

EPOV

It was pretty fucking obvious that Sookie was tense about the whole amnio thing. A lot more worried than she had been when she'd been pregnant with Tray, which probably meant it was to do with her age. Fuck, there wasn't a single thing I could do about that. Even mentioning it to tell her it probably wouldn't make a difference would just lead to an argument, and tears and nothing that would actually change what might happen.

So instead I just had to watch Sookie as she worked herself into a frenzy trying to reorganise every damn thing in the house so she didn't have to think about it anymore. I'd come home to find her balanced on the step-ladder trying to put the curtains back up, and if I dared suggest that maybe it wasn't a good idea for her to be up there, I'd get the lecture that started "This isn't a soap opera, Eric. No one actually loses a baby from just falling down. Most likely all I'll get is a bruised bum…" And at that point it was best to just tune out and try to persuade her to let me actually do it instead.

So mostly I was trying to just stay quiet and hope it would all be over soon. Mostly I did that. The Saturday I came home from Felicia's soccer game and discovered Sookie had decided to wash and polish her car and was using one of my t-shirts to apply the polish, I tried to just hold my tongue, but it was one of those conversations that began with Sookie saying "Why are you so grumpy?" and may have ended with me saying "Why are you in such a bitchy mood?" For a while later on that day I thought it was going to end with my dinner being given to Bob, who sensed there was a bit of discord between Sookie and I and had decided that this might be his chance to elevate himself up the food chain by sticking really close to Sookie's legs, and occasionally patting her knee with a paw. Unfortunately the kids also sensed what was going on and the bad mood seemed to spread until everyone was fighting with each other, and I didn't think Sookie had really intended to have a table full of kids fighting and pushing each other to help her stop focussing on the amnio.

SPOV

The mood in the house wasn't great. I knew that I was wound up about the amnio, and everyone else was kind of feeding off of that, but I didn't seem to be able to make myself stop. And Eric going off about me throwing away a manky old t-shirt didn't help matters at all. I really wanted it to just be over with.

I had one last appointment with Russell before I was scheduled to have it done. So I turned up, having left Sam and Tray with Kennedy. She looked a bit shell-shocked at the prospect of suddenly dealing with two small boys as well as the baby girl she was almost used to, but it was only for an hour or so. I told her if it got too much, she could lock them out in the back yard with Max. She looked a bit worried at that as well.

I got to Russell's practice first and sat in the waiting room with a magazine in my hands, not really looking at it. Eric arrived and got the usual glances from the other women in the room, before he sat down next to me. "Hi" he said.

"Yeah…hello." I was going to say something else, but just then someone else's toddler brought Eric a piece of a Dora puzzle. "Oh…thank-you" Eric said, looking a bit bewildered. The small girl wandered off and came back with another piece of the puzzle about 10 seconds later, smiling at Eric as she handed it over, and glad she'd found a new friend.

It appeared we couldn't go anywhere without being interrupted by kids.

Russell called us in, and we went over the results of my NT ultrasound. The odds from that weren't particularly bad, I'd come out as about 1 in 160 for Down's syndrome, but they didn't make me feel any better about the coming amnio. Russell checked my blood pressure, asked how I'd been feeling, and then put me up on the table for a check with the ultrasound.

Eric hovered beside Russell and watched the screen, kind of smiling to himself. I wished I could smile. I wished I could be anything but a stupid, mopey, annoying drain on the whole family.

As we came out of the office, me clutching a copy of my notes and my appointment card for next time, Eric turned to me. "Are you OK?" he asked.

I squinted up at him in the sun. "Yeah…" I said. "Just worried."

"I know" Eric said, putting his arm around my shoulders, and giving me a quick hug. Once again, I wished I had his confidence about this stuff.

"Why aren't you worried?" I asked him.

"What about?" Eric said. "Whether I'll sit down on a sofa that isn't there because you moved it? Or whether I'll come home one day and find my half of the closet completely empty?" He smiled at me, enjoying his attempts to lighten the situation.

I wished they'd worked.

"No" I said. "The baby…and the amnio."

Eric sighed. "Because I don't think there's anything to worry about" he said.

"Well, that just shows how much you know" I said, kind of grumpily.

"OK. Nothing that it does any good to worry about, then" Eric amended. "We can't change it."

I just shook my head. I guess that was the advantage of not carrying the baby yourself. You didn't feel personally responsible for every quirk or problem it might arrive with. "I want to walk up to the butcher's shop" I said.

"OK. We can have coffee if you want?" Eric asked. Oh great, now he was all concerned and worried about me, which wasn't the result I wanted. I wanted him to understand we were supposed to be worried about the baby.

"Yeah, OK" I said, and Eric gave me a funny look. I hadn't meant to sound quite that sulky and annoyed with him, but even I could hear the echoes of Felicia in my voice.

We walked through to Mt Eden Road and past the other shops, up towards the Sierra café. Eric was kind of guiding me all the way, as though he thought I might run off or something, but I thought that was overkill. I was upset and distracted, but I wasn't a complete idiot.

However he was kind of distracted by the sign on the blackboard outside the Candyman shop on which someone had written Twinkies. "Oh" he said.

"Really?" I asked. He couldn't be that enthused about crap they'd shipped here from the States, could he?

Eric just shrugged and we carried on to the café. When we sat down with our coffee, conversation was kind of stilted. "It's not the same knowing we won't have to haul the boys out of the sandpit at the end" I said to Eric.

"Yeah" he agreed, sipping his coffee. "Last time I think Tray took half the sandpit home with him."

"The trick is to roll his jeans down before you get him out" I said. "Otherwise, yeah, the turn-ups do catch it all."

"Mmm" Eric said.

"I hope they're being good for Kennedy" I mused.

"She'll cope" Eric said decisively. "She has before."

"Yeah…but she's got Kassidy now. I'm sure she probably wants to cope with her own baby and not my slightly feral kids."

"It'll be good practice for her" Eric said. "And anyway, they're hardly _feral_."

"I'm pretty sure I caught Tray growling at Sam this morning" I said.

Eric shrugged. "That's from Bob."

"Not from anything inappropriate he's seen on TV?"

"Well it's not from the pirates movie, anyway" Eric bristled. Yep, the obsession with pirates had been great, until the wet afternoon Eric had decided to show the boys the actual _Pirates of the Caribbean_ movie. They'd liked the ride at Disneyland, after all.

And they'd loved the movie. During the day. That night had been a different story, when suddenly the prospect of zombie pirate ghosts or whatever they were became slightly more terrifying, despite the fact they were highly unlikely to suddenly materialise in the middle of Mt Eden. The bed had been very crowded that night, and I'd had to sleep pinned under Sam, which was a change, I guess, from sleeping pinned under Eric.

I wasn't sure Eric felt quite so philosophical about the fact Tray spent all night waking him up by sitting up and going "Up?"

We finished our coffee and walked back into the sunlight outside. Spring was in full effect, and you got sunny days and rainy days and lots and lots and lots of days that had both. I just hoped that I wasn't going to be getting any rain later on today because I had a lot of washing outside.

"I'm just going to go to the butcher's" I said.

"OK" Eric replied, not really looking at me. "I'll wait."

I probably shouldn't have been surprised when he wasn't still waiting on the footpath when I came back out. I knew where he'd gone of course. He was inside the candy shop, buying God knows what rubbish at horribly inflated prices. So instead I hung around outside waiting for him, and watching the clouds. Some of them did look quite dark.

"Excuse me" someone said next to me. "I'm…uh…looking for the way to…uh…Mong…Mung…uh…Mun-new-wow?"

"Oh" I said, wondering if there was an invisible sign stamped on my head that read 'I speak American.' I looked at the guy. He only seemed about 20, if that. I guessed we were just around the corner from the Backpacker's hostel, although surely they would have told him where it was? Unless they couldn't understand him either.

"It's Maungawhau. Mung-a-fow. Although Mt Eden is probably more common, and you're more likely to get directions for Mt Eden. It's just up there" I said, pointing up Mt Eden Road. "Just walk until you get to the Honeywell building, it's right on the corner of the road that leads to the summit."

"Oh. OK. Great, thanks" he said, his face lighting up. "I thought I was totally on the wrong track. Someone said I should get on the motorway?"

"They probably thought you were saying Manukau, not Maungawhau. But never mind, we figured it out." I gave the guy my best smile, expecting him to say thanks, and leave. But he didn't.

Instead he smiled back and introduced himself. "I'm Dave" he said.

"Oh. I'm Sookie."

"You're from around here?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yeah" I said.

"It's kinda tough" he continued. "You know, with the place names here."

"Yeah" I agreed. "But you get used to it." We were silent for a minute, Dave looked like he was trying to think of something else to say, I was just wishing Eric would hurry up, and wondering if I should send Dave inside the shop to buy himself American goodies, when, finally, Eric did appear, clutching his bag of treats.

"Hello" Eric said, very pointedly to poor Dave. Dave's face lit up like a Christmas tree, and he looked ecstatic. I guess finding another actual American was maybe better than being able to buy American junk food.

"Hey!" Dave said, excitedly. "Wow, I thought I was the only one here!" I looked at Eric, and he didn't seem nearly as excited to have found Dave. Or that Dave had found us, at any rate. "Dave", Dave said, holding out his hand to shake Eric's.

"Eric" Eric said, still staring Dave down. Dave didn't seem to find that a particularly worrying fact. Maybe they all did it. Who knows?

"Where are you from?" Dave asked.

"Well, here. So we'd better get going now. Nice to meet you Dave." Eric half-turned and took a step, waiting for me to follow.

"Enjoy Mt Eden" I said to Dave, who's face had fallen dramatically when he realised Eric was going. "Or Maungawhau. The view's really good…better than the Sky Tower." Now that I felt kind of bad for Dave, I had started rambling. That just made Eric glare at me instead of Dave. "So, um, bye" I said in the end, and Eric and I started walking down Mt Eden road as Dave said "Bye, Sookie!" behind me.

We stopped to wait for the crossing signal at the intersection. "You know" I said to Eric. "You were kind of mean to poor Dave."

"Why is he poor Dave?" Eric asked. "How the fuck do we even know Dave?"

"Well…he asked me for directions. He sucks at pronouncing Maori place names."

"OK, but did you have to give him the complete tour-guide speech about Mt Eden?" Eric asked. "Because I think he already had the idea." The buzzer sounded so we crossed the road, well, Eric crossed and I did my best to keep up.

"I don't know why you're all grumpy. It's not like I was going to run off with him. I just couldn't ditch him because I was waiting for you to spend your money on lollies."

"It's clearly candy" Eric said.

"Whatever! And you know he was unlikely to bop me over the head and carry me off. For one thing he looked pretty small; I doubt he could carry me. I'm pregnant, quite clearly so."

Eric looked thoughtful. "Well" he said. "It'd be like a two for one…or something…" I looked at him, and he was trying really hard to find a justification for his rudeness, but honestly, the thought of some guy carrying me off in the middle of Mt Eden was just kind of funny. I started laughing.

"What's funny?" Eric asked.

"You" I said. Probably that was the wrong answer.

"I wasn't trying to be funny, Sookie" Eric said. "I was trying to make a point that you don't know what he was after and just because you're pregnant…"

"Oh Eric! For starters, what makes you an expert because I don't remember you being in the white slave trade? And anyway, he just wanted directions from me. It was you he wanted to be mates with."

"Mates?" Eric asked, like I had said something in Maori he couldn't understand.

"Yeah. He only got excited when you showed up. Because for one thing, you might understand him when he screws up the place names."

"Oh" Eric said. "Well…that's a bit fucking weird." We'd walked back to where my car was parked in the spaces outside Russell's practice and he just stood there, obviously mulling over that idea.

"Yes, Eric. Sometimes, people want to talk to you. Can't for the life of me think why, but there you go. He probably saw the stuff in your bag and wanted to know where you got it from."

"Yeah" Eric said slowly, and then he was silent again.

"Well, I better go. Make sure Kennedy's in one piece. Thanks, anyway. For cheering me up a bit."

"Um. OK" Eric said, not really sounding sure about it. I reached up to pull him down for a kiss, and he opened the car door so I could get in. "Enjoy your candy!" I said brightly, trying to make the last word sound as drawled and American as I could.

"What the fuck accent is that?" Eric asked.

I giggled. Somehow I felt a lot better than I had in a while. Eric shut the car door and watched me reverse out of the space.

Kennedy had survived, but only because, I think, Sam had let her know which Sky channels had all the children's programs, and they were currently watching _Ben 10_ which I thought they were too young for but which I knew Eric had let them watch on more than one occasion. It was hard to blame her though, if I'd been in her shoes I'd have been inclined to believe the 3 year old who was telling me it was totally OK to watch this show just so he and his brother would sit down for five minutes.

Although, in Tray's case it was probably more like two minutes. When I arrived at Kennedy's he was running in random circles around the living room while Sam sat glued to the contraband TV show.

"Have you guys been good?" I asked them. Sam nodded; Tray just ran at my legs and tried to get me to spread them so he could run through. We weren't going to be playing that game much longer.

"They've been fine, haven't you boys?" Kennedy said.

"Yeah" Sam said. "Altho Keen'dy din' like the spida."

"Spider?" I asked Kennedy, and she looked briefly embarrassed.

"Yeah, Sam tried to show me the spider on the web outside, and I hauled him away from it without thinking" she said. "You know. I'm used to ones that bite."

"Spida's don' bite" Sam said. "But you no touch stranger doggies." Yeah, we'd had that little talk a few times. Stories of dogs mauling kids were not at all uncommon here, and I wasn't taking any chances, no matter how friendly the dog in question looked.

"That's right" I agreed. "And don't pull the spiders off their webs, either." Sam looked a bit sheepish, and Kennedy did her best to repress a shudder at the thought.

The rest of the day was as uneventful as I as ever got with Tray and Sam. The weather held and I got my washing dry, as well as some help getting it all inside, although one of the sheets ended up with grass stains after Tray held it around his neck and ran across the grass with it trailing behind him like a cape. It was just lucky he couldn't really tie a knot yet, because Sam promptly ran to sit on it and if it had been tied on, it would have half-strangled his brother.

I could completely see why I had so much washing these days.

After that we made some cupcakes. I knew to make a double batch these days, because Sam and Tray mostly just wanted to sit there and eat uncooked cake batter. By the time they were out of the oven, it was time to go and collect the girls from school.

We parked a way down the road, as per Amelia's instructions, and waited in the car. Felicia was first to the door. "Isn't she here yet?" she complained.

"No" I replied.

"She's so _slow_!" Felicia wailed. "I have to walk further than she does and I'm still here first."

"You's fast" Sam said, kind of admiringly.

"I know!" Felicia agreed, climbing into her seat. "Have you got any food?" she asked, and I passed over the crackers I'd brought for her.

Eventually Amelia turned up. She was dawdling along beside Maisie, which I thought was a good sign. I still wasn't sure what had been going on at school since we got back from the States, but I think it was starting to settle down. Well, I hoped so anyway.

"Where have you been?" Felicia asked Amelia, as she climbed in.

"Walking" Amelia said.

"Slowly!" Felicia added.

"It's a long way to the car. Mum parked ages away from the gate!" Amelia complained.

Might have known it would be my fault. "OK everyone" I said. "Belt up." Sam loved it when I said that, and might have fallen out of his carseat laughing, had his belt not been done up. Tray laughed too, but I think that was more because Sam was. Amelia just groaned and mumbled "So lame!" loud enough so she was sure I could hear it.

I drove off and headed towards St Luke's. "We're not going home?" Felicia said, with her mouthful of crackers.

"No" I said. "We're going to Kmart. To buy summer pyjamas." It had been on my list of jobs to do to keep myself occupied, and while I was somehow feeling better now about the amnio and everything, I was still intent on completing my self-imposed list. "Yay!" I said. No one yayed with me.

"That's boring!" Felicia said.

"I don' likes _shops_" Sam added, just in case I wondered.

"Can we go to a different shop?" Amelia asked. "For my pyjamas?"

"There might be ice cream" I suggested. "You know, if everyone's good."

"Ice cweam!" Tray yelled, having been oblivious to what was coming before the promised ice cream. At least one of them was enthusiastic.

We made it to St Luke's without too much more complaint and I actually managed to get one of the parent's parks. "Look" I said to the kids. "I got an awesome park!" Sam and Tray clapped obediently, Felicia gave me a couple of slow claps, and Amelia ignored me completely.

The hardest part of getting through Kmart was just not losing anyone. Well, losing Tray mostly. Luckily he was loud. Although we had once lost him in Farmers and they'd paged the parents of the small blond boy in the red t-shirt to go and collect him from the Manchester department. That maybe wasn't our finest moment, and had prompted some muttering from Eric about tying the kids together from now on.

But we managed to complete our mission, although Amelia pouted because she didn't like the selection, Felicia wouldn't choose because she didn't care, and the boys just pulled random things off the shelves.

As we were heading to the checkout though I noticed something really odd. Well something you didn't see around here very often. Oh well, I thought. Why not?

EPOV

Sookie seemed a bit better when I left her after the appointment with Russell, but I couldn't really figure out why. She'd been fucking weird for a couple of weeks now, and I really hoped it was over. I'd had about all the weird I could handle. And I really didn't want to lose any more fucking clothes due to her need for distraction.

So I wasn't really sure what to expect when I got home later that day. I really hadn't been expecting to see a cardboard jack o'lantern hanging on the front door. Huh. I'd pretty much forgotten it was Halloween.

I opened the door and Felicia came running out, wearing the costume we'd bought her in Disneyland. "I'm Jessie the cowgirl!" she yelled. "From _Toy Story_. Because it's Halloween!"

"Um…yeah. It is." Well, it would be if it was colder and darker and maybe there were trick-or-treaters around.

"Cool" Felicia said, and she ran off. I went to find everyone else in the kitchen. Sookie was wearing a pair of fairy wings with her normal clothes.

"Let me guess, you're the underpants fairy?" I asked.

"How did you know?" she said, as I walked over to kiss her.

"Are underpants fairies supposed to get themselves knocked up?"

Sookie looked up at me. "Well, where do you suppose the sock pixies come from, Eric?" OK, so that definitely pointed towards her being in a good mood then.

Tray and Sam came in at that point. They weren't sock pixies though. Sam was dressed as a pirate and Tray was something else altogether. "Why is Tray dressed as a ladybug?" I asked Sookie.

She shrugged. "He didn't want his pirate hat, and I had that left over from when Felicia wore it. He loves it. I think he thinks he's that boy ladybug, from _A Bug's Life_. You know."

I watched Tray as he ran past with his arms out and the wings, which were attached to his wrists, flapping behind him. "Mmm" I said. "Although he might have mistaken it for a superhero costume."

"Really?" Sookie asked. "What superhero goes around dressed as a ladybug?"

"Well….that one" I said, as Tray ran at Amelia and tried to tackle her. She held him off.

"What's Amelia dressed as?" I whispered to Sookie. She was wearing a really weird combination of long black cape, black hat with a crown over it and carrying a sparkly wand.

"Um…it's her own creation. Princess-witch" she whispered back.

"Wasn't there a story about that once?"

"Lots of them" Sookie confirmed. "Occasionally Sam and Tray get to hear them, but they only really like the parts where dragons eat people."

I decided I might as well ask. "So how come we're doing Halloween? I though we didn't celebrate it?"

"Well we don't really" Sookie said. "Because, you know, it's just a weird American holiday and the pumpkin thing doesn't work if it's not autumn, and it's hard to get spooky atmosphere during daylight saving. But this is more, um…happy pretend American holiday."

"Happy pretend holiday?" I asked.

"Yeah, we're pretending it's a real holiday. And not something you guys made up to sell more crap at Wal-mart."

"OK" I said slowly. "I guess I better find a costume then."

When I came back into the kitchen Sookie took one look at me and burst out laughing. "What on earth are you meant to be?" she asked. I thought the combination of flip-flops, shorts and that fucking awful giraffe t-shirt which, for some bizarre reason, Sookie hadn't thrown out yet, was pretty obvious. "New Zealander" I said.

"Well, for a start try saying Nu Zilander, because the accent is all wrong."

"Nothing wrong with my accent" I said.

"No, apart from the fact it's rubbing off on Sam. You know he sounds more and more American the more he's around you. It's a weird phenomenon. I think he's the only one though. The other night at dinner Tray pointed to my plate and asked 'e'ya funushed?' so I have high hopes for him."

"OK" I said. I couldn't hear the difference in the way they spoke. Well, Sam was clearer, but I think that was more his age than anything else. "So do we get special Pretend Holiday food?"

"Sadly, no. I only thought of this late this afternoon. You get butter chicken on rice which was already in the works for tonight."

I shrugged. "That's OK. I like butter chicken."

"Yep, everyone does. But you do get our special creations for afterwards." She gestured to where a tray of cupcakes was sitting; each one had a spider web on top of the icing. "Amelia helped me put all the liquorice on them" Sookie said. "Sam hates liquorice, Tray liked it a bit too much and ended up feeling sick I think."

The kids were excited to be wearing costumes for dinner, although Sookie had to take off her wings after they kept hitting Tray in the head. They didn't really have much of a clue why they were dressing up, I guess to them Halloween was something you saw on TV, but they enjoyed it all the same.

And I appreciated the gesture. I guess maybe Sookie's incessant desire to take her mind off everything wasn't so bad. Sometimes she had good ideas.

The cupcakes were handed around for dessert, and, sure enough, Sam carefully removed all the liquorice from his before eating it, while Tray attacked all of his with relish. It was weird when those differences showed up, like Sookie's notions about their accents. We tended to treat them as almost one person, but occasionally they were like chalk and cheese.

After dinner Felicia wandered up. "We're supposed to get, uh, candy" she said.

"Are you?" I asked. I didn't know if that was part of the Pretend Holiday rules.

"Yep" she said, nodding. "I saw it on TV. Because we've dressed up, we get candy."

"You had cupcakes."

"Yeah…that's not candy. Definitely we need candy." She nodded as if that helped make her point.

"Candy, huh?" I asked. "You sure?"

"Yep." And then she thought for a moment. "What is candy?"

"It's um…lollies. And chocolate" I said, wishing I'd been able to think of a description that didn't sound so appealing.

"Oh. Cool. Yeah, we get that!" Felicia said, excitedly.

"Fine. Hang on then." I went into the office and looked in my laptop bag where I still had some of the candy I'd bought earlier in the day, while Sookie had been standing outside and that weird little guy tried to get her to escort him to the summit of Mt Eden.

I figured if we were going to have a Pretend American Holiday, then why not have American candy.

Unsurprisingly, the kids had a sixth sense about the fact there was junk food on offer, and I was mobbed pretty quickly. I was kind of grateful I didn't have to take them all out trick or treating because I wasn't sure I'd be able to get them all home safely and without Tray eating all of his long before we'd finished. As it was by the time Sookie found us all in the family room, Tray had chocolate smeared all over his face, which kind of gave the game away.

"I like American holidays" Amelia said. "What other ones can we do?"

"Well" I said. "Thanksgiving is next month."

"Uh-huh" Sookie said. "And I'm not cooking a turkey in November, it's too flippin' hot."

"You roast stuff in December" I pointed out. "And it's hotter then."

"But it's Christmas. That one's compulsory. Thanksgiving is…kind of superseded by things like Waitangi Day and Anzac Day in this country. Anyway, it's bedtime now."

With a fair amount of complaint, everyone started their nightly routine and for a while there it was just a matter of making sure we had four clean kids who were tucked into their own beds. And when peace had finally settled on the house, I got my chance to talk to Sookie properly.

She was back in the kitchen again, filling lunchboxes. Bob was there, finishing up what looked like some of the butter chicken. I hoped he wasn't eating too many of the leftovers. "So Bob came as a person then, for his costume?" I asked.

"Yep" Sookie confirmed, as she shut the lid on one of the lunchboxes.

"So…you still feeling better?" I asked.

"What, because we celebrated Pretend Holiday?" she asked me.

"Well…just because. You don't seem as, um…" I tried to think of a good term, that didn't sound too accusatory. "Um…stressed."

"No. No, I feel a lot better. I think you cleared it up for me before. Pretend Holiday was my thank-you to you for that." She shut the last lunchbox, and then came over and put her arms around me.

"Well I'm just glad you believed me. Because, really, it will all be fine…" I said, but Sookie shook her head. "No" she said. "It wasn't that. It was when you got upset with Dave."

"Dave?"

"Yeah, your little American mate…or buddy, I guess. Because he might have kidnapped me, or whatever you thought the worst case scenario was. It was kind of silly, really. And I realised that maybe I was being just a little bit silly too."

"Oh" I said. Well I liked the improved mood, and I liked getting the credit for it, but I wasn't exactly thrilled about the whole silly aspect to it. I liked to think I wasn't really that silly. "He was a bit fucking weird, that guy" I grumbled. "You know…he might have stalked you or anything.

"Mmm" Sookie said, looking like she was trying not to laugh. "Because that would be terrible. Strange American men stalking me."

"Yeah, fuck. Alright. But he's not me."

"No. No, he's not. I'm sure he'll find some other nice New Zealand girl to stalk now that he knows I've already been taken." Sookie tried to keep a straight face, failed, and giggled.

"Fuck off" I said, but I was laughing now too. "I wasn't that over the top."

"No" Sookie said, still giggling. "Not at all."

I figured the giggling might be a nice lead-in to something else, so I bent down to kiss her. She opened her mouth to respond and I thought that this was looking promising when the phone rang.

"Hold that thought" Sookie said, breaking the kiss and stepping away to answer it. She said hello, and then, after whoever was on the other end responded, she changed into her 'let's have a fucking long chat' voice and I left her to it. It was probably Judith.

When she came into the bedroom about thirty minutes later though, I found out it wasn't. "That was Jason" Sookie said. "He has news."

**A/N Maungawhau (Mung-a-fow) is the Maori name for Mt Eden. Manukau (Marn-oo-cow) is an area of Auckland.**

**Waitangi Day is 6 Feb and celebrates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and representatives of some of the Maori tribes in 1840. Anzac Day is 25 April and commemorates NZers who have served in wars. The ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, who were first deployed in WW1, which was the first time we fought under our flag and not the British one. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	105. Bonus Chapter: Victory Dance

**A/N Brrr! It's cold here. Today we had snow in Auckland for about the first time in 30-odd years. Well, there's some debate about how much was actually sleet, because mostly it didn't settle, it just kind of flurried around. But it's cold! Really cold for here. It's supposed to drop down to 4 degrees C tonight. Not happy-making!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

So now I was waiting for two things, the amnio and Jason's visit. In actual fact the amnio was easier. It was just another needle after all. Russell had scheduled it for a day he knew he'd be working at the hospital and we'd done this so many times that he was almost cheerful about it all, chatting to Eric as he stuck that bloody great needle into my side again. I looked up at the monitor attached to the wall, and saw the ultrasound pictures of the baby burbling about in its own little world. It seemed quite happy in there. Maybe it would be OK.

Mostly I was worried about Jason and Crystal coming to stay. It was going to be an odd visit, I thought. Odd and uncomfortable. I tried to talk to Eric about it, and he just looked uncomfortable about the whole thing, which really proved my point, but somehow me following him around saying "See? It just proves my point that it's going to be awkward" wasn't appreciated, and I'm not convinced that when he tried to shut the office door on me it really was an accident and he couldn't see me. I'm pretty sure he could still hear me.

So mostly I was just stuck waiting for them all to arrive and find out the full extent of the situation. And worry about where they were sleeping, of course. It somehow didn't seem right that in a house this size we didn't have a spare bedroom. We would have had a spare bedroom, if Eric didn't need an office at home of course. But it was kind of handy having him around from time to time so I wasn't so stupid as to make him give it up entirely.

But he could share it.

"What do you mean share it?" Eric said when I broached the subject one night. He was in the office at the time, going over some stuff Indira had emailed through.

"Well, I just mean it could double. As a spare room. For when we have guests."

"Uh-huh, and what are they going to sleep on? The desk?" Eric asked.

"Possibly they could just shred all the paper lying around and make nests?" I suggested, looking over at Eric's neat little piles lining part of one wall. Eric didn't respond, he just sighed. "Or we could buy one of those couch things, that fold out to a futon? At least that gives us an option when we have people over. Not huge amounts of people. Just some people, anyway."

Eric looked around the room. "You want to put guests in here?"

"Well, just temporary guests. I mean I wouldn't put like a long-term homestay student in here…"

"Hang on; we're getting a student living with us?"

"Only if the power bill goes up any further. It's scarily expensive these days. But anyway, the futon-couch thingee is just for those odd people you have to put up for a night or two."

Eric sighed. "And Jason is really fucking odd" he said.

"Well…anyway" I said, glossing over Eric's assessment of Jason. I was pretty sure Jason would say something similar about Eric. "That was my idea."

"Mmm" Eric said. "Maybe. But I doubt we could get one now. They arrive the day after tomorrow. And we're both working all day tomorrow, and the stores will all fucking shut at half past three in the afternoon."

"Yeah, six o'clock, Eric. Don't begrudge the retail workers of New Zealand the chance to go home for dinner. Anyway, it's arriving tomorrow."

"What? You said they were coming on Friday."

"Not Jason and co. The futon. Couch. Thingee. It's coming tomorrow."

Eric looked puzzled and then realisation dawned, and he frowned. "Have you already bought one?" he asked.

"Well, duh. Yeah. I went and bought it today, and they promised me delivery for tomorrow, so I'm going to leave work a bit early. They'd better be here on time. So that's sorted then."

Eric still looked a bit grim. "But you just bought it" he said. "And now you're telling me?"

"Mmm, before it arrives. So you get a heads up to move the paper tonight." I pointed to the piles. "Because it's going in that spot."

"Will it fit?" Eric asked.

"Well I can work a tape measure, so yes it will. Although we might have to re-arrange things when we actually want to turn it into a bed." I looked around. We'd have to push the bookcase against the desk to pull the futon out, but no one would be using the desk if there were people staying in here anyway.

I stopped mentally re-arranging furniture and looked back at Eric, who was just staring at me. "What?" I asked.

"You bought furniture. By yourself" he said. He looked a little pouty. I shrugged. I was sure he could deal with it. I'd had to.

"Well, you see" I said, "everything I know about buying furniture, I learned from Eric Northman. He's awesome!" I gave him a big grin.

Eric frowned some more. "I didn't…" he started to say, and then he stopped talking and just huffed, obviously having thought a bit more about making a blanket denial on that subject. Then he leaned forward in the chair, put his elbows on his knees and stared at a spot on the wall, probably formulating his rebuttal and hoping I'd bugger off and leave him to it. Perhaps come back in an hour or so when he could run me through the full PowerPoint presentation as to why the table and the couches and the TV were entirely different matters and how it wasn't at all the same thing that I'd bought the futon.

But I wasn't going anywhere. I just stood there, waiting. In the end Eric looked at me again. "You look positively triumphant, Sookie" he said.

"It's not triumph" I lied. "It's just, um, a feeling of self-satisfaction at having come up with a workable solution to our shortage of sleeping spaces."

"Uh-huh" Eric said. "That'd be triumph then."

"Well, I think I did a good job" I said.

Eric crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair. "You probably did" he said, quietly, and then he swivelled the chair around to face the desk again. "I better finish this" he said. "Or fuck knows what kind of shit Clancy might produce tomorrow."

"OK, I'll leave you to it then" I said, and I turned and started to walk out of the room.

"Sookie" Eric called, and I turned back towards him. "What?" I asked.

"It's definitely triumph" he said. "You're practically vibrating with it. In fact you're almost doing a victory dance as you leave the room."

"No, I'm…oh fine" I said. Might have known I wouldn't really get the last word in. Instead I stood in the doorway and shook my backside a couple of times to give him his victory dance, before walking off to the kitchen. In the background I could hear Eric saying "Now you're just taunting me."

If only it was so easy to figure out how I was going to deal with Jason when he got here. The sleeping situation was one thing, but everything else…I'd just have to wait until they got here I guessed.

EPOV

Sookie was a bit up and down in mood. One minute she was worrying about the amnio, or about Jason's impending visit. The next she was buying random pieces of furniture and doing a fucking victory dance around the place because of it. It was fucking weird. Also, a little bit inconvenient, because I really had everything pretty much how I liked it in the office. And I liked it staying that way. Mostly it did, although sometimes the boys got in there and disturbed stuff. Occasionally it would obviously happen during the day and Sookie would try to disguise it, but I'd find, say, a half-chewed cookie under some of my filing, and it would be kind of fucking obvious what had happened.

And then occasionally I'd go in there during the day and put my feet under the desk and encounter something kind of squishy and furry, and I'd have to lean under there and tell Bob to fuck off and find his own hiding place.

But we did have some good news. Sookie's amnio came back fine. "I said it would" I told her, as she made dinner that night. She'd called me at work to let me know, but couldn't really talk for long as she had bubbles to blow, or something.

"So are you going to do your victory dance now?" Sookie asked. I shrugged. Probably not in the kitchen where the kids were all crowded around waiting to get fed. I didn't know why, it wasn't like they'd ever been forgotten, but I'd honestly once seen Sookie stirring a saucepan with Tray and Sam attached to each of her legs.

"Anyway, have you had a look yet?" Sookie asked.

"Well, I can't really see anything…" I said, reaching around and attempting to lift her t-shirt up. She pushed my hand away with her elbow. "OK. I meant at the futon. Go and look in your office. Go on."

"I'll look later on" I said. In the background I could hear Amelia and Felicia having some kind of animated discussion about who owned the blue felt-tipped pen, and Sam and Tray appeared to be having a roaring competition.

"You just want to stand here and supervise how much dinner I dish up for you" Sookie said. Well, I kind of did want to, because if she didn't put enough on the plate first time round I'd have to go back for seconds, which made me look a bit greedy.

"I don't" I said. "But I don't want to miss dinner either."

"I think you'll be OK" Sookie said, and she looked at me expectantly and I walked off to the office to the sound of Amelia asking if she could have 'one of those couch-beds' instead of an ordinary bed.

When I got back to the kitchen Amelia had moved on to how she wanted to have a pyjama party. Oh, fuck no.

"We'll see" Sookie said, and then she turned to me. "So what do you think? Does it look alright?"

"It looks great Sookie" I said, kissing her head. It looked fucking big and was taking up a shit-load of my space, but I didn't feel like I could really complain too much. When I'd started this whole thing by saying I felt like there was still a space on the bed during movie night, I maybe hadn't thought about the knock-on effect of where the kid was going to sleep at night. Definitely not in our bed. "Bob agrees. He's in there ensuring Jason won't be having a cat-fur free sleep tomorrow night."

"Oh, bloody hell" Sookie muttered. "Amelia, can you go and move Bob off the new futon?"

"Where do you want me to put him?" Amelia asked.

"I don't know. Your bed? Anywhere but the newest piece of furniture in the house."

Amelia sighed and walked off. Sookie turned to me. "I spent all afternoon trying to keep the boys off it" she said. "And then Bob gets in there anyway. Oh well. You can round everyone up to wash their hands if you want."

When everyone was sitting down and eating, which took longer than you would think because Tray seemed incapable of doing both at the same time for more than about five seconds, Amelia decided to give up eating altogether and just start a new conversation.

"So, if the baby is a girl" she said, and I realised there were no secrets around here these days, "Do we get to help pick the name?"

"No" I said, at the same time as Sookie said "Maybe." Amelia just glared at me, and then turned back to Sookie. "So I thought Lula."

"Um…Lulu?" Sookie asked.

"No" Amelia said, grumpily. "Lula."

Sookie looked at me, and I shrugged. It didn't sound like an actual name to me, but she could fucking tell Amelia.

"We'll think about it" Sookie said, which really wasn't telling Amelia we weren't using her idea at all.

"What about Jessica?" Felicia asked.

"What about her?" Sookie replied.

"No. Call the baby Jessica" Felicia said.

"Um, bit too confusing don't you think?" Sookie asked her, and Felicia looked thoughtful. "We could call them Jessie One and Jessie Two?" she asked.

"No" I said, and now Felicia looked pouty. "I wish I'd been called Jessie" she mumbled.

"Felicia's a nice name" I said to her. Well, I kind of liked it because it belonged to her, but I wouldn't have picked it myself. However, I wasn't around for that discussion.

Felicia muttered something that sounded suspiciously like "No it's not" and went back to eating her chicken. "What about you, Sam?" Sookie asked. "Have you got any suggestions for names?"

Sam looked at Sookie, confusion written all over his face. "Wha'?" he said.

"For the baby" Sookie clarified. "Do you have a name for the baby?"

"Wha' baby?"

"There's a baby in Mummy's tummy, you stupid-bum" Felicia said to him.

"That's not nice" Amelia said, eager to jump in and admonish her sister. I noticed she'd barely touched her dinner yet. She was going to be last again, and there would be a lot of complaining when everyone else wanted to leave the table.

"I'm just tellin' him!" Felicia said.

"Alright, just shush, and let Sam answer" Sookie said. Sam who'd gone back to eating his dinner, happy that his contribution wasn't required, looked up at the sound of his name. "Wha'? he asked, with his mouth mostly full.

"Do you have a name you like?" Sookie asked him.

He thought for a minute. "Light'ning M'keen" he said, and then he crammed another mouthful of chicken in.

"Girl's name!" Amelia called out. "It's a girl baby."

"Wha' baby?" Sam asked. I think. His mouth was so full it was hard to tell.

"Maybe not that one" Sookie said. "But what's the girl car called? In the first movie?" she looked at me. I shrugged.

"I don't know. It's a Porsche" I said.

"Definitely not Portia" Sookie said quickly.

"Like Aunty Portia?" Amelia asked. "But we can't have two. Like with Jessica."

"No. We can't have two" Sookie agreed.

"So we could call the baby Lula, because there isn't another one of them" Amelia said, looking pleased with her logic.

"Well…we'll think about it" Sookie said.

"Eat your dinner, Ames" I said, pointing at her almost full plate with my fork.

"What? Oh." She looked down at her food and started reluctantly cutting up some chicken. It wasn't that she didn't like it; at least, I thought it wasn't. She just wasn't particularly keen on eating when she had an audience.

Sam on the other hand was far, far more interested in what was on his plate and had to be coaxed to say anything. He'd normally stuffed his mouth so full it wasn't really pleasant if you did get him to talk to you.

Felicia was somewhere in between the two, and Tray alternated between stuffing his face and throwing his dinner, with occasional forays into drum solos using his hands on the table. He never managed to contribute much to the conversation either. But that didn't stop Sookie asking him. "So, have you got any names Tray?" Sookie asked. He had been trying to stab a piece of roast potato with a spoon, rather unsuccessfully. He was desperate to get a fork like the big kids, but, fuck, I'd seen how many times he'd hit his fingers with the spoon. A fork would just be a fucking disaster.

Tray looked at Sookie, but seemed a bit lost. "Tato?" he said.

"You can't have a person called potato" Amelia said. "It's not a real name like Lula is." Yeah, we could fucking debate that one, but I had a feeling Amelia would stick to her guns no matter who wanted to contradict her. She was just getting more stubborn as she got older and Sookie spent a lot of time listing the reasons she was just like Bill's relatives. So much time that I wondered who exactly she was trying to convince.

"Tato" Tray said happily, and then pushed too hard with the spoon and the piece of potato went flying sideways and into Sam. "Ow!" Sam exclaimed. "Don' do dat, Tray!"

"TATO!" Tray yelled, worried that he was going to lose his prize to his brother. I reached over and picked it up off the table, and put it back on Tray's plate.

"Let's just eat dinner and not worry about names" I said. "There's months yet."

Everyone concentrated on their food, although Amelia muttered "I still like Lula" before she delicately picked up a piece of chicken and put it between her lips. Yep, she was definitely going to be last, again.

Later that night though, when it was just the two of us, I thought I might ask Sookie what name she liked. Only I had to find Sookie first. She wasn't in the kitchen, the laundry, our bedroom or the family room, which were the usual places she habited in the evenings. Eventually I tracked her down to my office.

"So do you really think it looks OK?" Sookie asked without turning around as I walked in the room. I really hoped she'd heard me walk in and wasn't just talking out loud to herself. Or Bob, who might be under the desk again.

"Yeah" I said. "It looks fine…"

"Just fine?"

"Great. Looks great."

"Yeah…it might have been better in blue, but if I wanted it today I had to take what they had in stock, so it had to be this kind of burgundy colour. I think it's OK though."

"It's very OK" I assured her.

"And let's face it" she continued, "It doesn't matter what colour I get, the cat fur is going to show up. That's the problem with having a black and white cat; it shows on everything when he sheds."

"At least when you shed it only shows up on the dark colours" I commented. That was something I'd discovered after Sookie had Sam, that women apparently don't lose any hair while pregnant. They save that all up and lose great fucking handfuls when the baby's about five months old. And it was so much worse after she had Tray. Every time I put a suit on it would be covered in long, blonde hairs. Even if the suit had just come back from the drycleaners. And if I held up any of the hairs and commented on it to Sookie, she'd want to do a comparison test to make sure it was hers. Like it would be anyone else's.

"Oh, shut up about the hair" Sookie said mildly. "You'd think I did it on purpose."

"I don't know" I said. "It might be your way of marking me, like the way Bob's compelled to sleep on anything new."

"Or clean" Sookie added.

"Exactly" I said, standing behind her and putting my arms around her. Sookie sighed, and then said "Well, I can't stand here all night. I better go and make some lunches."

I followed her into the kitchen, thinking I might make some coffee, although that was bound to make Sookie sad. She hadn't stopped tolerating the smell of coffee during this pregnancy, which was a fucking relief, but at the same time, it meant I felt slightly guilty when she'd sit there and say 'I sooo miss coffee'.

"So" I said, as I getting the coffee machine set up. Sometimes it seemed a bit of a hassle for one person, but it was better than shit coffee. "Have you thought about names?"

"Not really" Sookie said. "But I think we can discount everything the kids suggested."

"I quite liked Potato" I said. "It has a nice ring to it, Potato Northman."

"Maybe if I was a celebrity" Sookie said. "But I'm not, so it will have to be a nice normal name like the other kids have."

"Or we could just find something in one of your books again?" I suggested.

Sookie paused, with the knife she was using to butter bread in mid-air. I briefly wondered if all the left-over chicken was going in the kids' sandwiches, because they might prefer ham or that Marmite shit. "Yeah" she said, slowly. "I guess I could keep an eye out as I read. You know, I quite like Isabella, but I think it's been overdone. What about you?"

I shrugged. "It's OK."

"No. I meant do you have any names. We haven't really done girls' names before. I thought you might have picked already."

"I had. But then we kind of amended it and gave it to Sam. And if two Jessica's would be confusing, I think two Sam's might be worse."

"Yep" Sookie said, and then she quoted "_Did I ever tell you about Mrs McCave, she had twenty three sons and she named them all Dave?" _That was from the Dr Seuss story that the boys loved, due to its long list of weird and wonderful names listed as alternatives to Dave.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Something like that, anyway."

"Well, we'll just keep thinking about it" Sookie said. "Something will come to us."

SPOV

The morning Jason was due to arrive I was a bit all over the place. It wasn't just Jason coming of course, he had part of his family with him too, which was why sleeping space was kind of all important.

It was Friday, so Eric was at work and managed to miss their arrival. He didn't seem all that upset. Amelia had campaigned actively to have the day off school, but I'd said no. She could see them when she got home. Felicia didn't seem to care one way or the other; she was far more worried about how long it was until the walking bus arrived.

Sam and Tray were mostly interested in breakfast and whether we were going to the park.

But at about 10 o'clock in the morning Jason's ute pulled up. Well, what I assumed was Jason's ute; it wasn't one I'd seen before, so it must be new. It had a double cab, I noted, so maybe he was letting the kids in it more often now.

Sam and Tray came to the front door with me, and stared bug-eyed at the vehicle now parked in the driveway. Yeah, I guess if you were a small boy, it did look pretty cool. And a not-so-small boy in Jason's case.

Crystal got out of the passenger seat and waved. "Kia ora!" she yelled out, and I raised a hand in greeting. Oh, how I wished they had bypassed us on their way up North. I loved my brother, and I was happy enough to entertain his family, but I didn't want to get caught up in all their dramas.

"C'n we go in dat?" Sam asked me, pointing at Jason's ute.

"Uh…we'll have to ask Uncle Jason" I said to him. Jason had opened a back door and Wayne reluctantly slid out, his eyes on the ground. At 14, nearly 15, he was almost as tall as Jason, and looked about 10 year's older than he really was. Jason said something to him, and I couldn't hear what it was, but from the expression on Wayne's face I'd imagine it was something along the lines of 'behave'. Wayne turned to look at me, but he wasn't smiling. I couldn't blame him really.

Meanwhile Crystal had opened up the door on the opposite side to the one Wayne had just stepped out of and was bending inside to get something else out. Eventually she emerged carrying a baby capsule.

And there was the cause of the awkwardness. Because that wasn't Jason and Crystal's baby, unfortunately they'd never won Lotto and been able to suddenly afford IVF. No that was, according to the reports of the mother anyway, Wayne's baby.

Ugh, the whole situation just made me uncomfortable. I felt for all of them. Wayne, who had suddenly found himself thrust into adulthood, and Jason and Crystal, who were suddenly grandparents.

Christ, if my brother was a grandfather, even a step-grandfather, how old did that make me feel? Too old to be having another baby, that's for certain. I looked down at Sam, and he looked up at me, I think he could feel how tense I was because he looked a bit worried. Tray was busy pointing at the ute and shouting "Twuck!", so I don't think he knew anything was amiss. Thank God he was a bit better at pronouncing that word these days, because I didn't need to feel anymore embarrassed than I already did.

Crystal didn't look embarrassed though, as she climbed up the steps to meet me. She was beaming at me, and looked really excited, as she put down the baby capsule and enveloped me in a big hug. OK, so maybe she wasn't so put off by the grandmother thing. I suddenly realised I had no idea how old she'd been when she had Wayne, I didn't think she was as young as he was now, but I didn't think she was much older either. Maybe this wasn't a big deal to her?

Jason hugged me next. "How are you, Sook?" he asked. He didn't look quite so excited by the whole thing. His eyes kept sliding towards Wayne, as if he was wondering what Wayne was going to do next. I didn't think there was anyone around here he could run off and impregnate, but then again, I didn't exactly keep track of all the teenage girls either. I had a sudden flash of how hard life could be in a few years.

"I'm great" I said to Jason, possibly a bit too brightly. "Hi Wayne!"

Wayne looked at me briefly, then back down at his shoes. "Hey, Auntie" he mumbled. I kind of wanted to hug him, because he looked like he needed it, but it was pretty clear he didn't want one. At least, I thought he didn't. If he'd look up occasionally I might get a better reading of the situation.

We all trooped into the house and I finally got a look inside the capsule when Jason put it down again on the kitchen table. Yeah, that was a tiny little baby. She was fast asleep and had that frowny face that newborns get sometimes. She was very cute. I wanted to say that, but I wasn't sure who to address that comment to. Wayne seemed to be trying to ignore her completely.

"Wha's dat?" Sam asked.

"A baby" I said. I wasn't going into whose baby it was.

"Huh" he said. "C'n we go in dat truck?"

"Oh, well. We'll see. It's really up to Uncle Jason."

"What's that mate?" Jason asked, bending down so Sam could talk to him.

Sam went a bit shy and looked at the floor. I didn't think we needed another one doing that. Tray came to the party though. "Twuck!" he yelled enthusiastically. Sam looked at his brother, and then decided to be brave. "C'n we go in your truck?" he asked. "Please?"

"Oh. Yeah. No worries, eh?" Jason said. "But it's a fuckin' ute. Don't listen to your dad."

Sam just stood there, mulling over that comment. I could tell he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be not listening to Eric about, and although the idea appealed, he really knew it was wrong. Poor kid, Uncle Jason was just confusing as far as he was concerned.

"Uncle Jason's just teasing, Sam" I said, as I putting the electric jug on. Jason smiled and sat down in one of the chairs. "Tea'd be great, Sook. Long drive, eh?"

"Crystal?" I asked, Crystal was busy rocking the baby in her capsule and didn't really hear me. It was only Jason going "Oi, Crys. Sook's talking to you. You want a cup of tea?" that broke her out of her reverie. She was besotted with the baby.

"Oh, yeah. Thanks Sookie" Crystal said.

"Um…Wayne? Do you want anything?" I asked him. Wayne shook his head for no, and stared down at his hands on the table. I guess now he was sitting down it was difficult to look at his feet.

Jason sighed, and looked pointedly at Wayne, but didn't say anything about his rudeness. I guess we were all likely to cut him a bit of slack at the moment.

I made the tea and gave the boys something to eat, but they pretty much ignored it in favour of standing around staring at Wayne and Jason. "Hey" I said to them in the end. "Why don't you take Wayne outside and show him, um, trampoline soccer…or something?" Yeah, trampoline soccer was another one of Eric's inventions and involved putting the boys on the trampoline with as many balls as you could find and leaving them to it. When they were bored, Eric declared a random winner and everyone was happy.

Sam and Tray looked excited about the prospect of having someone else to wow with their amazing skills, and Wayne looked, well, less than thrilled. But he shuffled off outside after them anyway.

I sat down at the table with Jason and Crystal, and the baby still in her capsule. "So, um, what's her name?" I asked. When Jason rang me they hadn't even seen the baby and had just found out about her. Now she seemed to be a fully-fledged member of their family.

"Oh…we're, um, we're still figuring that one out, eh?" Jason said, looking to Crystal for confirmation.

"Yeah" Crystal said, gazing at her grand-daughter. "Don't want to rush it. We're just calling her Bubba for now."

"No" I said. "You don't want to rush it." I sipped my tea.

"So, you'll have another one to name soon, eh Sook?" Jason said, eyeing up my stomach.

"Yep" I said.

"Shit, who'd have thought you'd have so many kids, eh?" Jason said. "You're going to have a whole bloody cricket team by the time you're finished." He laughed, and I joined in.

"Hardly" I said. "Most of them are half-American."

"Yeah, fuck" Jason said. "Those jokers can't play cricket for shit, eh? And they fuckin' suck at rugby." Jason was kind of right on that one, the Rugby World Cup had not been a particularly happy time in our house, and not just because of all the tourists clogging up the streets of Mt Eden on their way to the games.

"So, how are Tama and Aroha?" I asked.

"Good, yeah" Crystal said. "Left them with my dad and his girlfriend, so they'll be enjoying it there, eh?"

Conversation lapsed for a bit, and then the baby woke up and started to get a bit fussy. "Oh, shit" Crystal said. "Everything's still in the car, eh? I better go get Bubba her bottle." And then she took off and left Jason and I to it, with a crying baby perched on the table between us.

I kind of wanted to get her out, but she wasn't my baby. I waited to see if Jason would do something, but he seemed to be ignoring her completely. Well, that was kind of telling I thought.

But then Crystal bustled back in with a bottle that I took out of her hand to warm up. "Don't worry Bubba!" she said, undoing the straps and getting her out of the capsule.

When the bottle was heated I gave it back to Crystal, who was now sitting with the baby in her arms, cooing and singing. Jason was staring fondly at Crystal and I guessed that while he might be coming to terms with the actual baby, he did at least like seeing Crystal happy. I was still worried about Wayne though.

And I was going to have to talk about the elephant in the room. "So..." I said. "It's, um…that's Wayne's girlfriend's baby?"

Jason snorted. "You mean is it Wayne's fuckin' baby? Dunno, eh? She says it is." I assumed 'she' was the girlfriend.

Crystal turned to Jason. "She looks like my family, eh? I think she is."

"You want her to be" Jason said, giving Crystal a level gaze, which she ducked, turning her attention back to the baby. She said something in Maori that I had no hope of understanding and then sighed. "At least we want her, eh? That…that fuckin' bitch doesn't care at all. I wish she'd never got her hooks into my son." Crystal's mouth set in a grim line and she stared straight ahead.

Jason shrugged. "I don't think it was all her, eh?"

Crystal turned back to Jason. "'course it was bloody her. She's sixteen, and she's fuckin' been around. She knew Wayne was all goo-goo eyed over her and she strung him along and then she didn't even have the decency to tell him she was hapu until just before Bubba was born."

"I still reckon it's because she had someone else to be the dad, eh?" Jason said. "And it fell through. Poor fuckin' Wayne was her last fuckin' choice." Yeah, Jason maybe wasn't as dense as he seemed sometimes. If nothing else he could sniff out someone trying to pin paternity where it wasn't warranted.

Crystal shrugged. "What's it matter? She didn't want Bubba, she wanted to go to Wellington and do that course. We've got her now."

"The, uh…the mother's family didn't want the baby?" I asked, hoping I wasn't about to find myself in the centre of a custody dispute or anything.

"Nup" Crystal replied. "Bunch of bloody no-hopers. All they want is to piss away their benefits every bloody week. Unless she was going to stay around and get the DPB so they could spend that too, then she was no bloody use to them, and neither was Bubba here." She kissed the baby…Bubba…on the forehead and cuddled her close.

Well, at least someone wanted that baby.

"So, um, how does Wayne feel about all of this?" I asked, and it was a while before anyone answered. In the end Jason said "Well he's not really saying much, eh? Probably shouldn't have gone there in the first place."

"Not with that fuckin' bitch, anyway" Crystal added.

"But…he's bringing her up?" I asked. I was a bit fuzzy on the situation; the phone call from Jason had been full of a lot of ranting, sighing and expletives. It was a bit like talking to him about the cricket.

"Well…not really, eh?" Crystal said, looking across at Jason. "That's why we're here. He's going to stay with my cousin up North, for a bit. Get himself sorted out."

"Oh." Jeez, I thought. Poor Wayne, getting sent away for his sins like that. "And you'll look after the baby for him?"

"Yeah. She'll be our whangai baby" Crystal said decisively. I glanced at Jason who looked a little bit less sure about it. I had only the vaguest understanding of the whole whangai thing, other than that it was a non-legal adoption that made up part of Maori tradition. It always seemed a bit vague and tenuous to me, but maybe that was my cultural bias.

"Yeah, that just sounds fuckin' dodgy" Jason said.

"That's your Pakeha prejudices talking" Crystal said to him. "Who else is going to look after Bubba, but me?"

OK, definitely my cultural bias then. Well, mine and Jason's. It was nice when we had something in common.

We were all silent for a bit as we finished up our tea, and then Wayne arrived back in the house. "Are they driving you a bit barmy?" I asked him. I peered out the window and Sam and Tray seemed OK, still running around the back garden even though they'd lost their audience.

Wayne shrugged. "They're alright, eh?" And then he looked at the floor again. Jeez, it didn't take a genius to notice that he was looking anywhere but at that baby.

Not for the first time in my life, I kind of wished I'd been an only child like Eric.

The day dragged on. We all had lunch and then Crystal put Bubba down for a nap in our cot. That was when I realised that I'd totally stuffed up the sleeping arrangements. I'd been so intent on getting that couch for the office that I'd just assumed Crystal and Jason would sleep on it. But instead they'd have to have the airbed I'd put in the baby's room, and Wayne could have the office. I couldn't really leave him alone in a room with a tiny baby he wasn't caring for, even if it was his.

Worst of all was the tensions I could see percolating between Jason, Crystal and Wayne. You could totally understand why, but all the same, it wasn't pretty to witness. Jason wasn't quite behind the whole 'keep the baby' plan and Wayne just wanted out of the whole thing, I think. If they carried on like this I wasn't sure what was going to happen to them.

And so after lunch, when Tray and Sam had dialled down the manic running-around and showing off to a manageable level, and the baby was asleep, I suggested to Jason that he take Crystal out for a coffee.

"I'm not fuckin' drinking' coffee" Jason said. "Not at the prices the jokers up here'll charge."

"Oh, for God's sake, you poor, poor farmer, you. You realise that most of the price of a coffee is in the milk, don't you?"

Jason sniggered at that, but I wasn't letting him off the hook. "Just take Crystal out and…I don't know. Buy her ice cream or something. Go for a walk. But I think you two need to talk this through before you find yourself stuck deep in something you're really not on-board for."

Jason opened his mouth, and, miraculously, closed it again. I guess he couldn't really make a blanket denial of that one. "Yeah…I guess, eh?" Jason said, reluctantly.

"It makes sense to do it while you're away from all the other distractions. Jeez, it's not like I can't look after the baby for an hour or two."

Jason sighed. "Fine. Alright. But only because you're fuckin' bossy, eh? You always bloody were."

"Oh, I was not! You just don't remember now you're old."

"Not too old to do this…" Jason said, lunging for me.

"GET OFF!" I shrieked as the tickling started. Jason didn't though. "Stop it Jason!" I said, as firmly as I could. Yeah, that didn't work as well with Jason as it did with the kids.

Or maybe it did, because Jason stopped tickling. Thank God for that. Except that Jason said "And what are you doing?" and I wasn't doing anything, other than trying to curl myself into a ball while standing up. I straightened up and looked around. Oh. Sam had attached himself to Jason's leg in an effort, I assumed, to pull him off.

"Mummy d'n't want t'be tickled" he said.

Tray, who kind of had the wrong end of the stick and thought it was a free-for-all was meanwhile attempting to tickle Jason and had both hands on Jason's other leg while yelling "TIGGLE TIGGLE!" Poor Jason, he didn't quite know what had happened.

"You gonna call your attack dogs off, Sook?" he asked.

"Um, why would I do that Jason? Jesus, I had children for a _reason_." Poor Jason, it was kind of funny to see him trying to side-step the pair of them and I had to laugh. I'm not sure that it was the best reason I could think of for having children, but right then, watching Jason finally get his comeuppance for years of tormenting me, well, it was so totally worth it.

"OK, guys" I said, when I could tell poor Jason had had enough. "Off Uncle Jason if you want a ride in the ute later on."

"Now?" Sam asked, immediately stepping away.

"Well, later on" I said. "Right now Uncle Jason is taking Aunty Crystal out somewhere."

Jason sighed and looked resigned. "Yeah, fine. I'll go and see if she's happy to leave the bubba with you." He started to walk off to the sound of Tray saying "Twuck?" sadly.

"Oh, and Jase?" I called out after him. "Can you guys sort out a name for her? I mean, you have to register it soon…so…it would be a good idea, don't you think?"

Jason grinned. Yeah, he probably knew why I didn't like the idea of her being called Bubba her whole life. "Sure, sooky bubba, I'll give it a go, eh? But Crystal's got some weird fuckin' ideas about names." Jason winked, and then left the room.

"Is that all'o your name?" Sam asked.

"What? No! No, that's just…nothing. Don't listen to Uncle Jason." Yep, that particular epithet had plagued my childhood. Stupid, stupid name I'd been stuck with.

Crystal came to give me instructions on the baby's care and then she and Jason left. And once they did, Wayne emerged from the family room where he'd been watching TV with occasional interruptions from Tray and Sam who were really quite curious about him.

"Do you want to help me?" I asked. I was cutting up vegetables for dinner. I thought I might pull out all the stops and do a lamb roast.

Wayne shrugged. "Yeah, OK Auntie" he said.

"You can peel the potatoes" I said, passing him the peeler and the potatoes in question. "Put them in this pot as you do them."

Wayne did as I'd asked, and I carried on with the pumpkin I was slicing up, occasionally glancing over at him. I vowed I wouldn't push him and I'd just let him be, but in the end, I cracked. "So, how are you coping?" I asked him.

He shrugged in reply. "S'weird" he said.

"In what way?' I asked slowly.

"Just is, eh? I mean, I didn't think this was gonna happen." He shrugged again, and I decided it was a bit too late to ask him what he had thought might happen if he slept with the baby's mother. I kind of hoped that at some point Crystal, or maybe Jason, had covered that one off. But mistakes happen and I for one could hardly point fingers.

Although Tray, or, at least, the timing of Tray, was clearly more Eric's fault than mine.

"And you don't want to be a dad?" I asked Wayne.

"I'm a kid, eh? But it's OK, 'cos Mum'll have her. She can't have any more babies, so it'll be sweet." Only he didn't really sound convinced about that point. I couldn't really tell what his feelings were on the matter.

But at that point there was a clattering at the front door as Amelia barged in talking, possibly she was mid-sentence, and Felicia exclaimed "Ow! You just hit me with your backpack!" and Sam and Tray went to see their sisters and Wayne sort of slunk out of the kitchen before they all arrived. Poor kid, he was really in a bad place.

EPOV

As tempting as it was to stay at work and not go home to face the drama that was likely to greet me, I realised I couldn't. Sookie for one would notice I hadn't come home, and would not only figure out the reason why, but make my life miserable because of it.

I just didn't understand why Jason had to bring his fucking shit-train of disaster to our front door. Granted, he was Sookie's brother, but we didn't really have to deal with Wayne, did we? And Wayne's indiscretions by the sound of it.

Sookie had been itching to get the full story ever since Jason had called, but I for one couldn't give two shits. It was a fucking awful situation but that didn't mean I had to be involved in it. Jason and Crystal could handle it, I was sure of it. Well, Crystal could. She seemed pretty switched on.

So I waited as long as I could, and then I drove home to face whatever sort of drama they had going on there. And the first problem when I opened the front door had nothing to do with Wayne, or Jason or any random baby, but was actually Tray sprinting towards me with no pants on.

I don't think he'd expected the door to open because he skidded to a halt and tried to execute a rather hasty retreat, but his little legs got tangled and he went face-first onto the rug.

"Bah-dah!" he said, which I'm pretty sure was his version of bugger, and I scooped him up and took him back to the bathroom, just as Sookie was making her way out of it. "Oh good" she said. "You're home."

"I am. And I found someone you may have lost." I held Tray out in front of me and he giggled.

"I did lose that one" Sookie said. "It was bad enough that he did his trick of going behind the curtain to have a poo in his nappy in front of the guests, but he ran off when I was changing him. At least he had a clean bum when he did it."

"Bum, bum, bum!" Tray sang. Well, shouted really. He was little, but he was fucking loud.

"Yeah" I said, putting Tray on the floor so Sookie could help him step into his diaper. "I don't think he realises that he might be behind the curtain, but the curtain does not contain the smell."

"Oh God, no" Sookie agreed. "Which means, you're about to get toilet trained, mister. If you know when you're going, you can use the potty."

Yeah, well that was a good plan except it didn't really solve the issue of the smell. Still, it was a step in the right direction and, having toilet trained Sam the previous summer, I figured we had this under control now.

"Well, you go and get changed and then you can come and say hello to everyone" Sookie said to me, which sounded a lot less appealing than toilet training a toddler right at that moment.

"Yeah, OK" I said, and I headed off to our room. When I got to the kitchen everyone was assembled and Sam was the first to grab my attention. "We's went in de truck!" he said. "So cool!"

"Was it?" I asked. I'd been in one of Jason's trucks and I didn't remember it being that great.

"Ute, mate. It's a ute, eh?" Jason called out. "We had that discussion."

Sam turned to look at Jason. "Oh yeah" he said. "You don' get dat righ'. It's a ute."

"Well, if Uncle Jason says it is, then it is" I agreed, thinking Jason was clearly wrong. The new one that was taking up our entire driveway was so fucking big it couldn't be anything else other than a truck.

Having pacified Sam I walked over and shook hands with Jason. Wayne was sitting next to him at the table, and gave me a cursory nod, but that was it. Poor fucker.

Crystal walked in carrying the baby in question. "Oh, kia ora Eric" she sang out. She looked a lot happier than she had the last few times I'd seen her and I figured the baby probably had a lot to do with that. I wasn't sure that Wayne had intentionally set out to get his mom a baby, like he'd once bought her a barbecue, but it seemed that was the way it had ended up.

Dinner was noisy and I couldn't really follow any of the conversations going on. Sookie had cooked roast lamb, which was great except that Jason thought he had rights to most of it and I had to bite my tongue not to tell him to keep his fucking hands to himself. At least he complimented Sookie on it though. "This's nearly as good as Gran's, eh Sook?" he said, while jamming more Yorkshire pudding in his mouth.

"Well that's high praise for our family" Sookie said, but she did look genuinely pleased at Jason's comment. It's probably why he got away with having thirds. If I tried that shit there'd be sighing and eye-rolling.

Wayne was pretty quiet throughout dinner and it was hard to tell if that was just in comparison to Amelia, who was sitting next to him, or because he was miserable. I'd vote for miserable. I fucking would have been in his shoes.

"So, um, any ideas on names?" Sookie asked during dinner and I thought for a minute she was asking them for ideas for our baby. I might have let Crystal pick Tray's middle name, but I wasn't sure I wanted this kid ending up with a first name I couldn't pronounce.

But then I realised she meant for their baby…or Wayne's baby, or whoever the fuck the baby belonged to at this point in time. The baby that seemed only to be called Bubba, which seemed fucking weird to me.

"Oh, well we talked about it, eh Jason?" Crystal said. "I think we want her to have family names, make it really special, that connection to her whakapapa. We just haven't got it all sorted yet." Crystal gave a small smile and went back to eating. Actually everyone was eating at that point, probably trying to get what they could before Jason fucking stole it out from under their noses, so I think it was only me that noticed Wayne's expression and the way he looked at his mother. Fuck, he was kind of pissed.

Maybe he liked this baby more than he was letting on.

After that I was stuck trying to stop Tray only eating gravy. He was dipping potatoes into it and sucking it off, and when he ran out he'd point to his plate and yell "Gwawy!"

"That kid really likes gravy" Jason commented.

"Almost as much as you" Sookie replied. "Remember that Christmas at Gran's? You ate, what, half a bowl of stuffing and then drained the remains in the gravy boat. And then you threw up all over the azaleas."

"Oh, Christ yes!" Jason said. "And you had to run inside yelling 'Jason's being sick! Jason's being sick!' Fuck, that was funny." He and Sookie were laughing so much they were crying, while the rest of us looked on. I somehow doubted it was actually that funny at the time, but at least we knew where Sam got his habits from.

After dinner it was difficult to persuade our kids it was bedtime, and they got to sit up a bit later than usual while Jason regaled them with stories from the milking shed.

"So" Amelia asked. "Do the cows mind being milked?"

Jason just shrugged. "They don't know any different, eh? That's their, uh, job. As cows."

"Sounds horrible" Amelia said with a shudder. "It's bad when Mum does it, but she only has to pump when there's a baby. We're getting another baby, because Tray's really big now. I don't think we needed another one. But it's a girl! And I'm going to look after her. We're naming her Lula."

"Um…we haven't decided on a name yet…" Sookie interrupted, walking into the room with cups of tea. She turned and walked back out again, leaving me to try to rein Amelia in.

"Well I have!" Amelia huffed. "I like Lula. And I haven't named a baby yet!"

"You can't name this one" I said to her, which earned me an extra special glare from Amelia. She turned to Crystal. "Can I name your baby?"

"Um, I'll think about it" Crystal said.

Amelia was undeterred. "I'm good at naming things. My teacher, Mrs Andrews, she said that I have a really good imagination. So I could name your baby. Did you and Uncle Jason have to do a magic cuddle to get her?"

"A what?" Jason asked.

"Yeah, let's not go into that…" I tried, but Amelia just ignored me. Fuck, she was pain in the ass sometimes.

"A special cuddle. In bed. It makes babies. You must know, because you have a baby." She frowned at Jason, who looked a bit taken aback. "Mum and Dad have done it _loads_" Amelia said, scathingly.

"They are _loud_" Felicia added, looking up from where she'd been using all of Sam's Lego to build a boat which she wasn't letting Sam anywhere near.

Jason tried to keep a straight face, but failed. Crystal however looked at Amelia and said. "Ah, but my baby came from the kumara patch."

"No…well that's not right" Amelia said.

"Just, go and get ready for bed" I said to her. "Everyone, go and get ready for bed."

I shepherded them all out of the room, as Sookie arrived back in with some cake she'd baked. "You under control?" she asked me.

"Yeah" I said. "I'll deal with the kids, you entertain the guests. Just…uh…save me a piece of the cake?"

"Yours is in the kitchen" Sookie said. Yeah, she'd met Jason before, after all.

By the time I'd brushed teeth, changed a diaper, supervised trips to the toilet and read a couple of stories I was feeling less than inclined to go back and listen to Jason and Crystal and watch Sookie try to interpret what was going on between them about the baby. So I thought maybe I could go into the office. Except that I forgot that's where Wayne was hiding.

He looked up as I walked in, but didn't say anything. Yeah, fuck. With the futon pulled out I wasn't going to be doing any work in here. "You, uh. You need anything, Wayne?" I asked.

"Nah" he said, taking his earbuds out. "I'm sweet, eh? Just chillin'"

"Cool" I said, and I was about to leave when he said. "You can stay. If you want…'cos it's your room, this eh?

"Oh, um…" Fuck, I thought, I hope he doesn't want to talk about any of this…whatever it is. I had nothing to offer him.

"Nah, you can go if you want" Wayne said shrugging. "I don't care." Only it was kind of obvious he did care.

I sat down on the futon. It felt a bit sturdier than I thought it would, and certainly better than the airbed that Jason and Crystal were going to be sleeping on. Sookie had done pretty well with buying it, I thought.

I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn't think of anything that fitted this situation. What to do when you maybe father a kid and your mother wants to keep it. Yeah…fuck. Had to be weird for the kid.

And although Wayne might have wanted me to stay, he wasn't exactly forthcoming with the conversation either. This was fucking awkward and I realised I should have just gone back to talk to fucking Jason.

"So, uh…you're going to stay up North?" I asked in the end, hoping that maybe that was neutral enough.

"Yeah" Wayne said. "Should be sweet. My uncle's helping them fix up the marae, eh? He asked the kaumatua there, and they said I could help." Wayne's face lit up at the prospect of that.

"So…you like fixing things?"

"Yeah. I like the wood, eh? My cousin, he can carve and he said he might teach me."

"Well that sounds…great. So are you going for long?" Wayne shook his head. "Just the summer, eh? School's nearly over so Mum said it'll do me good to get away from...well, a lot of stuff, eh?"

Yeah, I could only imagine they'd want to stop him seeing the baby's mother again. Fuck, what a shitty position for a kid to be in.

"And what do you think?" I asked.

Wayne looked thoughtful at that. "I, uh…I dunno what I think" he said quietly. "She was just really nice, eh? Everyone thought she was fuckin' wonderful, but she dumped me pretty quick when her old boyfriend came back from Gisborne."

"So…it couldn't be his baby?" I said, without thinking. Wayne looked shocked, and suddenly much, much younger than he did when he was talking about learning to carve. Fuck, of course he wouldn't imagine the girl of his dreams sleeping around on him. But it wouldn't be the first time it had happened to someone, and he wouldn't be the first poor fucker to have a baby pinned on him when it wasn't his in the first place.

"No" Wayne said. "Well…no. No it isn't. 'Cos she said…like, before…when he wasn't there…" he trailed off.

"Before the ex-boyfriend came back?" I asked, cursing myself for asking for more details. Really, I should have just wished him luck and backed quickly out of the room, but something was making me stick around. It was a fucking annoying something.

"Yeah" Wayne said, sadly. "She said she was pregnant, eh? And I was real happy 'bout it, 'cos I thought it might be cool and stuff? But she said we couldn't tell anyone, so I didn't…and then, well. Yeah. He came back and she said that'd be better, 'cos the baby'd have a real dad, who could work, or get a benefit or something eh? Get stuff, anyway. So I didn't say nothing. But I guess he left again, 'cos she called me when she was about to have the baby and said she didn't want it no more. She's gonna go and do this course in Wellington. Tourism. She wants to be, like, an air hostess and shit, eh? So, yeah. Mum was pretty mad, and I thought for sure I'd get a bloody hidin'. But she's pretty cool about it now. She likes Bubba." Wayne stopped and stared at the futon.

Well that was indeed a fucking messed-up story. I tried to think what to say, but couldn't come up with anything.

"It fuckin' sucked when I knew she was with him, eh?" Wayne said. "But she's not now, so that's OK."

Well it wasn't really OK, but it maybe wasn't as bad as these things could be. I didn't know. I still felt out of my depth.

"What's her name?" I asked. "Your, uh, girlfriend?"

"Rangimarie" Wayne said. "She's the prettiest girl I ever seen. 'Cept maybe for Auntie, eh? Your Auntie…I mean, you know, Sookie. She's real pretty. And nice too."

"Yeah, she is." That was ground I felt a bit more secure on covering.

"Mum says that Rangimarie's a bitch, eh? 'Cos she didn't want the baby." Wayne looked at me like he wanted confirmation, and I had never met the girl.

"Well, I guess your mom just doesn't want you to be hurt" I said. I figured that'd be true, because I was pretty sure Sookie would take a dim view of any skanky girls messing around with Tray and Sam.

Although if they brought us home any babies when they were fourteen, I think their emotional well-being might be the last thing I'd be thinking of.

"Yeah" Wayne agreed. "She's been pretty cool about it, eh? Although she doesn't know…that I knew before, so I think that's why she's so pissed off with Rangimarie. But she said don't tell, so I didn't."

You had to give him points for loyalty. "You weren't upset that it happened?" I asked.

"Nah" he said. "I didn't mind, eh?"

I couldn't imagine that. And then for some reason, I decided to tell Wayne why I couldn't imagine that. "I had this girl, uh, once" I said. "She came and said she was late…"

"Late?" Wayne asked.

"Yeah, you know. _Late_."

"Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know, eh?"

"Yeah. So…fuck. That was pretty awful. I was only in high school."

"How old were you?" Wayne asked me.

"Seventeen. I think." I couldn't really remember. It was a fucking long time ago and might as well have been someone else's life. I wasn't really very good at dredging up the past, you brought out one memory and all of a sudden you had way more than you fucking bargained for. None of it was ever good.

"And what happened?" Wayne asked.

"Oh." Fuck, yeah, this was why you didn't discuss these things. "I said she was lying" I said, and I shrugged. She wasn't exactly known as the picture girl for moral integrity, so…I wasn't proud of it, but there was a good chance I'd been right.

"And then what happened?" I might have been doing a good job of keeping Wayne's mind off his own troubles, but I wasn't sure he was exactly seeing me in the best light. Fuck, I hoped none of this got back to Sookie.

"Um…well, nothing really" I said. There'd been tears. A lot of fucking tears, some screaming and some storming off. And then I'd just avoided her, as best I could.

"But was she, you know. Was there a baby?" Wayne said, saying the word I hadn't ever dared associate with that whole episode.

I stared at my desk and noticed that Sookie had turned several piles of filing into one large one. Fuck that was going to need to re-sorting. "Don't know" I said, and it was the truth. When I'd said I avoided her, I'd done a pretty awesome job of that, which at the time, I'd been quite proud of. After all, the school wasn't that big a place. "I mean…she never left school, or had time off. I would have noticed…so I guess there wasn't. But I don't know why." I hadn't wanted to know why. I still didn't want to know why.

"Shit" Wayne said. "I'd wanna know, eh? I hate if I didn't know. Even when she was goin' to have the baby with that dickhead around, I woulda wanted to know. In case, eh? In case they ever needed somethin'."

Wayne looked at me expectantly and I had the uneasy feeling that maybe he was a better man than I was. It wasn't a particularly pleasant thought. "Well, I guess it's good that you do know" I said. "And you've got your mom to help."

"Yeah…she's good with little kids, eh?"

"She is."

"I just…do you think she'll hate me?"

"Um…" I tried to work out what Crystal might be feeling and failed miserably. Mostly she looked happy, but the happiness was directed towards the baby. I wasn't sure how Wayne factored into the equation. "No, she might feel a bit disappointed that, um…that you've had a kid so young. But I don't think she hates you."

"Oh, nah. Not Mum, eh? Bubba. D'you think she'll hate me…if I'm not around? Like, if I leave her with Mum and I'm not around anymore when I leave home."

"Ohhhh. Um. Not if she's happy with your mom."

"Mum'll be good to her, eh? She really wants a baby. And Jase's OK. When's he's not a bein' a dick." Well, Wayne and I agreed on something. "It's just that sometimes, used to be lots of times, I really hated my dad. For leaving me and going back to Aussie."

"You're not your dad" I said. "And it'll be different for, um, the baby. She'll have Crystal and Jason, and you, so that might be better."

Wayne looked thoughtful. "Your mum left, eh? D'you hate her?"

I wasn't sure when this had turned into my personal therapy session. "I did. Not so much now. It was a long time ago…I just. I don't have the energy. And I have a lot of good things in my life now." It felt fucking weird articulating something I didn't usually even put into a coherent thought, but it was true.

"You like your kids, eh?" Wayne asked me.

"Yep" I said. "I really fucking do."

"Yeah…" Wayne said, drifting off to his own thoughts again. "One day I can be a dad, eh?"

I nodded. "But maybe it's too soon?" I asked him.

"Yeah. I can't, eh? Just have to hope she doesn't hate me."

"She won't" I assured him. "She'll be OK."

Wayne smiled at me, well, it was a half-smile, but he didn't say anything and I took that as my chance to leave. He nodded at me, and then put his earbuds back in. Poor fucking kid.

I found my cake in the kitchen and set about making myself some coffee. That was the problem with no one else drinking it, although I wasn't sure I'd really want Jason near the coffee machine even if he did. I kind of liked it when it was just me who touched it.

"Where have you been?" Sookie asked me.

"Oh…um. Talking to Wayne" I said.

"Oh" Sookie said. "Is he alright?"

"Yeah, he seems pretty OK really." Sookie gave me a look, like I couldn't possibly have any idea how Wayne was doing, and then pulled the dishwasher door open and started emptying it.

Just then Crystal walked into the kitchen carrying the baby and a bottle. "Just came to warm up the last one before bed" she said cheerfully. "Can I just get you to hold Bubba?" she looked at Sookie, whose hands were currently full of clean dishes. "I'll take her" I said, and Crystal handed her over. I balanced her carefully on my shoulder and took a mouthful of coffee.

"Oh, look at you" Crystal said, walking over to the microwave. "You're like a pro now! No wonder you guys have so many, eh?"

Well they weren't so bad at this age. As long as they didn't throw up on you, or poop through their clothes or fucking scream their head off. If none of that was happening it was almost pleasant holding them.

"Oh, Sookie, you better watch out, you need a guy who's going to put you on a pedestal I think."

Well that was a bit fucking mean. I thought I treated Sookie pretty well really. Granted I wasn't helping with the dishwasher, but I was holding the baby.

But Sookie laughed. "Oh yeah" she said, and then she looked at me. "Oh, you won't know. It's an old Billy T. James joke. He was a comedian. How did it go?"

Crystal took a deep breath and said "There were 17 of us in our family; we put Mum up on a pedestal. Had to keep the old man away from her somehow, eh?" and then she did a weird kind of giggle, and Sookie laughed as well.

Fucking weird people in this country.

Jason wandered in, looked at my cup and then at Sookie. "Is there any more tea?" he asked.

"Jesus, Jason" Crystal said. "I'm pretty bloody sure you can find the teabags, eh?"

Jason sighed, and looked at Sookie again who was pointedly ignoring him. Finally he muttered something and went to make his own tea.

"Have you seen Wayne?" Crystal asked Jason, coming over with the bottle to take the baby from me.

"I have" I said. "He's OK." Crystal gave me the same look Sookie had, like I knew shit. I gave up. Hopefully they'd all figure it out.

"I feel really bad for him" Sookie said, as she continued to put away the dinnerware. "It's a crappy thing to have to deal with at 14."

"Yeah…" Jason mused. "Should have known better though, eh? I mean, shit. I fuckin' told him not to do anything, well, anything that fuckin' stupid."

"Oh, well we all make mistakes" Sookie said. "And some of us are older." She glanced at me, and I really wished she hadn't because I could see all of the light bulbs fucking flash right above Jason's head.

"Hah!" he said, pointing at Sookie. "I fuckin' knew you had Tray bloody quickly. Shit Sook, I would have thought you'd figured it out by your age. That's fuckin' hilarious." Sookie pressed her lips together glared at Jason, and then turned and glared at me, making it pretty fucking obvious where she thought the blame lay. Yeah, it wasn't all my fucking fault, that's for sure.

"Oh, shut up Jason" Sookie said.

"Yeah…but, fuck it's fuckin' funny, eh! Poor fuckin' Eric, with you running around trying to jump him all the time."

I could see the flash in Sookie's eyes when she'd had enough of Jason, because it was the same flash Sam got when Tray pushed him to his limits. She turned and hit him on his side with the tea-towel she had in her hand, and then she kept hitting him while he tried to shield himself with his one free arm. He might have put up more resistance if he hadn't been trying not to spill any tea on himself.

"Go on, Sookie. You teach him a lesson!" Crystal said from where she was sitting at the table. She seemed to be enjoying watching Jason get beaten up by his baby sister.

I looked at Sookie's bump and wondered how Sam and Tray were going to fare in the future.

SPOV

It was kind of awkward having them to stay, but it was kind of OK at the same time. It was better when Jason kept his big trap shut of course. He always thought he was a lot funnier than he was.

I heard the baby a couple of times during the night, and it was a weird feeling, hearing a baby cry that wasn't mine. I wondered what Wayne thought of it all.

In the morning though, at breakfast, it was kind of business as usual. Felicia decided to break out the new version of the Happy Birthday song that she'd learned at school. "Happy birthday to you" she sang. "You live at the zoo, you look like a monkey, and you act like one too!" It always made Sam and Tray run around and do their best monkey impressions, which kind of negated Felicia's desire to insult them. Jason clapped. I just hoped he didn't decide to teach her the version he'd taught me that rhymed 'Happy birthday to you' with 'Squashed bananas and poo.'

Jason always knew all the best songs.

Tray mugged Eric for a share of his breakfast yelling "Bix! Bix!" when he saw Eric had a bowl of Weetbix. That made both Crystal and Jason aww over how cute he was, and he was, but I wasn't sure Eric felt quite the same way when he had Tray attached to his leg, and opening his mouth in the hope of getting a share.

I asked Sam to bring his plate over and he said "Sure" in his funny little accent. "Hey, Sook?" Jason said. "Your kid sounds like a Yank, eh? That's fucking hilarious."

"No he doesn't" I lied. "He sounds just like us. Well, like me anyway. Your accent is atrocious."

"What accent?" Jason said. "I fuckin' sound normal, eh?"

I looked over at Eric and he just rolled his eyes, and went back to giving all his breakfast to Tray.

So it was all kind of nice, but no one was saying much about the baby with no name, or about poor Wayne who skulked in the shadows despite Amelia's attempts to draw him into a conversation about the best kind of gel pens to use.

I cleaned up breakfast and wondered if I needed to give them another push towards some kind of…well, I wasn't sure what. Some kind of resolution about the whole situation. I just wasn't sure what to do.

But the cracks started to show themselves. "Hey, Wayne" Crystal said. "Can you go and get your teeth brushed and stuff? I thought we might go to the shops, eh? Get Bubba some stuff while we're here."

"Yeah, whatever" Wayne mumbled. I think. It was a really mumbly response.

"No, do it now" Crystal said. "Or else the whole bloody day will be gone. I'm not sitting around here waiting on you to get your arse moving."

And that seemed to be it for Wayne. "Don't treat me like a FUCKIN' KID!" he roared at his mother, and then he turned on his heel and strode out of the room.

Amelia looked up from the picture she was drawing and was both shocked and kind of intrigued, and luckily the other three kids had missed it, they were outside with Eric at the time. Jason looked downright furious. "Fuckin' Wayne" he said. "I'm going to go and tell him fuckin' what's what".

Crystal put her hand on his arm. "No, I'll go" she said. "He's pissed at me, so let him be fuckin' pissed at me. I can take it." And she left in search of Wayne.

"He's got fuckin' issues that kid" Jason muttered, coming over to stand beside me in the kitchen. Probably he was angling for another cup of tea.

"Well, you can't blame him" I said. "I mean, he's fourteen and he's suddenly done something so adult, but he's patently not ready for it."

"Yeah…" Jason said slowly. And then he looked out the window at the garden to where Eric was currently running around with several kids attached to him. "I dunno if I am, either. I mean, fuck, I'm old enough…but shit, babies are fuckin' scary, eh?"

I laughed and Jason scowled at me. "Oh, I'm not laughing at you" I said, but I don't think Jason believed me. "It's just…well I think everyone thinks that. Eric was terrified of any baby that crossed his path. But he was fine with Sam. Exploding nappies and everything."

Jason pulled a face at that idea. "Oh you deal with cow shit all the time!" I said, "How is baby poo any worse than that?"

Jason shrugged and I realised it probably wasn't the nappies that worried him. "You'll be fine" I said. "You already are with the other kids, why will this one be any different?"

"Dunno" Jason says. "It just feels…important or something, eh?" He continued looking out the window and I kind of got where his head was at. For a couple who'd been told they weren't going to get pregnant themselves, having a baby suddenly drop into their lap was a big deal. A huge deal. And Jason was scared of stuffing it all up. They'd already had to deal with an unexpected situation with Wayne, and I guess the prospect of that, or something worse, happening with this baby was terrifying. They were being trusted to bring her up healthy and happy, and Jason took his promises seriously.

And then I heard the baby crying from the bedroom. "Baby's crying!" Amelia called over from the table. Yeah, she was kind of used to that sound herself.

"Well" I said. "Here's your chance to at least have a go. Go and get…uh, her up."

"I dunno" Jason said. "Crys'll probably want to get her, eh? She's used to it."

"You'll never get used to it if you don't try" I said. "If you get stuck, ask me."

Jason turned, and looked me up and down. "Well you are like a fuckin' breeding heifer"

"Oh, fuck off. Just go and get the baby. And while you're there, bloody name her!"

Jason laughed, and walked off to the bedroom.

Everything was quiet for a while, and then Crystal reappeared just as I was assembling stuff for lunch. "Wayne's gone for a walk" she said. "I think he needs to cool off a bit." She sighed, and sat down.

"Must be hard" I said. "For Wayne."

"Yeah, it's fuckin' hard for all of us Sookie" Crystal agreed.

EPOV

I took the kids down to the park on the corner of the road and found Wayne was already there, sitting on one of the seats. I sat next to him.

"Just getting' some air, eh?" he said.

I thought that maybe that wasn't the whole story. Sookie had said he'd yelled at Crystal and she was worried about him. I thought maybe I should say something. "You need to say something to them. Tell them what you want, and how you want to do it."

"They don't fuckin' care" he said. "They think I'm just a kid."

I shrugged. "Well, the only way you can change that is to not act like one."

SPOV

When Eric and the kids came back for lunch, they brought Wayne with them. He sat through lunch without really saying anything, or making eye contact with anyone other than Eric, who seemed to be on the receiving end of a few significant glances.

When lunch was over, he stood up and said "I want to talk to Mum. And you Jase. I want to talk to both of youse."

"OK" Crystal said. "Let's go on the deck."

I tried not to be nosy, but the kitchen overlooks the deck. I got a few significant glances from Eric about it, but it wasn't like I could hear them. They seemed to be doing OK though.

After a while Jason turned up. "Any tea, Sook?" he asked. "I'm fuckin' parched, eh?"

"Oh. OK" I said, putting the jug on. "How's it going out there?"

"Oh, good. Yeah." He didn't elaborate though, and just left it at that. I gave him his tea, plus some for Crystal, and he went back outside.

It took another little while and then all three of them came back in. I tried to read their expressions, but I kind of sucked at that.

"All OK?" I asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think we're good now" Crystal said. Well, she sounded happy. "You happy Wayne?" she asked.

Wayne didn't look overly happy, but he looked resigned, and, again, he looked a lot older than his fourteen years.

"Yep" he said. "I, uh…" he looked down at the ground, and then over at Crystal. "You're a good mum, eh Mum. You'll be a good mum to Bubba. She'll be alright with you fullas."

Crystal teared up and hugged Wayne. She whispered something to him in Maori and he just nodded. I guess this was what they needed, a chance to just clear the air. It wasn't going to be easy for them, but I hoped it would work out.

"It'll be good up North, eh?" Wayne said. "I just…well, it'll be good. I don't mind going. I want to." I hoped that was the truth, I really hoped this was his chance to leave any bad feelings behind.

"So has she got a name yet?" I asked, ignoring Eric poking me in the hip with his finger. He thought I was unduly worried about the baby not having a name, but honestly, it bugged the crap out of me. I wanted that kid to have a proper name and I wanted it now.

"Yeah" Jason said. "We all picked one. Seemed fair that way."

"Oh, cool" I said. "So what is it?"

"Well" Crystal said, "Her first name is for my mother, so it's Ngaihuia."

"Oh, that's pretty" I said.

"And I picked her second name" Jason said. "I thought, um…well. I thought Michelle for Mum. You don't mind, eh Sook?"

"Oh, no. I don't mind." I didn't particularly like it, although it wasn't as bad as the name Mum had lumbered me with. If only mine had been as ordinary as Michelle.

"Wayne got to pick one too" Crystal said.

"Oh, OK" I replied, "What did you pick?" Eric moved around so he was standing beside me rather than slightly behind.

"Well, we were sort of picking family names, eh?" Wayne said, looking kind of embarrassed. "So I thought, well. I thought she could be named after someone who's only kind of my family, but has been real good to me…" he trailed off.

"Go on" Crystal said, sounding excited. "Tell them."

"Well I thought…' Wayne began again, and I was suddenly worried. Please do not stick that poor baby with my stupid name I thought. She'll never forgive you. "I kind of wanted...um, well…Erica. I thought Erica would be cool, eh?"

Oh. Well that wasn't quite what I expected. I looked at Eric. Yeah, that was definitely triumph; I wondered when he was going to do his victory dance. He just looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Fine, he could be Wayne's favourite then.

"Oh" I said. "That's a lovely thought. Don't you think so Eric?"

"Yeah" Eric said. "That's uh…well, that's a bit weird actually. But nice weird. I think."

Wayne beamed at the floor and Jason looked around. "Is there a cup of tea going?"

The next morning only Eric, Amelia and I were awake in time to wave them all off on their way up North. Well, I was going back to bed. I hoped. The trick was to not wake the boys up.

Unfortunately Amelia is not the quietest person around. "Bye!" she yelled from the top of the hallway, and I heard the sound of small feet hitting the floor of the boys' room. Bugger.

"It's not up-time" I grumbled to Eric.

"I think it is now" he said, as Sam and then Tray emerged from their bedroom looking sleepy and rumpled.

We did a round of hugs and goodbyes to Crystal, Jason and Wayne, and I gave Ngaihuia a quick kiss on her forehead.

"Take care, everyone" I said.

"E noha ra, Sookie" Crystal said, hugging me. "And you too Eric."

"Drive safe" I said to Jason.

"I always bloody do" he grumbled.

"Bye-bye ute" Sam said.

"See, he's bloody got it right now, eh?" Jason said. "You can thank me later!" He laughed and walked down the front steps.

We all waved from the front door, as Jason's ute took off down the road. I hoped Wayne would be OK up North. I hoped they were all going to be OK.

Felicia suddenly appeared. "Have they gone?" she asked.

"Yeah" Eric replied.

"Oh. What's for breakfast?"

"Dad's making French toast" I said. "You guys go to the kitchen and we'll be there in a minute."

"Yay!" Felicia said, running down the hall the boys trailing after her.

"I am?" Eric asked, shutting the door.

I shrugged. And then my stomach rumbled. Loudly.

"I see. A little bit hungry are you?" he asked.

"It's the baby, not me. She's hungry."

"Yeah" Eric said. "You're hungry a lot. Sometimes I'm worried you might eat one of the kids."

"Phfft, no meat on them" I said. "You might be in trouble though."

"Well, there's a few places I wouldn't mind you putting your mouth" Eric said, leering slightly.

"Oh, shut up" I said, swatting his chest. "Anyway, you owe me a victory dance."

"Why?" Eric asked.

"For the name. I saw your face when Wayne said he'd picked Erica. That, my friend, was pure triumph and nothing else."

Eric looked at me for a minute, and then he said "OK, but only because it doesn't do to argue with a pregnant lady." And then he danced down the hall to go and make French toast for us all.

**A/N Sookie's Dr Seuss quote was from _Too Many Daves_ which is included in the book _The Sneetches and Other Stories._**

**Here we use bubba as kind of a pet name for babies. Sooky bubba (with sooky pronounced like Sookie's name) means cry-baby, and is a much-beloved taunt of small children. You can imagine the kind of fun Sookie had growing up with that being thrown at her.**

**The Rugby World Cup is being held here next month, and many of the games are at Eden Park, which is in the heart of suburban Mt Eden.**

**Kia Ora (Key Or-rah) is hello.**

**Hapu (har-poo) means pregnant.**

**Whangai (fung-eye) adoptions are traditional arrangements, with a long cultural history, that are still practiced today but are hard to enforce in law. However it's often used (I think) for arrangements within families.**

**Whakapapa (fuck-ah-pap-ah) means genealogy, or family history. **

**Tama is pronounced Tar-Mar, and Aroha, A-row-har. Rangimarie is pronounced Rung-ee-marie. Ngaihuia is pronounced Nye-hoo-ee-ah,and means good feathers.**

**Pakeha (Park-ee-har) is the term for European New Zealanders.**

**Marae (Mah-rye) is the traditional Maori way of living, and many of them are still used as meeting places and form a central part of the community.**

**Kaumatua (Cow-mah-two-ah) is a male elder, someone respected in the community.**

**E noho ra (Ear no-hoe rah) is goodbye.**

**The DPB is the Domestic Purposes Benefit, which can be claimed by solo parents who meet the criteria set by the government.**

**Kumara (koo-mah-rah) is a root vegetable, like a sweet potato, and was a staple of Maori diets pre-European.**

**Billy T. James was one of our most famous comedians, especially in the 1980's. He was Maori and played a lot on that in the characters he played and the jokes he told. He was quite fond of sending up the stereotypes, and known for the slightly high-pitched giggle he'd do at his own jokes.**

**And in case anyone's worried the age of consent in New Zealand is 16. So technically Wayne was below it, but honestly, these things happen all the time and I can't see anyone interested in prosecuting his girlfriend. It might be a different story if he'd been involved with someone much older or in a position of power.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	106. Bonus Chapter: Date Night

**A/N Well I was having a crappy week anyway and then the stomach bug hit and the toddler vomited all over the floor. I really should not write about this stuff! Hence the delay for this chapter and the fact that part-way through writing I nearly gave up on the whole thing, realising I was never going to move off the couch again because all she wanted to do was lie on me and sleep. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I'm starting to think there's some kind of weird voodoo involved in it all.**

SPOV

After Jason and family left things settled down a bit. Well, they would have if we weren't in that time you get at the end of the year when suddenly everything is so incredibly busy you wonder if anyone will really mind if you just sleep through the whole of Christmas day to try and recharge your batteries.

Unfortunately that wasn't going to happen in our house.

"So" Amelia said, walking into the kitchen one morning. "I've made my list for Santa" she gave me what I assumed was a sly wink, but it was hard to tell as she wasn't that great at just closing one eye and not the other. Now that she knew the truth about Santa, as did Felicia, they were sworn to secrecy around the boys. But Amelia wasn't always particularly good about secrets. Mostly, she just sign-posted them to everyone else.

"OK" I said, looking at her piece of paper and thinking 'no' to most of the stuff listed. She really didn't need her own laptop. Not yet anyway.

"Is Santa comin' to'morra?" Sam asked.

"No, not for a while yet" I replied.

"We get to put the calendar out soon!" Amelia sing-songed. "And I'm going to start it!"

"You started last year!" Felicia complained. "It's my turn!"

"No it isn't, is it Mum? It's my turn?" Amelia asked.

"You're _wrong!_" Felicia yelled.

"We doin' de calendar?" Sam asked kind of interested. I hadn't realised he remembered it that well. Thankfully Tray wasn't paying any attention to what everyone was yelling about. He was sitting and watching Bob eat breakfast, but was a bit too close for Bob's comfort, and Bob kept flicking his tail at him and looking annoyed. It didn't bother Tray though, who pointed at Bob and yelled "Cart!"

"Mum! MUM! It's _my_ turn, isn't it?" Amelia asked again.

"Um…" I said, trying to remember and wishing that I wrote these things down. "Um…maybe Daddy knows?"

"Well I'll ask _him_ then" Amelia said stalking out of the room with Felicia hot on her heels saying "It's not your turn all the time!"

I heard Eric say "What? What do I know?" and I felt briefly mean about setting the girls on him, but he was much better at getting them all to share. Well, as well as they ever shared anything.

Sam looked in the direction his sisters had disappeared and I think he was weighing up the pros and cons of joining them. It was a hard decision, on the one hand he might be missing out on something they were getting from Eric, on the other hand he currently only had me, Tray and Bob in the kitchen with him and he was pretty sure he was in charge of Tray and Bob.

In the end he wandered over to Tray. "No touchin' Bob!" he warned, pointing his finger at his brother. Tray turned around and looked confused because he hadn't been touching Bob. He'd had his hand in Bob's water bowl, but he hadn't been touching Bob himself.

Tray just wiped his wet hand on his shirt, and turned back from Sam to Bob. "S'eatin'" Tray commented. Bob looked at the pair of them and decided to make a tactical withdrawal, shooting straight out the cat door.

"G'boy Tray" Sam said, patting Tray on the head. Tray went back to making a puddle on the floor.

"Hey!" I said. "No, puddles." I grabbed up Bob's bowl and tried to mop up the water with a paper towel.

"Put-tles!" Tray echoed.

Amelia and Felicia came stomping back in. "What did Daddy say?" I asked them.

Felicia sighed. "He reckons it's Tray's turn" she grumbled.

"Well, that's probably right" I said. I was pretty sure we'd decided Tray was too little to care the last couple of Christmases, especially when he'd only been a couple of weeks old.

Felicia didn't look convinced, but I figured she couldn't really come up with a good argument to prove otherwise. Amelia had a go though. "I think I should start it, because I'm the oldest. And then it could go on age."

"You _always_ want to be first" Felicia said to her.

"I'm always older than you guys. Duh!" Amelia replied.

"Shouldn't you guys be getting ready for school?"

They both sighed, almost in unison, and sloped off, although Felicia doubled back to peer in her lunchbox and sigh again, before she finally left.

Eric appeared, still carrying the coffee cup he'd left the kitchen clutching about fifteen minutes earlier. I guess it had at least ended up back here, even if it had done a round-circuit of the house in the meantime.

"Do you know where my tie is?" Eric asked.

"Which tie?" I said. Sometimes clarification is useful in these matters.

"The one I like" Eric said, putting his cup in the dishwasher. Sometimes clarification doesn't help.

"Is it on your tie-rack?" I asked, and Eric shook his head. "Is it, um, in your office?"

"No" Eric said, sounding grumpy.

"Well, when did you last have it?"

"Yesterday. I had it yesterday."

"Have you re-traced your steps? Maybe you took it off in the bathroom?" Eric looked at me for a few moments, probably wondering if I was going to go and look in the bathroom for him. But I'd learned that lesson; if I looked for everything that everyone in this house lost I'd never do anything else.

Eric shrugged and walked off, and Sam took off down the hall as well. Tray went and stood by the bi-fold doors and stared at Bob. "Cart!" he yelled.

"Cat" I said, putting lunchboxes into bags. "Bob."

"Bob Cart!" Tray yelled. He banged on the glass. "Com'ere!"

Bob slowly, and without looking back at Tray, walked down the steps of the deck and out of sight. Tray continued to stand there hopefully.

Sam arrived back holding a tie. Possibly the tie Eric was looking for. "Where was that?" I asked him.

"In de b'droom" he said. "On de drawers." Well that made sense because Eric had arrived home the night before just in time to put Sam and Tray to bed. He'd probably ditched it while giving them piggy-back rides around the room after having been told it was quiet story time.

"It's not there" Eric said, walking back in. "Are you sure you haven't…?" I pointed to Sam who held up the tie triumphantly.

"Oh" Eric said. "Thanks, Sam. But don't take my ties to play with them."

Sam looked a bit affronted and I stepped in. "You left it in their room. Last night?"

"Did I?" Eric said, like I was saying the most ridiculous thing in the world. Then he shrugged and started putting it on, while Sam stood watching, apparently fascinated by the process of tying a tie.

"Well, good work with the advent calendar anyway" I said to Eric. "Sometimes I really wish Lorena had never given it to us, it causes so many problems."

"Oh, it's OK" Eric said. "The kids like it."

"Mmm, but try dividing 24 days by five kids next year and see how you get on."

"Shit" Eric said.

"Uh-huh."

"So why am I doing it?" he asked.

"Because you are the officially sanctioned arbitrator of the advent calendar. Basically they don't listen to the crap I tell them, only the crap you tell them."

"Maybe my crap's better?" Eric asked.

"Maybe you're just full of more crap than I am?"

"Wha's crap?" Sam asked.

"Something highly desirable, I think, if I'm so full of it" Eric said, looking at me pointedly and smirking a bit.

"And that just proves my point!" I said, throwing up my hands and turning away from him, before my smile got too big and he knew he'd got me. I knew exactly what he was getting at. Eric thought I was chasing him around all the time again.

And in a way, he was kind of right. Somehow with this pregnancy, my hormones had kicked into full swing and I was horny in a way that normally you only read about in the books I tried to hide from Eric. Of course those he found. He couldn't find his own bloody ties, but a romance book with smutty passages, well it was like he had a GPS leading him to them.

Although I didn't really need to be romanced via novel at the moment. If you could call Eric declaring "It's all just porn!" and then reading the most salacious scenes while making sneering asides about the characters and the plot, romancing. No, I wasn't so much interested in the romance as the actual having sex, and, given how busy we were at the moment, it was better to get to the good stuff as fast as possible. I thought so, anyway.

Eric, of course, sighed and huffed a bit every time I mentioned the words "quick" and "sex" in the same sentence, like it was some kind of punishment. And then he'd make a big deal out of how he would do it to satisfy me, because God knows, I was demanding. But, you know, he loved me so much he'd do it.

The trouble was that it wasn't just me. I might have been up to the eyeballs in hormones, but I think they'd started to affect Eric too. Maybe he had some super-developed hormone receptors after all this time hanging out with me? For all his eye-rolling and sighing and his constant mantra of "of course I'll service you if you really want me to", he was chasing me around just as much as I was chasing him. He would have probably been the one doing most of the chasing, but I was less likely to run than he was. I was carrying another person around, after all.

And so instead, because I wasn't particularly agile, I had Eric attaching himself to me at inappropriate moments when I couldn't get away. Sometimes I'd get cornered in the pantry and he'd try to simultaneously get his tongue down my throat and his hand up my shirt and dinner would be slightly delayed while the microwave beeped for several minutes until Amelia yelled out "Mum! I think dinner needs you!" and I'd have to try to peel Eric off me, which is easier said than done.

The problem with both of us being, well, under the influence of my hormonal fluctuations, I guess you could say, was that it was easy to get a bit carried away. Like the night Sam got out of bed and felt the need to announce his trip to the toilet and sprang us on the family room couch. Luckily, we were mostly still dressed, and as annoyed as I was when Eric leapt off me at the sound of Sam's voice saying "I needed de toilet", it was kind of impressive that he could move that quickly. Unfortunately it left me trying to pull up my yoga pants, which wasn't easy given how round I was, and when Sam asked what we were doing, I had to lie about how Daddy was giving me a tummy rub.

I hope he bought it, because he looked kind of suspicious. Mostly suspicious of Eric though, so at least I might have been off the hook.

I composed myself and turned back to Sam. "Go and get your shoes" I said to him, and he gave me a grumpy look. "I don' wan' shoes" he complained.

"No, but you need some. Go and find a pair and we'll be off in a minute." He trudged off to find some shoes that I was pretty certain would be worn as far as pre-school, and then discarded until I picked him up again, if I was lucky, that is. If not they'd be left beside the sand-pit. Again.

"Tray, you go and get shoes too" Eric said. "_Your _shoes." Tray ran off and it was just a guess as to what shoes he'd come back with. I don't know if it was the result of living with so many hand me downs, but he had a very fluid idea of who owned what around here. It wasn't even like he could necessarily make a bee-line for the boy's stuff because I was pretty sure he had worn at least one pair of pink gumboots when that's what was available in his size.

"So what time do I have to be home tonight so you can chase me around again?" Eric asked.

"Ha. Very funny. Except that tonight is the parent teacher meetings at school, so that's why I need you home. Or to at least meet me at school."

"It is?" Eric asked.

"Yes, I told you that."

"Um…OK" Eric said, not really sounding convinced.

"I'm not sending you reminder emails, Eric. I'm not your secretary."

"No" he said sadly. "You're not. You could pretend though?" He looked at me hopefully.

"Well, I can't get under a desk at the moment, so I think you're out of luck. Plus the fact, secretaries file, so I'd have to touch the sacred piles of emails."

"Pretend what?" Amelia asked.

"Well" Eric said. "Tonight we're just going up to the school, find the kids who aren't any trouble, and pretend they're ours."

Amelia went quiet for a while, which was really quite an impressive feat on Eric's part. "No you're not" she said. "Their parents might be upset if you did that. It's not right."

"You don't think anyone would want to swap their kids for you and Leesh?"

Amelia looked sideways. "Maybe we could swap Leesha?" she suggested.

"Well, maybe we'll just see how the meeting goes first, before I swap any of you. The alternatives might not be any better."

Felicia shuffled in to the kitchen. "Daddy's going to swap you for another kid!" Amelia announced.

"What?" Felicia asked.

"Daddy was only joking" I said, before that one got out of hand. I remembered how I'd felt that time Jason tried to sell me to Mrs Fortenberry and I didn't want anyone here thinking siblings were disposable.

"He's gonna swap you" Amelia said, ignoring me.

"I said I'd swap both of you" Eric interjected, which probably wasn't going to help the situation.

Felicia and Amelia looked at each other, and I would have sworn they were almost having a silent conversation. "She wouldn't let him" Felicia said in the end. I guess I was that 'she'.

"Yeah" Amelia agreed. "Plus they wouldn't be having Lula if we were _that _bad."

"We haven't decided on a name for the baby yet" I said. I was currently leaning towards Estella, which had turned up in a novel I'd read. Eric wasn't so keen on it though, which was a slight problem, although as long as the only two viable alternatives remained Lula and Potato, I figured Estella was in with a good chance.

"OK" I said, wiping my hands on a towel. "Everyone to the car." I handed Amelia and Felicia their schoolbags and grabbed Sam's and Tray's. Tray came clomping down the hall wearing a pair of plastic high heels from the dress up basket. "No" I said. "Not those shoes." He looked a bit sad. I guess none of his shoes had sparkly butterflies after all.

"We'll grab your Crocs on the way out" I said, lifting him onto my hip. "Sam! Are you ready?"

"Yeah" Sam called back. Possibly he didn't have shoes on though.

"OK" I said to Eric, who was doing something with his phone. "I'll see you at the school? At 4.30?"

"Um…yep. I'll be there. I didn't have it in my diary though."

"I know, but it was on the calendar. And I told you!"

Eric looked over at the calendar on the wall and sighed. "I never look at that" he said.

"I know it doesn't have little tokens of camels and stars every day, so it's not as great as the advent calendar, but I do put all the important stuff on there."

"Yeah…but couldn't you at least draw a camel or something?" Eric asked.

"No, I couldn't. Just look at the friggin' calendar occasionally. OK, we've got to get going, so see you later on."

"Mmm. OK, bye" Eric said. I wandered over to kiss him, and then grabbed the bags with the arm that wasn't holding Tray and walked out to where everyone else was assembled, hoping that Sam's shouts of "No, Leesha!" didn't signify anything too bad was happening.

EPOV

I thought I'd seen Sookie's pregnancy horniness in full force, but I'd been wrong. So completely wrong. This time she was really fucking horny, all the fucking time. It was kind of nice, although a bit tiring, and she was overly fond of groping me at times when it wasn't really appropriate, like when she was meant to be making dinner. One minute I'd be helping Amelia with her maths, and the next I'd be lured into the pantry on the pretext of getting something down off the top shelf, only for Sookie to jump me while I was in there.

As it was I was already worried that half the kids in the house knew far more about sex than they should. Amelia was particularly fond of coming up with random questions about magic cuddles and making babies and whether it was enjoyable or whether we just did because we had to. Luckily she still mainly directed those questions to Sookie, although she did one day ask me if Sookie had told me I'd have to make babies with her before I moved in, and if I'd been OK with that because she'd done it before and I hadn't. I really wasn't fucking answering that one, so I'd distracted her by suggesting she write her list for Santa, which had meant I'd had to sit through a five minute reminder of how Santa wasn't really coming but it was just Sookie and me.

It was preferable to the fucking sex talk.

Felicia mostly kept quiet on the issue, but now we had the problem that Sam might have caught us fooling around in the family room. I wasn't really sure what he'd seen, because I'd stopped what I was doing pretty fucking quickly and Sookie had at least come up with the mildly plausible explanation that I was rubbing her stomach, although I was fairly sure that even at three Sam knew where people's stomach's stopped, even one the size that Sookie's was currently.

I couldn't quite figure out though why he glared at me like I was the bad guy when Sookie was the one spinning him the tale.

But as voracious as Sookie was, she was still managing to load up our days with a fuck-load of things to do. I guess it wasn't all her, most of it seemed to revolve around the kids and all the places they needed to be, but occasionally she'd create fucking events out of thin air. Like the time I got a text to say don't come home because they were all next door at Kennedy and Danny's. When I got there I found Sookie had gone to watch the Melbourne Cup and somehow Tray had won the sweep, although I never did find out what he actually won. More to the point I'd missed the race so the chances of any bouncing were slim to fucking none. All that was left was spending the evening eating fish and chips with Kennedy and Danny while trying to stop Tray giving Kassidy any of his dinner and listening to Amelia complain that horse races were boring.

We didn't exactly get much time to ourselves. Well, time that wasn't about sex anyway. It wasn't that I was complaining about the sex, I kind of knew by now that I had to make the most of the times when Sookie wanted to have sex at every opportunity, because there'd be other times when I'd be lucky to get within ten feet of her, but even so. Sometimes I missed just hanging out, or, at least, the kind of hanging out where Sookie wasn't trying to either take my pants off or tell me the five hundred things that were happening this week.

Trouble is that I was bound to forget the odd one.

SPOV

I realised I should have sent Eric a reminder text when it got to 4.45pm and he still wasn't there. He was just lucky that Amelia's teacher was running late, although if she ran much later, we were going to miss the time we had with Felicia's teacher. Or I was going to miss it, at any rate, because I was sitting here by myself and God knows where Eric was.

I thought about sending him a text, but if he was stuck on the other side of Auckland, it wouldn't do any good. And he should have let me know.

And if he had just plain old forgotten, well then, I wasn't going to tell him. Sod him. He could find out later on.

Another five minutes went by and still no Eric. I got called in though to see Mrs Andrews. If he turned up now I only hoped he figured out where to find me. I went in and had the obligatory chat about Amelia's results in reading and comprehension (very good) and maths (OK) and several other subjects, and Mrs Andrews laid out where Amelia compared to her peers in the class. She was doing OK, she wasn't ever going to be a genius, but she seemed to be quite naturally bright and eager to do well and didn't seem to mind doing what she was told. I tried to get some information about the situation with the other little girls, but Mrs Andrews was either playing coy or genuinely didn't know, and I wasn't sure which I preferred.

"So…there's not been any, um, animosity?" I asked.

"Oh no" Mrs Andrews said, waving her hand around. "They all get on very well. And of course Amelia's a natural leader."

Uh-huh. That'd be the bossiness. I wasn't sure the other girls were really as enthusiastic about that trait as Mrs Andrews was.

"So you haven't noticed any, um, well…you know what it's like? The cliques? I'd hate to think there's too much of that going on…?" I trailed off. Mrs Andrews pursed her lips and looked thoughtful. Maybe she didn't know what it was like I reasoned. I hated to judge on appearances, but she was far glossier and glamorous than I remembered any of my primary school teachers being. And she had to be a good ten years' younger than me. No wonder Amelia adored her.

"Ohhh" she said slowly. "Well, these things tend to be fluid, don't they?

"They do…I just." I stopped, I had no idea how to articulate the warning bells that were going off in my head, but maybe I was overly sensitive to it all, or maybe it really had been a storm in a teacup. "Well if you haven't noticed any tension, then I guess it's OK."

"Oh, it's fine. Amelia's a…a…lovely addition the class, she really is. It wasn't the same when she was away on holiday!" Mrs Andrews said brightly.

Well at least someone had missed her I guess.

"And she did a lovely presentation for us all, about the holiday. That was completely her idea. She demonstrated the hula and everything. It was very entertaining" she added.

That definitely sounded like Amelia.

The interview finished and I wandered back out of the classroom, half-expecting Eric to be there. He wasn't though. Of course. God knows where he was at this point at time.

EPOV

It was the fact it wasn't my wife standing in the kitchen that alerted me to the fact I'd fucked up. I knew it was definitely my kitchen, I could see the print I'd bought Sookie several Christmases ago hanging on the wall for one thing, plus I think I stepped on Bob. Or Tray. But it was Kennedy's presence that really fucking threw me for a loop.

"Oh" Kennedy said, looking up from the small portable television that she and Amelia seemed glued to. "Um…I thought you were going to be with Sookie…"

Fuck. Yes, I was supposed to be with Sookie. I had thought that I'd put a reminder in my phone, but maybe I hadn't. Or maybe I'd just ignored it. Either way, I was in the shit about now.

"You're supposed to be talking to Mrs Andrews!" Amelia wailed, tearing her eyes away from the TV. "Or else you won't know what I did at school!"

Yeah, that was a point. Fuck. And if Amelia was upset, I wasn't sure what Sookie was going to be like. Maybe I shouldn't bother going?

"You better go" Amelia said. "Or you'll miss it!"

"Why's Dad here?" Felicia said, wandering into the kitchen. She looked at the TV and sighed. "That's so dumb!" she said.

"No, it's not. Kennedy's telling me what's going on. See that girl doesn't like the other one because that's her boyfriend…well, he was. But now he's not. So that made her a bit sad. And that family have to live in their car because they don't have any money, and the little boy is trying to go to school but doesn't want anyone to know he lives in his car…"

"OK, I'll just…try and catch Sookie then." I said and I walked back out the front door.

SPOV

I walked across the playground and towards Felicia's classroom, but for some reason, I turned back to look in the direction I'd just come from. Probably because I could see that woman, coming from the opposite direction, craning her neck to look at someone.

I could make a pretty informed guess as to who that someone might be.

I turned around and watched Eric stride into the building that held Amelia's classroom. Well, he was a bit bloody late. I wandered back down towards the building he'd gone into and saw him come back out again, frowning. I had to admit, that it was sometimes nice to appreciate Eric from a distance and on the sly. He did look nice in that suit.

Except I was grumpy with him, so I wasn't going to appreciate him too much.

He saw me and came striding over.

"Hello" he said.

"Hello. Where were you?"

"Um…I got held up."

"Did you?"

"Well…yeah. And I wasn't entirely sure of the time…" he looked at me, and he looked a bit guilty. I found that look easier to spot on him these days, now that I got the mini-versions from Sam and Tray whenever I found them surrounded by whatever catastrophe they'd managed to conjure up while my back was turned.

"Well you missed seeing Amelia's teacher" I said.

"Oh. Was it alright?"

"Yeah. It was what I expected." I waited for Eric to say something else but he didn't. "We'd better get to Felicia's class" I said.

"Mmm" Eric said, sizing me up. I decided to save him the trouble.

"I'm a bit grumpy with you" I said.

"I can tell" Eric said, sounding grumpy himself. The mutual grumpiness was probably how we missed Debbie approaching.

"Hello, Sookie. Eric" she said. "Have you been in?"

"Yes" Eric lied, and I glared at him.

"Mmm" Debbie mused. "I'm not expecting much. I'm not sure about Mrs Andrews, she just seems a bit…I don't know. But every time I ask her about Sebby's progress I get a lot of vague talk, when what I really want to know is whether his extra math tuition is helping or not. He seems to have a problem with fractions." She stopped, and stared at Eric expectantly.

"Well…it was what we expected" Eric said diplomatically. Demonstrating his ability to bullshit Debbie didn't make me any less grumpy with him though.

"I know" Debbie said. "But what can we do?" And then she looked down at my bump and frowned a bit, before attempting a smile. "I suppose I should say congratulations."

"Um…thank you" I said, not really sure how to take that one.

Debbie attempted another smile. "I suppose it will keep you both, uh, busy" she said, making it sound like that was the worst thing in the world. "I mean…well. This will be, what? The fifth?"

"Yep" I confirmed.

Debbie laughed, and patted my shoulder. "You're like a machine!" she trilled. "It's quite a feat considering you're not getting any younger. I mean, it's all I can do to keep up with what Sebby's up to from day to day, I couldn't imagine doing that for _five_."

"Mmm" Eric said. "You need to have a, um, a decent system in place. To keep track." He glanced sideways at me and I knew that was a dig at my calendar. Well it worked for me, because I bloody looked at the thing and didn't rely on someone else to tell me where I was meant to be all the time. Must be nice to be Eric, I thought.

I'm not sure Debbie thought it was nice to be Eric, though, and she certainly thought it sucked to be me. "It's such a large family for this day and age!" she said brightly. "You're such a trooper, Sookie!" I really wished I had a tea-towel handy so I could give her the same treatment I'd given Jason when he visited.

"Well, I'm just doing my bit" Eric said proudly, putting his arm around me. "You know, because it's so under-populated here."

"Under-populated?" Debbie asked.

"Uh-huh. There's only about four million people in a country the size of, what? Britain? Anyway, you needed more." I was intending to glare at Eric but I made the mistake of looking at Debbie first and she looked a bit taken aback. I guess Eric's confidence that we wanted him down here, sharing his gene pool was kind of unusual.

And also pretty funny in terms of the reaction it was getting from Debbie, who really didn't know how to respond. Damn him. I didn't want to smile. I was still being grumpy.

But I did smile. I directed it to Debbie though, and I think she was really freaked out by both Eric and I smiling at her quite so broadly. She probably thought we were part of some weird cult. Or secret breeding program. At any rate, she suddenly felt the need to get away.

"Oh" she said, looking at her watch. "I better go and um, check on the au pair. If I'm not around she doesn't know what to give Sebby for his dinner, and her cooking is a bit basic. But I'm training her up! Bye, Sookie. Eric." And with that Debbie flounced off.

"Au pair?" Eric asked.

"Yeah. Elena. I think she's Portuguese. She's seems nice enough, if a bit brow-beaten by Debbie."

"Oh" Eric said thoughtfully, as we started walking towards Felicia's classroom. "An au pair might be useful."

"For what exactly?"

"Keeping track of the kids" Eric said.

"I can keep track of the kids! It's you I can't keep track of, and I'm not sending in an au pair to do that for me." God, it was one thing having random mothers all staring at Eric, I couldn't live with it on a day to day basis in my own house.

We reached the right building and went in, and sat down side by side on the some of the seats put out for us. It was a bit of an effort to get myself into the chair which didn't seem fair because I was only just over half-way through this pregnancy.

"You OK?" Eric asked, as I 'oofed' as I sat down.

"Fine" I said, and the conversation lapsed. And the kicking started. They were all out to annoy me tonight. "Don't you start" I muttered, as another couple came out of the classroom.

Eric waited for them to leave and then turned to me. "What've I done now?" he asked.

"Not you" I said. "Her."

"And yet you look at me like it's still my fault" Eric said. Well, maybe it was. I was almost completely sure my half of the DNA didn't include unnecessary kicking.

Eric put a hand on my bump in order to find out what was going on. I decided to save him the trouble. "It's the waistband" I said.

"What?" Eric asked, poking me a bit more. Because I needed both of them having a go from different sides. If only I could figure out a way to remove myself from the middle of them, things would be better. The baby kicked Eric's hand, and then moved back to her original target.

"She doesn't like the waistbands of anything I wear, and the yoga pants really offend her. It's like I've invaded her space by daring to wear anything around my middle, she's a bit of a pain."

"Well that's not from me, I don't mind at all if you invade my space" Eric said, thoroughly invading my space by trying to actually stick his hand inside my yoga pants.

"Oi! Out of there" I said, slapping the back of Eric's hand. It didn't really work. I gave up and figured that maybe I'd just let the baby kick him and see if she had any more luck getting the point across. If waistbands annoyed her, surely her father was going to be the next target.

But before the baby could really see Eric off like I wanted her to, Kevin Pryor stuck his head out of the classroom door. "Oh, hi Eric" he said. Yeah, he was all about the dads who turned up to stuff. "Hi Sookie, come on in."

Eric stood up and held out his hand to me, and I wasn't too proud to take it. Those chairs were really low.

Eric held the classroom door open for me, and I went in first and managed to manoeuvre myself into another chair that seemed far too low in front of Kevin's desk. Well, it was one of his desks. He hadn't yet managed to find someone to take on Mrs Garfield's class and had stuck it out almost through the whole year. Felicia adored him, second only to Eric, I think, so it had worked out well for her.

We sat and listened as he explained how Felicia was doing and where she was in the class. She was doing OK, nothing outstanding, but nothing so bad that I felt compelled to immediately enrol her in six after-school extension programs like Sebastian got to enjoy each week. She'd shown fairly solid progress, and even her spelling was coming right. For one thing, she had the hang of spelling colour now.

"So, uh, she gets on OK?" I asked. "With everyone else in the class?"

Kevin looked a bit taken aback. "Oh yes" he said. "She's very popular."

"She is?" I asked. It wasn't that I couldn't see it…but I couldn't see it. She used to bite people.

"Uh-huh. She doesn't seem to have any problems relating to the boys or the girls in the class. She's very confident. I had her look after the new student when he arrived…you know, um, Charlie?"

"Oh, yeah. The one from England" I said, for Eric's benefit. He wasn't here doing mother help and had probably missed Charlie's arrival. When he finally started talking the kids discovered none of them could understand the Liverpudlian accent he came with. I assumed that Felicia liked him because he silently followed her instructions and filled the gap left by Finn when he'd finally got up the courage to go and play with the other boys, but I guess from another angle Felicia's adoption of Charlie was kind of useful.

"She was really great at looking after him. Maybe slightly, uh, enthusiastic when she thought some of the other boys were picking on him. But she's certainly not a push-over!" He chuckled, and Eric joined in. I had to admit that sounded like Felicia but I had no idea about the other stuff. I was used to her arguing with Amelia and trying to push her brothers around. I wasn't used to the version who was a popular and useful member of society. Even when we came for mother help mostly she was concerned with what Sam and Tray might be doing, and trying to make sure that they sat quietly and didn't annoy anyone important, like Felicia herself.

We chatted a bit more, about Felicia herself and how he was finding teaching kids again, and the plans for the end of year assembly, and then we left.

"Well, that was what I expected" Eric said.

"Really? I didn't expect half of that. I mean…I don't know. Sam's kind of the helpful one."

Eric shrugged. "Felicia's helpful too" he said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "I guess, although maybe you see that more than me. And she is confident; he had that right, although maybe not as confident as Amelia?"

"Mmm" Eric said. "It's just different. I think she doesn't make such a song and dance about it. She just does."

"Well, apparently Amelia demonstrated the hula for her class so there was definitely dancing" I said.

"Yeah, that sounds like her" Eric said.

"Nothing but confident" I added.

"I don't know. Sometimes it's more of a front than she wants you to know."

"Really?" I asked. "I think she's pretty confident. This is the kid who was introducing herself to checkout operators when she was barely three."

Eric shrugged. "But it's easier for her with grown-ups than the other kids. I think she worries a lot about what they think of her. Too much for her own good probably. Leesha doesn't care if she fits in, and so in a way, she always will. Amelia just needs to make sure she doesn't come off desperate, if the other kids sense that, she's doomed. At the moment she's OK, although going away rattled her a bit. I think she was hoping for a bigger welcome back than she got. But she'll cope."

"Wow, you're so much more use than Mrs Andrews" I told him.

"It's probably not that hard to achieve" Eric replied.

We turned and started walking back towards my car. "So" Eric asked. "Now that I've proven my usefulness, are you still grumpy with me?"

EPOV

I kind of knew I'd be in the shit when I got to school, but the question was how much. It wasn't something I could judge until I was actually there, and Sookie was kind of forthcoming in telling me she was grumpy with me. But it could have been worse, if she was saying that she was grumpy there was a good chance she'd get over it, if she just stomped off then I was really in fucking trouble.

So all I could do was wait it out, because by now I'd figured out if you just didn't spend too much time dwelling on what had happened, it would all blow over. It was just a matter of hanging around, and, in the meantime, not admitting to anything that might incriminate me.

The interview with Felicia's teacher was OK, and I was bummed I'd missed the one with Amelia's. For all Sookie was dismissive of the woman, I still kind of liked it when you turned up and they told you that your kids were pretty good, or, at least, they weren't out to kill anyone and mostly they did what they were supposed to. It was kind of a fascinating experience getting reports back on what all these people you were responsible for were doing during the day. You could find out all sorts of shit.

Although Sookie hadn't seemed impressed with what she'd got out of Amelia's teacher, which just made me wish that I'd been there all the more. But I couldn't change what had happened now. Possibly, though, I could still salvage the night.

I asked her if she was still grumpy with me, and she frowned, huffed, looked at the ground, looked kind of sideways and then finally said "Kind of, but I'll live, as long as you try not to do it again."

Well, I wasn't completely convinced all the blame lay on my doorstep, I could do a lot of things, but keeping track of Sookie's constant trickle of useful bits of information maybe wasn't one of them. There had to be a fucking better way of organising things.

But I wasn't going to bring that up now. Because I had an idea. "Are you hungry?" I asked Sookie.

"Yeah…" she said "I hope there's some pizza left over." She looked around. "Where's your car anyway?"

"I got blocked in by the pizza delivery guy, so I walked" I said. At the time, it had been highly inconvenient.

"So he didn't get tipped then?" Sookie asked grinning at me.

"I don't know" I said. "You left Kennedy in charge of all of that."

"Yeah…I don't think she would. Australians usually have more sense. About that anyway. What was everyone up to?"

"Oh, the usual. Kennedy and Amelia were watching something pretty horrific on the television."

"Oh, bugger. I bet Kennedy was letting her watch _Home and Away_." I shrugged. I couldn't answer that one.

We reached Sookie's car and she went to climb in the driver's seat. "Hop in, then. Let's go home" she said.

"Um…do you want to go and get something to eat?" I asked. Sookie looked thoughtful, and then guilty.

"I don't want to leave Kennedy there for too long" she said. "When the pizza gets eaten and _Home and Away_ finishes you know there's likely to be a coup."

"Yeah…but…it seems a shame to waste a babysitter" I reasoned. We hadn't been out by ourselves for what seemed like a very long time, just because it was hard to find someone who really wanted to take on four extra kids. Even our wedding anniversary this year had consisted of Thai takeout after the kids were in bed, followed by a DVD. Well, it would have been followed by a DVD, but Sookie jumped me instead.

"Mmm" Sookie said. "We'd have to be quick."

"I can be quick" I said, getting in the passenger seat.

"Um…we're eating, right? Not going to a motel or anything?" Sookie said, looking over at me as she started the engine.

"Well, that was what I thought, but I don't know, you're the insatiable one" I replied.

Sookie snorted. "You have _such_ a twisted view of things sometimes" she said, as she pulled out into the street. "So where do you want to go?"

"I don't know any motels around here" I said. "I was a homestay, remember?"

"Yeah, bit hard to forget that one. No, I meant to eat." Sookie slowed down to let someone pull into traffic and there was much mutual waving and nodding between Sookie and the other driver. She wasn't a bad driver, but with all the courtesy going on sometimes driving with Sookie was like being part of some permanent garden party with everyone being overly polite for the sake of form. It didn't exactly get us anywhere any faster.

"Um…well, what about Burger Fuel on Dominion Road?" It was one of the many burger places around here. It wasn't great but it had a place to sit, and it would be fast.

"OK" Sookie said, and she drove down the street and made the turn into Dominion Road, looking for somewhere to park. It wasn't easy when she was pretty much driving a barn. Eventually she found a spot on a side-street and we could get out of the car. "You know" Sookie said, pressing the button to lock the car doors. "We pretty much could have walked here quicker."

Yeah, I could have but Sookie was a little slower than normal these days. I wasn't going to say it though because that was the baby's fault, and by extension, my fault, although why I was solely responsible for everything she did wasn't entirely clear.

We walked up to Burger Fuel and Sookie kind of proved my point by walking about five paces behind me the whole way, and that was after I made an effort to go particularly slowly.

"You alright back there?" I asked, turning around and waiting.

"Oh, shut up. It's not my fault there's a hill here. And a friggin' baby there" she pointed to her stomach, and then grimaced.

"I take it Potato didn't like you blaming her for being left behind?"

"Yeah, well when she can walk on her own two legs she can try keeping up with you and see how well she does. You could try walking a bit slower too" Sookie grumbled. "And don't call her Potato; it's not even a cute nickname."

I decided not to answer the last few grumbles Sookie had made for fear of the whole 'I'm grumpy with you' mood re-surfacing. Because for a while there I'd suspected that sex would be off the agenda for tonight, but now, well. I had my hopes. If I fed her I was usually in with a good fucking chance. She was pretty much a sure thing.

We queued up at the counter and made our choices. "I suppose you want the kumara fries?" I asked Sookie, and she nodded enthusiastically. I could cope with roast kumara, or even mashed, but in fries it was just wrong. And then she told me what burger she wanted. It sounded disgusting. "Beetroot is one thing, but when you add mango and avocado I don't think it's even a burger anymore. I think you guys need to come up with a new name for it. Like a Kiwi dog's fucking breakfast or something."

Sookie just shrugged. "It's nice. I like that one. Plus I think the baby wants it."

We sat down at a free table to wait for our order. The place wasn't too busy at this time of night; I guess we were still eating pretty early although it felt kind of late. I was used to eating on kid-time these days.

"I thought the baby was supposed to be half-American" I said to Sookie. "Shouldn't you be getting the one with the pickles then? Like I am?"

Sookie pulled a face. "No. She has better taste than you. Trust me on that. Plus I already have one kid that can pass as American. Every time Sam says 'sure' I have to check that's actually my kid saying it."

"What's wrong with the way he says sure?" I asked.

"Well, it's all like 'sh-war', which is kind of odd. At least Tray doesn't do it. Yet, anyway. He still sticks to OK."

"Except he doesn't say 'OK', he sounds like you, Sookie. So it comes out as 'uh-kay' every fucking time." I figured if we were picking apart accents, her's was fair game. Because I really didn't think I had one.

"Exactly, so that's fine" Sookie said, with a big smile on her face. "You know the vowels they write down are just guidelines." She giggled and I was pretty sure that the earlier grumpiness was forgotten. There might be sex tonight after all.

SPOV

I felt really naughty being out with Eric when we were supposed to be going home to take over from Kennedy. I hoped she was coping. I also hoped we could come up with a good enough excuse to explain the delay. Maybe we just wouldn't say anything unless asked? Maybe I'd just leave that one up to Eric.

I'd been determined to be grumpy with him, but honestly, sometimes it wasn't worth the effort. He knew he'd stuffed up and I figured it wasn't life or death. It certainly wasn't worth missing on my burger for. "It's really good" I said, taking a big bite and waving it in front of Eric so he could shrink back. But that kind of worked in my favour. It was like the kumara fries, I was bound to keep more of them than I would have normal potato fries.

"You'll have to have my aioli" I said to Eric, handing it over. "I can't have it. It's very sad." It was sad; I loved dipping my fries in aioli.

"Very sad" Eric agreed, swooping up the little plastic pottle they served it in and placing it next to the one he'd nearly emptied. He didn't look sad though.

"So how's work?" I asked Eric, and he gave me a few details of what he was working on. It was quite nice just sitting and chatting for once, rather than trying to do big information dumps. And combined with the fact we were out on the sly, I felt kind of giddy and silly. A bit like I was drunk, even though my lemonade wasn't going to have that affect on me. It was more like being drunk on spending time with Eric. It was a nice feeling. We might have been having a lot of sex, but this was the closest I'd felt to him for a while.

And then we talked some more about the kids, it was kind of inevitable as they were such a big part of our lives. But it was easier to think of them a bit more fondly when they weren't actually right there, under our feet. Fighting with each other and making a mess.

"So how come you figured out what was going on with Amelia?" I asked Eric, after I made a swipe for his milkshake. He looked at me pointedly, but didn't say anything. And I just wanted a taste. To make up for the fact he got my aioli. Plus he took some of my fries when he ran out of his, although he moaned they weren't nearly as nice.

Eric just shrugged. "I don't know…I just paid attention I guess."

"Huh" I said. "I've been trying to figure it out for ages. I was sure it was the other girls being mean to her." Maybe I'd just been filtering it through my own experiences.

"Nope" Eric said. "She's just over-thinking it. It's more about what will happen than what's actually happened."

"You were paying attention" I said, and I stopped myself from saying 'for once'. I was having a nice time and I didn't want to spoil it. It was fun sitting here, playing hooky from the kids.

We finished up eating and reluctantly stood up to leave. "I'm going to pay for that" I said, patting my bump. "I shall now have to go home and guzzle half a bottle of Gaviscon to get rid of the heart-burn." I reached over and took Eric's hand, partially to stop him just striding off into the distance again, but also because I just wanted to hold his hand. Usually we had a child or two who wanted us to swing them in between us, so this was quite a nice opportunity.

"Do you think it's sad that in order to get a babysitter and dinner out we had to have the parent teacher interviews as well?" I asked Eric.

"No" he said. "Well…maybe. It worked out OK in the end though. We should probably do it more often."

"We should" I agreed.

"But of course, it depends on whether you let me out of the bedroom long enough." Eric gave an exaggerated sigh, because he was so put-upon. And not at all the person who'd been rubbing his hand up and down my thigh under the table.

"I keep telling you, that's you, not me. Honestly, the other night you dragged me off before you'd even made yourself coffee. You were so keen!"

"I'm just trying to keep you happy, Sookie. It's a full-time job."

"Yeah, right." He was exaggerating. Mostly he was exaggerating. OK, in that moment I thought that sex sounded like a really good end to the evening, but it wasn't all I thought about. Not like some people.

We reached the car and Eric offered to drive, in case my heart-burn was too bad. It wasn't that he didn't like my driving; at least, I hoped it wasn't, but he was always happier if he was in control. I handed over my keys and climbed in the passenger seat.

"I hope the kids were good for Kennedy" I said. "I'll be totally embarrassed if they've acted up."

"See this is where an au pair would be useful" Eric said, as he did a U-turn and muttered something under his breath, when the U-turn turned into a three-point turn. My car didn't have a great turning circle. Or any turning circle. Sometimes it was easier to drive around the block. "You could just pay an au pair, and not worry about how they were coping because you're paying them" he said.

"I think you just have to give them a place to stay" I told him. "One that isn't a futon in someone's office."

"They don't sleep with the baby?" Eric asked.

"No! What is this? Victorian England? We're not getting the baby staff for her nursery. Not even to pad out the skimpy population down here."

Eric chuckled. "Well it's true" he said. "The immigration policy here isn't exactly bringing a lot of people in."

"We're exclusive, and we like it that way. You're just lucky we let you stay, what with your weird accent and curious customs of giving money away to people you don't know."

Eric laughed outright at that. "Still" I conceded. "You did freak Debbie out enough to make her turn tail and run. Thank God. She's convinced I'm a nutter, but I think she thinks you're the reason I'm a nutter. Actually I'm not sure what's worse, being a nutter, or being easily led?"

Eric didn't offer an opinion on that. "It was probably your goofy look that scared her off, anyway" I said.

"What goofy look?" Eric said, as he turned into our road.

"It's a very cute goofy look. It's the one that says 'look what I did!' when you look at my bump."

"Well I did" Eric said, parking the car in the driveway. "I mean, you were there too, but I'm pretty sure without me you would have been a bit screwed. Or not screwed in fact."

"And we're back to sex again" I said, as I reached down to undo my seatbelt.

Eric leaned over and whispered in my ear "It's because you're insatiable" Eric said, before he got out of the other side of the car. "In your dirty mind" I replied, but he'd already gone.

Luckily the scene inside was relatively calm. Amelia wandered out and ambushed us in the hallway. "What did she say?" she demanded.

"Oh, well. What do you think Mrs Andrews would have said?" I asked.

Amelia pressed her lips together. "Well, that I'm really good at stuff? Did she say I'm really good at stuff?"

"Yeah, she did. She said you did a nice presentation to the class after the holiday."

"Yep, I did" Amelia agreed, and then she wandered off again.

Sam and Tray had managed to avoid all attempts to point them in the direction of the bathroom or the bed and were currently sitting under the table, giggling. I sent Eric in to scoop them out and drag them off and set about thanking Kennedy for minding everyone for me. "Sorry we took so long…they ran late, and, um, well. We had a quick bite to eat." It felt mean to not confess.

"Oh, no worries" Kennedy said. "You probably needed the time out."

"Yeah, we did" I agreed. "It was nice."

"OK, I'll pack Kassie up and take her home then. See if Danny's there yet." She picked up her bag and the baby capsule in which Kassidy was currently dozing, and started out the door. "Thanks" I said again. "I owe you."

I had the task of getting Amelia and Felicia into bed. Amelia was a bit hyped up from the joy of having had Kennedy around all night, plus she wanted to talk all about the interview. "So did Mrs Andrews say I was really good?" she asked for about the hundredth time.

"Yeah" I said. "She did."

"And Daddy got to hear that too?'

"Um…yeah, he did." Well he heard it from me, and I think he had a pretty good idea of what made Amelia tick anyway.

When the house was quiet I got Eric back again. Which was good because, while tidying up the kitchen and staring at the calendar, I'd had a thought.

"I had a thought" I said, as Eric walked in to join me.

"Are you sure you're up for the kitchen table?' Eric replied.

"Jeez, Eric. You really do have a one-track mind. No, I was thinking about your problem with the calendar."

"No, see I don't have a problem with my calendar, it works great. I just can't decipher the little squiggles on your calendar sometimes; they might as well be hieroglyphics."

"OK, well anyway. I'm still not going to send you emails and reminders for every single thing you need to know, but I will have a meeting with you once a week."

"A meeting?"

"Yeah, you bring your calendar, I bring mine and we do our best to share it all in one big block of information, rather than in dribs and drabs."

"Um. OK. That might work." Eric said. "So do we get to celebrate your idea now?"

"Yep, a totally one-track mind. I'm surprised you can hold a conversation at the moment."

"But we had a conversation earlier, Sookie. Now I want to do something else." Well he did have a point.

I turned to shut the dishwasher door and Eric grabbed me from behind, reaching around to put his hands on my abdomen, at which point the kicking started up. "See? She doesn't like anything touching me there."

"No, I think she likes me" Eric said.

"Well, I like you" I said, leaning back against him. "So maybe we can ignore her for a bit."

"She still needs a name" Eric mused. "I mean Potato's OK but…"

"It's not staying. Kennedy was trying to get me to name her Nadia, but I think Kennedy might be too fond of alliteration."

"Yeah…" Eric said, as his hands drifted up to grab my boobs. I got the feeling he was losing interest in the conversation portion of the evening.

"Bed then" I said, and Eric released his grip on me so I could start off towards our room. Once upon a time he might have picked me up and thrown me on the bed, but that wasn't happening in my condition. Instead he waited for me to wriggle out of my outer layer of clothing, watching probably more avidly than was warranted. I was pretty sure I was ungainly and awkward.

I lay back on the bed and Eric shed all of his clothes and climbed on the bed next to me, reaching around to help me take off my bra. When it was off, he bent down and took one nipple in his mouth, while I clutched the back of his head and pushed my chest up towards him. Yeah, I liked hanging out with Eric.

Eric took my knickers off, kind of disguising the fact that was awkward for me too. It wasn't easy being round. And my shape meant we were kind of limited on positions at the moment.

"What do you want?" Eric whispered into my ear as his hand worked between my legs.

"Um…I could be on top" I suggested.

"OK" Eric said eagerly, rolling onto his back.

I knelt between his knees and took his penis in my mouth, earning me a grunt and a "Fuck, Sookie". It was kind of awkward like this, but it was worth it for the pleasure I got from pleasuring Eric. Even after all this time I still got a kick out of the fact I could make him moan and writhe quite like that. I still felt kind of powerful.

After a while he said "Stop" kind of raggedly, so I did and I looked up at him. "Fuck" he said. "I regret saying that now." I laughed, and then I took the hands he offered to steady me as I straddled his hips and lowered myself down. That felt good.

It felt even better when I started to move. Eric let me set the pace and I rocked my pelvis, leaning forward onto his chest, and driving towards my own orgasm. It felt so good when it arrived. Probably it was the hormones thinking for me, but I had a moment of wondering why I ever bothered doing anything else.

And then Eric started thrusting up and I leant back against his raised thighs and enjoyed the sensations, until he used a thumb on my clit to tease another orgasm out of me. I came, and then Eric followed, both of us now panting and sweaty and feeling more relaxed.

As we lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, Eric stroked my stomach. "Well" he said. "That was a pretty good date night." The baby kicked his hand in annoyance.

"Two of us think so anyway" I said.

**A/N _Home and Away_ is (I think I mentioned once before) an Australian soap full of attractive young people with problems. Here it's shown in the late afternoon.**

**Liverpudlian refers of course to something from Liverpool, England. Like The Beatles. Or people with indecipherable accents. Although my English father would dispute the accents comment, because apparently you can't speak English with an accent if you are English. It's actually a dialect.**

**Kumara (Coo-mah-rah) is our native sweet potato (well, it was here before Europeans, and probably introduced by the Maori when they arrived here). Very versatile, and we'll use it for anything.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	107. Bonus Chapter: Not Part of the Plan

**A/N Well, it's been a very trying week and a half. It wasn't so much a stomach bug that hit our house, as a kind of 'flu virus with bonus vomiting, and then we all got a nice collection of chest and ear infections. In the middle of it, my husband skipped off to Las Vegas where he is currently esconced not tipping people and texting me to say his conference is boring. Yeah, I'm sympathetic.**

**But it meant that I kind of lost my ability to write there for a while. Not really sure it came back, but I've pushed through.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, I have enough medicines to start my own pharmacy though.**

SPOV

I figured that by baby number five I'd have it all figured out and actually having the baby would be a breeze. After all, I was pretty good at labour.

It's just that I'd forgotten that sometimes labour starts all on its own.

As the last two babies had been induced by Russell breaking my waters, I kind of had the mind-set that that might happen again. Certainly by the time I was 37 weeks pregnant I was more than ready for it to happen given I was, once again, the size of a small moon.

Although this time around, it didn't seem to be the baby's fault I was this big. She wasn't running ahead of the curve in size like her brothers had, and I had to blame them for stretching me out during the last two pregnancies. Of course it was far more likely to be my sudden addiction to Cadbury Crème Eggs, but I maybe wasn't 'fessing up to that one too publicly. No, I'd stick with the 'I'm this big due to the enormous babies I had before' defence.

But I'd finished work and I was slowly getting my act together. Very slowly. I had lots of lists and plans but I kept putting stuff off, like packing my bag. I had, however, managed to finally get around to washing some of the baby stuff. I had the house to myself for once, so it seemed a shame not to do something. It was just a bummer that it was raining so I was going to have to use the dryer. I considered doing it all the next day, but Sam and Tray were going to be home and they were distracting.

No, I thought, I'll do this today. Tomorrow I'll do my bag, after we all go and see Russell. That was going to be enough excitement for one day, although the boys weren't exactly thrilled the couple of times I'd taken them along to appointments. Mostly I felt sorry for those nice first-time parents that always seemed to clog up the waiting room, you could tell Sam and Tray's antics worried them a lot and it was too late for them to back out now. I sometimes wondered just how many only children I'd possibly been responsible for.

I was in the laundry, staring out the window at the weather and wondering about washing line versus dryer, when I started to get stomach pains. Well stomach cramps. The kind that signal only one thing.

Diarrhoea.

Bugger, I thought, as I speed-waddled to the loo. This can't be good. I wondered if it was going to be a repeat of the problems I'd had before I had Tray, although that had mainly been vomiting and had been only at night for some bizarre reason. During the day I'd just felt washed out and blah, until Eric had had a minor freak-out at Russell's office and Russell had induced me.

Oh well, I figured I'd just tell Russell about it the next day. And in the meantime hope it wasn't too bad.

When the attack was over, I hobbled off in search of chocolate, only someone had eaten all the Crème Eggs in the pantry, even the ones I'd stashed at the back behind the flour. That wasn't fair. I was pretty sure I hadn't eaten them _all_. I'd eaten a lot but…well, it was the baby anyway. It was fairly obvious she was the chocolate fiend.

I wandered down the hall to Eric's office and started poking in the drawers in case he had anything hidden away. I managed to come up with some of that peanut butter in chocolate stuff; the horribly expensive 'candy' he bought that was imported from the States. Officially, I didn't like it. Unofficially, or when I was alone, anyway, it was actually OK, if a little on the sweet side.

I realised I'd finished the packet. Bugger. I'd just blame the kids. One thing about having so many if you were just vague and said 'I think maybe a kid ate it…' it was very difficult for the blame to be attached to anyone specific.

Anyway, it was a kid. It was the baby. She was probably going to spend the next week or so packing on the pounds so it was harder to get her out. Because that's the sort of thing my children do to me.

And then it hit me again. The stomach cramps. Well that definitely wasn't fair, I didn't want to spend the whole day I had to myself running backwards and forwards to the loo.

I got up off the office chair and headed back to the bathroom, the main bathroom. Not the guest bathroom, even though it was closer and the only guest who ever really used it was Eric Lazy-bum Northman. Somehow the fact he wandered around going "What guests, Sookie? What guests are we keeping it clean for?" didn't really make me feel any better about having to clean three toilets on a regular basis.

And somehow when you'd been pregnant as many times as I had it was hopeless trying to pull out the 'but I'm pregnant' card. Because, after all, when was I not?

At least that was how I felt now. It had been a long 37 weeks, but luckily it was probably only a couple more. Which was good thing, because then I'd have time to pack my bag. And pick a name.

We had a list this time. An actual, proper, written down on a piece of paper, list. Only trouble was that no one was that attached to anything on the list. I still liked Estella, and was stupidly attached to Isabella, even though I knew that was not the choice to make if I didn't want her to be forever known by her last name in order to differentiate her from the multitude of other Isabellas out there. It was bad enough when Amelia got Amelia Chang.

Eric, however, liked (in no particular order) Olivia, Carissa, and, for something completely different, Elizabeth. They were all OK, but I wasn't exactly thrilled by any of them myself.

Amelia was still holding out for Lula, Felicia had decided that maybe Tiana, like the princess from Disney's _The_ _Princess and the Frog_ might be nice. She'd never been one for really loving the princess movies, but she'd met Tiana at Disneyland and been quite enthralled by her. Apparently, in Felicia's eyes, she was the most beautiful princess there was, and she was really nice to frogs, so that was another point in her favour.

Sam had picked a princess name too, he thought Fiona like the princess in _Shrek_ would be a good idea, although I wasn't entirely sure that Eric hadn't had a hand in that one too. Tray still had no clue what we were asking him and if you started talking about names he'd either list the names of everyone in the family, well, as close to the names as he could get, or yell "Tray!" really loudly, pleased he could say his own name now. So we kind of discounted his choices.

Kennedy was still insisting I should go with Nadia, or possibly Nadine. Judith said we should call the baby Julia, but then told me that no, actually she was going to bags that one herself because they didn't know what they were having so needed all the names they could think of. Also she had dibs on Hannah and Amanda and Melissa. Tara said that Tara was a perfectly acceptable name and in need of a resurgence and didn't I think it would stand out really nicely amongst all the Isabellas?

Jason tried to convince me that Jasona was the female version of his name, just like Erica was the female version of Eric's. And then he tried to guilt me into using it. I think I would have rather picked Potato, or Lula.

But none of the choices any of us had come up with were really thrilling me about now. Although having an upset stomach kind of put a dampener on my enthusiasm for most things. I really hoped this didn't drag on and on for the next few days.

When I'd finished in the bathroom, I hauled myself into the kitchen to tackle my next project which was 'operation fill the freezer', and I took the mince I'd been defrosting out of the microwave thinking I'd make lasagne. I got it into the frypan and started browning it, but then my stomach cramped again.

This was getting really boring.

I switched the element on the stove off, headed down to the bathroom and hoped that this would be the last attack. Only this time I got a bit of a shock. I was showing, in the least pleasant way possible. The 'show' you get when you're about to start labour and you lose the mucus plug in your cervix.

Well, that was a bummer. Because the baby couldn't come today. I wasn't ready. She was doing this to annoy me.

Although…show didn't mean she was necessarily coming today. It might be tomorrow. I could be OK yet.

I found a sanitary pad to use and went back to the kitchen again. I managed to finish the lasagne with only one more trip to the toilet. "See?" I said to the baby, as I took the lasagne out of the oven. "We're fine, and you don't have to come today because I'm pretty sure we could find something else fun to do. Well fun for you. I'm having a bit of a crappy time lugging you around. My hips hurt for one thing. But I'll forgive you. If you just stay put."

I waddled back to the laundry and started moving the wet washing from the washing machine to the dryer. The cramps were back, only they felt more like a period-pain back-ache now. I guess that was because of the show. Terrific. That was all I needed.

But the trips to the toilet seemed to be wearing off. I managed to get the stuff in the dryer before I had to go again, and then I thought I might have a sit down.

Except that when I sat down I realised I should probably be packing my bag, just in case this baby really had it in for me.

I hauled myself into the bedroom and really wished the backache would disappear somewhere else. The sore hips were bad enough; the backache was just making me miserable. I briefly contemplated getting in the shower to see if the warm water would help, but then I worried that something might happen while I was in there and I'd be stuck there.

Although…what could happen? Because I was pretty sure that I wasn't in full labour. That'd probably hit tomorrow. After I'd seen Russell. Maybe he'd do a sweep again and really get it going.

So for now, it was just a matter of putting up with a bit of backache, and I could do that. It wasn't even that bad. I'd had worse periods, I was sure of it.

So this couldn't be real labour. Just a kind of run-in.

Still, maybe I'd pack my bag, I thought.

Just in case.

Luckily, although I'd been putting off packing things into the actual bag, I had at least started gathering things in little piles on my dressing table. I had the new toiletries, shampoo, toothbrush, deodorant, body lotion, which I'd bought to take with me, and a pile of clean clothes and my nighties, including my poor old pink one that I always gave birth in.

I hadn't got my socks out though. I must remember to find those I thought, as I started putting everything else in my overnight bag. I found my travel cosmetic bag and my hairbrush in the ensuite and threw those in along with everything else. I think that was everything.

Socks, I thought. Don't forget the socks.

I was on my way to the sock drawer when I had another race to the toilet. There was still show happening, but nothing untoward.

I was fine.

But maybe I needed to finalise the kid's bags.

The problem with having four other kids was finding somewhere you could plonk them all at short notice. I had it all under control, but there was also the inevitable stuff that had to go with said kids when they left. And it was half-packed.

Although they wouldn't need much for just one night.

So I pulled out all the backpacks I had packed and checked they had nightwear, a change of clothes, spare clothes, underwear, books, toys and toothbrushes.

Of course I hadn't quite figured out how I was going to be sending the backpacks with the kids unless I actually did get induced and got to drop the kids off at the places they needed to be, or at least the bags earlier in the day.

I might have to worry about that tomorrow.

I checked the lists I had written to myself about what needed to be packed. Socks, I really needed to find my socks.

But I might have a sit-down first. The backache was starting to get to me. I was tempted to try to ring someone who might commiserate with me, but I couldn't think of anyone. Tara would tell me I'd done it to myself, Judith was far too close to her own due date to want to talk about labour, she'd always had really yucky labours, Kennedy seemed to be under the impression that I kept doing this because it was easy for me. In fact, everyone always thought it was easy for me, and it wasn't. Sure, I had my moments, but it was still damned hard work. No one quite got that.

Well, Lorena might understand. But I wasn't desperate enough to ring her. I'd last seen her on Christmas day when we'd gone around to Judith's in the afternoon so the kids could trash their house for a while after having a good go at trashing ours. As we'd all sat outside and Judith and I were doing a really good job of pretending we couldn't hear any of the fights going on between the kids, Lorena had looked me up and down and said "I never thought you'd have five children, Sookie. You left it so _late_. To start having them."

I wasn't quite sure what to say to that. I didn't exactly want to point out that the timing of when I had Amelia wasn't entirely down to me and I didn't think Lorena would take kindly to being reminded that Bill was also responsible for when we tried for the baby who turned out to be the little girl currently trying to explain to her cousins and siblings why the game had to go by her rules because she was the eldest.

So instead I just shrugged and said, "Well…I guess things changed…" and then I realised that was the wrong thing to say. "Um…but it worked out. For me" I stuttered out, trying to ignore Judith sitting next to me who was enjoying this. Well, she was enjoying Lorena giving me a hard time, because previously Lorena had been following Judith around asking many pointed questions about whether she was worried about the gap between Thomas and their new baby, and complaining that she didn't think barbecue food was really appropriate for Christmas day.

Lorena pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes and I was kind of thankful Portia wasn't here to come in and take her mother's side against me. Although she was supposed to turn up at some stage. So it was coming.

"Well" Lorena said, still looking at me "it is hard work, but it's very, very worth it." I wasn't sure what to say to that, and while I was pondering the problem, Lorena made a face and announced "It's too hot out here for me, I'm going inside. I don't know why you insist on doing these…outdoor things, Judith. Just once I'd like a nice roast dinner inside the house." And then she pushed herself off and delicately stepped over the toys strewn across the back garden on her way to the back door, pointedly ignoring Calvin asking "You alright, Lorena?" as she stalked past the barbecue where he was standing.

Judith sighed. "I've done it wrong again" she muttered, and I wasn't sure whether there wasn't a slight insinuation that maybe I'd done something right. I didn't think Lorena would actually go so far as to approve of anything I'd done, but Judith obviously thought I was coming out of this better than she was.

Maybe that came with the territory when you were the youngest of five. Maybe this baby would figure that out pretty soon and spend the rest of her life sighing every time I commented on something.

Maybe she should stop making me ache quite so damn much. Although, at least the kicking seemed to have quietened down. That was nice. She was really quite, um, feisty.

I'd thought that Sam had kicked a lot, and Tray probably had too, but it was mainly because they were engaged in a never-ending game of 'kick Daddy's hand' with Eric, who was all for encouraging them to kick.

This baby didn't need the encouragement, she kicked everything. She kicked the waistbands of my clothing, the other kids if they sat on my lap, Bob, which made him really go off me, if I got too near to the edge of the kitchen table she'd kick that. And if Eric's hand ventured into her space, she really went for him.

That just encouraged him more, and he'd giggle and get her to do it again and again, no matter if I was trying to tell him off or not.

I really wished the baby had a name so I could tell her off too. I hoped we came up with something soon. Ideally before she arrived. Tomorrow.

Only, although I felt tired and uncomfortable, I also felt a bit restless. I wasn't sure I could really sit still. I drifted into the living room and looked around, looking for something to do. I ended up standing in front of the cabinet that held the collection of baby pictures. I tried re-arranging them so there'd be a spot for a new one. Because in a few weeks, I'd need that spot.

The one I'd stolen of Eric was included in there now. I'd stuck it near the back after he'd grumped about it being on display, and stuck a picture of myself next to it in an attempt to mollify him. It didn't.

It took the kids a while to spot it, and it was Felicia who saw it first in the end. I'd been in there trying to dust when she'd picked up the photo and thrust it at me. "Which baby is this?" she demanded. "Tray or Sam?" I guess she thought that maybe someone was getting more than their fair share of display space.

"It's Daddy" I said. "When he was a baby."

"Really?" Felicia asked, incredulously. "But he's nudie!" She giggled a bit at that, although I don't know why. She was forever busting in on Eric when he was in the bathroom or in the shower to update him with what was going on in the house. But somehow naked, baby Eric was highly amusing.

"What's funny?" Amelia asked, walking into the room.

"Look!" It's a nudie baby Daddy!" Felicia said, showing her the photo.

"That's not Daddy, that's Tray" Amelia said, trying, and failing, to sound like the kindly older sister who knew her little sister couldn't help being a nit-wit.

"No, it's Daddy!" Felicia said, giggling again.

"It is" I agreed.

"Really?" Amelia asked. "Where'd that come from?"

"Um…the States. From when we visited Daddy's, um, father…" I said, hoping Amelia left it at that.

"He gave it to you?" Amelia asked. Yeah, that was a vain hope.

"Well…it belonged to Daddy, so kind of…" I said, not wanting to go into the specifics of that one. I looked at the photo. It did always make me smile, mainly because Eric looked so goofy in it. I'm not sure whether it was the weird Tin-Tin quiff he had going on, or the big smile on his face, like that was the best fur-rug in the world he could be lying on, but it was a really cute photo.

"And this one is you?" Amelia said, picking up my baby picture. It was the only posed, professional photo I had of myself until we got to the school ones from age 5, and it had been taken when I was a little older than Eric was in his photo, nearly two maybe. I was sitting up and looking kind of demure in my blue dress with the white daisy trim. I was also holding Blue Bear, who had been made for me from scraps of blue fur material by Gran. Only in the photo, he was pink, because they'd hand-coloured it so he would stand out against my dress. I'd always been a little bit sad about that.

"Yep, that's me" I agreed.

"You're not nudie" Felicia commented.

"Well…no" I said. There were plenty of pictures of me running around the back-garden or the beach with no clothes on. It was the '70's after all. But I wasn't putting any of those out on display.

"But you're older" Amelia said, still looking between the two photos. "Older than Daddy."

"Um…yeah" I said. It was hard keeping anything from Amelia these days. She liked to know everyone's personal details.

"You don't look older" Amelia said.

"They weren't taken at the same time" I pointed out. I didn't add that it was because Daddy wasn't born when my photo was taken.

"How much older?" Amelia asked. "How much older than Daddy are you?"

I sighed. "Six years" I said. Well, when I died she'd have access to my birth certificate so I guess there was no point trying to fudge it now.

Amelia put my photo back and looked thoughtful. Sam came wandering in to see what everyone was up to. When I'd last seen him, he and Tray had been playing in their room but I suspected that the room had now been trashed and Sam had abandoned Tray and the evidence in a bid to get himself an alibi.

"So…" Amelia said slowly, counting on her fingers. "When you were nine, like I am now, Daddy was three. Like Sam!" She pointed to Sam, who looked like he'd been caught red-handed. That made me really suspicious about the state of the bedroom. And why Tray was being so quiet.

"That's right? Eh, Mum?" Amelia asked, looking at me. Well, it was. And it was a kind of a sobering thought. "Yeah" I said. "It is."

"That's just weird" Amelia muttered. "Because Sam's so _little_!"

"No's I'm not!" Sam protested.

"You are" Amelia said, not too unkindly.

"Baby, baby, baby!" Felicia chanted. That was definitely meant to be unkind.

"Alright, just be nice to each other" I said.

Felicia glanced at me, and then showed the photo to Sam. "Look, it's Daddy. He's a baby. And nudie!" Sam didn't seem impressed, and just looked at me trying to figure out what his reaction should be. Amelia looked him up and down. "I wouldn't want to marry anyone Sam's age" she announced.

"I didn't marry someone's Sam's age" I grumbled, "I married Daddy. When he was all grown up."

Sam looked at me hopefully. "You's marrin' me?" he asked.

"I married Daddy, sweetheart" I said. "I can't marry you."

"Oh" Sam said sadly.

"I'm going to show Daddy his photo" Felicia said, and she ran off clutching it. I wasn't sure how Eric was going to react to that. Or whether I'd ever see the photo again.

Amelia wandered off as well, but not before she looked at me one more time. "You're a _lot_ older than Daddy" she said, and then she left. Sam just looked at me. "Can we 'ave af'ernoon tea?" he asked.

"Yeah, why not?" I said.

But obviously the photo had ended up back in its place because it was still here now, although definitely stuck at the back and half-hidden by the photo of me. I shuffled the photos around a bit more, but it wasn't exactly holding my interest. Or making the back-ache any better.

I decided that maybe I would have a lie-down rather than a sit-down. The diarrhoea seemed to have slowed, and if I could get a wheat-bag in the right position, maybe I could kill that backache too. And that'd be nice.

So I heated up my wheatbag and shuffled off to the bedroom, where, after much adjusting of the wheatbag and the pillows, which made Bob, who'd been in bed first, sit up and sigh at me before stalking off, I managed to get comfy, and doze off for a bit.

Not too long though, because the side I was lying on got sore and the pain in my hip started up again. I lay there, feeling a bit groggy and heard the far-off bing of the dryer finishing. I should really go and get the baby clothes out.

And look for my socks.

I got out of bed and shuffled off to the laundry, and bent down to start pulling the clothes out of the dryer, and my waters broke.

Well…that wasn't part of today's plan. Next on the list was some lunch, but I couldn't go and eat now, there was a puddle. How really annoying, I thought, as I reached into the cupboard to pull out a towel for the floor. I dropped it down and pushed it around with my feet. It'd have to do.

I was wet now too, and I'd have to change my clothes. I figured though that if I was going into the bedroom to change, I should take the baby clothes with me. At least the ones that were going in the bag.

So with an armful of small garments, I gingerly picked my way to the bedroom, trying to keep my thighs as far apart as possible. It felt really icky being this wet.

And of course I was still leaking.

I cleaned myself up, put some dry clothes on, and started folding baby clothes, putting some in a pile on the dresser and some in my bag. At least it wasn't too hot this time of year; I'd had a miserable summer being pregnant. I hadn't been pregnant through summer since I had Felicia, and even then, she'd at least been born while it was still warm. This baby I'd carried right through into autumn. It was a bit of a pain.

As was that new feeling gripping me. A really sharp, shocking pain that didn't make me run for the toilet like the cramps earlier in the morning, but which made me try to curl into a small ball on the bed.

Oh, crap. I was going to have to have to ring Eric.

I sat up and had a moment of panic, because I realised I also needed to get the kids sorted. For about thirty seconds I dithered over which to do first, and then I decided the kids. I'd make the calls about the kids.

So I rang Tara and told her that I needed her to collect the boys from daycare before she got her kids from school, and then I rang Halleigh and asked her to get the girls from school when she picked up Riley. I'd cut Judith out of the equation due to her own impending baby, but I still needed someone to look after all the kids' bags until their respective babysitters could pick them up.

And that was where Kennedy came in. The contractions weren't too close together at least, but, boy, were they painful. I was starting to panic that I was running out of time but I just wanted everything sorted and finalised before I rang Eric. I wanted that to be the last thing, so then I could relax, and wait for him.

Well, as much as you could relax in labour.

Kennedy's car was in her driveway when I looked out the window of Eric's office, so I grabbed up the four backpacks by their straps, and headed out the front door, where I had to stop and breathe for a minute as some more pain hit me. This was all just so annoying.

And it was still raining. Bugger. I ran through the rain and made it into Kennedy's porch and then had to stop and clutch my side before knocking. Kennedy appeared a minute later, holding Kassidy on her hip. Both of them looked incredibly put together and made me feel particularly bedraggled. But then I had run through the rain.

Plus I was in a labour. I think that was the first time I'd really grasped that thought. And now I was scared.

"Um…" I said to Kennedy, "Can you mind the kids' stuff until their official baby-sitters come to get it later on….oh, shit…" I clutched my side and doubled over.

"Sookie?" Kennedy said. "Are you actually in labour?" I looked up to see her staring at me, but it was a minute or so before I could answer. I thought they might be coming closer together now, which was a really scary, scary thought.

"Yeah" I said. "I guess I am…"

"And you're having contractions? Now?" Kennedy's voice sounded a bit high-pitched and tense.

"Yep, but they're nothing really. So um, just hold onto those for Halleigh and Tara and they'll be over later on…" And another one hit me, and I had to stop talking.

"Where's Eric?" Kennedy demanded, looking over my shoulder like he might materialise. Well, that wasn't going to happen. I waited for the contraction to pass and then shook my head. "I haven't called him yet. That's next on my list…see there was a plan, and she's not sticking to the plan, possibly because her father keeps calling her Potato and she's in a strop with him. So yeah…I'll ring when I get back home…"

"Um, you should call him now" Kennedy said, nodding. Kassidy looked at me kind of dismissively, and then went back to admiring one of her mother's earrings. It was a nice earring.

"No...well…I don't have my phone…" I said. "I'll ring when I get back home. OK, so thanks, and bye." I turned and started to walk back into the rain, but I stopped part-way down the front steps as I had another contraction.

"Sookie?" Kennedy called. "You alright?"

"Uh-huh" I said between clenched teeth, fighting the urge to just sit down where I was, rain and everything.

"I think you'd better come inside. I'll ring Eric" Kennedy said.

"No, I'm good" I said in a voice which didn't really sound like my own.

"I don't think you should be alone" Kennedy said, although she didn't exactly sound thrilled at the prospect of being my keeper.

"I'll be fine" I said. And in that moment, being alone sounded like quite a good idea. I even thought that maybe I wouldn't ring Eric just yet, although there was a logical part of my brain in there, somewhere, which vigorously protested that notion and knew we had to ring him.

Although we were probably fine on our own. For now.

"No, come back and I'll call him" Kennedy said, sounding a bit more desperate. I couldn't fathom what on earth her problem was. I was in labour, and I was fine.

"Fine!" I huffed, climbing the steps and walking in the house, where I kind of dripped on the mat. At least no one could tell if my sanitary pad had stopped working and I was still losing amniotic fluid.

Kennedy raced off and came back minus Kassidy but with a towel and her phone. "Dry off" she said, handing me the towel, and it seemed like a good idea, but a bloody contraction came along and I sat on the mat instead. "Um…OK" Kennedy said. "I'll just ring Eric."

"Mmm-hmm" I agreed, wondering if I should wait in Kennedy's guest bathroom. I liked her bathroom. But then the phone got thrust into my hand. Oh, I had to tell him. Terrific.

Chicken, I thought, looking at Kennedy.

"Yes?" Eric said, when he finally answered. I didn't know why he was annoyed with me either. I was in labour.

"Baby's coming" I said. "Today."

"But…your appointment's tomorrow" Eric said, sounding annoyed, and also slightly distorted. He was driving. I hoped he wasn't too far away.

"Yeah…but _she_ didn't make an appointment, _she's _just bloody going to gatecrash my day, because _she's _like her father. And she doesn't have a name!" And then to my eternal shame I burst into tears. I didn't want to give birth to a baby that didn't have a name. I wanted to do this tomorrow, when she'd have one. We could pick it tonight, if I could just have 24 more hours everything would be so much better, but she wasn't going to listen to me. No one ever bloody listened to me.

And then I had another contraction and I even had to stop crying. I could hear Eric saying "Sookie? Sookie. Sookie!" and there wasn't anything I could do until it was over.

"Contraction" I said in reply.

"There's contractions?" Eric asked, sounding bewildered now rather than annoyed. I guessed in his experience all contractions happened in the carefully controlled environment of the hospital with Russell supervising. Oh God, I hadn't rung Russell either.

"Yeah" I said.

"How, um…how close?" Eric asked.

"I don't know" I whispered. I'd been trying not to think about that. "But my waters broke earlier…so I guess it's happening."

"Are you at home?" he asked after a beat.

"Kennedy's"

"OK, stay there. I'm on my way."

"Call Russell…" I said, and I hoped he heard me as the line went dead, and I had to pant through another contraction, which made Kennedy look worried, as she took the phone off me.

"Is he coming?" she asked, and I nodded yes in reply. But I had no idea how long he'd be or where he was. There wasn't much I could do but wait for him.

"I hated this part" she said conversationally, obvious feeling a bit more secure now she knew someone was coming to take me off her hands. "But then I had to have those drugs to induce me, and I think they stuffed them up, because I got contraction on top of contraction until I got my epidural."

"Mmm" I said. The contraction had stopped, but I didn't feel much like conversation. Kennedy stayed and watched me for a moment, like I might explode, and then Kassidy wailed in the background, and she said "Hang on for a minute" and took off, leaving me alone.

This was really not how I'd planned for today to go at all.

EPOV

My plans for the day had originally included a trip to see a client in Albany, just after lunch. I'd figured after that I could get home early, which would help Sookie out because she was getting pretty close to having the baby. I figured I wouldn't be surprised if Russell decided to induce her when she went to see him the next day, and certainly Sookie didn't look like she'd object to that idea. It had been a long summer for her carrying around another person, a person who Sookie liked to describe as 'stroppy' every time the baby initiated one her marathon kicking sessions.

Sookie liked to say I provoked her, but honestly, I think it was mostly the baby. And I also think I knew where that part of her personality might have come from. But I wasn't about to say anything.

If I'd learnt anything by now it was to avoid antagonising the pregnant lady as much as possible. Because Sookie thought that most things had it in for her, the heat, the baby, the fact it was Easter and there was far too much chocolate available. Never enough that she didn't also eat my candy, but so much that the baby got a taste for it and Sookie had to eat it at every opportunity.

So the last couple of weeks had been a countdown, and they'd felt like a countdown to something pretty final. It was pretty fucking obvious that this was the last baby we'd have, and, as sad as that was in a way, I could see why it had to be the case.

I'd miss the sex for one thing. I didn't know what it was about pregnancy sex, but it was kind of hot…and, well, special. I think because Sookie was not only really fucking luscious, but also kind of vulnerable. There was a lot of trust there. And I liked that she trusted me.

I liked a lot of things about Sookie of course, and mostly I just wished I could speed time up for her and get the baby out, although that just brought a whole other set of problems. For one thing, she didn't have a name. I still liked to call her Potato occasionally, but I could see the joke was wearing thin and Sookie was fond of snapping "She needs a real name Eric!" and possibly would have kicked me as well, but she wasn't very stable on one leg at the moment so I was safe on that front.

Still, I could have done without time fucking speeding up so much that now I was making a dash for home in the pouring fucking rain because, from the sound of it, Sookie was about to have the baby.

I pulled up into the driveway and then ran across to Kennedy and Danny's house. Kennedy must have seen me coming, because she opened the front door just as I got there. "Thank goodness you're here" she said, sounding a little bit scared. Sookie was just inside the door, slumped against the wall, and looking pretty pale and…wet. Fuck.

"Um…can you walk?" I asked her.

"Of course I can" Sookie said. "But not right now. I'll move in a minute." And then she went quiet and clenched her teeth.

I looked at Kennedy who seemed to be pleading at me with her eyes to take Sookie somewhere else, and I wasn't sure what to do. Mostly, I didn't want to piss Sookie off at this point in time, she was stuck with the shitty job of getting the baby out.

But maybe she wouldn't really want to have the baby at Kennedy's house. For one thing, I didn't think Russell would be showing up any time soon. "Um, what did Russell say?" I asked Sookie.

"What?" she asked through clenched teeth.

"When you called him?" I asked.

"You were ringing him. I asked you" Sookie said, very slowly, enunciating each word carefully, but not making eye contact.

"Um…I'll just call him now" I said, as I realised my phone was in the car. "I'll be right back."

Sookie didn't look up, but Kennedy watched me leave and didn't look happy. The rain at least was easing up now, so hopefully that would make the traffic going towards the hospital not so bad. I could hope.

I took the phone back to Sookie and tried to get enough information out of her for Russell's answering service. I couldn't figure out how far apart the contractions were, but they looked close. The woman on the other end said she'd get hold of Russell and he'd meet us there. Now I just had to get Sookie to leave Kennedy's house.

"OK. Thanks, Kennedy. We'd better go to the hospital now."

"No" Sookie said. "I'm OK for the moment. We can wait a bit."

"No, we can't" I said. "Russell's waiting for us." Well, he would be if we hung around here for too much longer. Not to mention I wasn't sure what stains Kennedy would find acceptable on her hall rug.

Sookie curled in on herself, and went silent. "Get my bag" she said in the end. "Get my bag from our house and then we'll get in the car."

"Where is it?" I asked.

"Bed. Our bed."

I didn't bother even looking at Kennedy this time, I knew what expression she'd be sporting, but I had to deal with things one step at a time. Sookie seemed a bit on the edge and I didn't want to rush her into anything. Well, I did really. I really fucking wanted her to see that the time for rushing was now, but trying to force it wasn't going to work.

Once I had the bag in the car I went back to Kennedy's. "OK, it's time to go now" I said to Sookie.

"I know!" she shouted at me. "Stop rushing me!" Considering I had deliberately not been trying to rush her, I thought that was a bit fucking low, but I guess part of not upsetting the pregnant lady, meant biting my tongue.

"Here" I said, holding out my hand to pull her off the floor. She glared at me a bit more, and then she reached over and took my hand and let me pull her to her to feet.

"Thanks, Kennedy" I said again. "We'll leave you in peace."

"Oh, no problem. Just let me know how it goes, and what you call her. Good luck, Sookie!"

Sookie didn't say anything until we got into the car, and then she muttered something about the baby still needed a name. Well, she did, but it could wait until after she got here. Right now, we just needed to get to the hospital.

SPOV

I didn't want to go to the hospital. It seemed like a lot of effort right at the moment, but Eric was annoyingly insistent about the whole thing and, after a while, I couldn't take him standing around acting all panicky. He really was such a worry-wort sometimes. Like Kennedy, who'd been stressed since I arrived, as though I was going to pop a baby out in her hallway.

So I got in Eric's car and let him drive us off to the hospital. There wasn't much conversation; the stupid contractions kept stopping me from stringing too many words together. And every time I looked at Eric he was just staring at the road.

"You got my bag, right?" I asked him, when we were stopped at the roundabout near the prison.

"Yep" Eric confirmed, watching the traffic and waiting for a gap.

I suddenly realised something. "I forgot my socks" I whispered.

"You'll be fine" Eric said, not looking at me, but patting my thigh.

"No I won't" I cried, "I want my socks! My feet will be cold!" And then some tears started to fall again. It really wasn't my day.

Eric moved around the roundabout and then turned to me. "We'll find something" he said. "You can have my socks."

"But…they're too big."

"Just…don't worry now" Eric sounded exasperated, and I gave up. I really, really, really wished I'd remembered those socks.

We were almost to the hospital when a contraction hit that lifted me slightly out of my seat. This wasn't good. The next one was the same. "I think I need to push" I whispered.

"No" Eric said, very quickly and very, very firmly. "No, you don't."

"OK" I agreed. He was probably right. I was probably imagining the pushing feelings. I wasn't even at the hospital yet, so there wasn't anything I could do after all. But we'd be there soon.

EPOV

I couldn't get to the hospital fucking fast enough. Part-way there Sookie announced she needed to push. Fuck. Why, why had she not thought this through earlier when she was crouched on Kennedy's floor telling me she was really fucking OK? Because she wasn't OK. She needed to push, and we weren't at the hospital, and this wasn't how these things were supposed to happen. I was fucked if I was delivering the baby in a car on the side of the road.

We made it to the hospital and I parked in front. They'd possibly tow the car, but fuck it. There wasn't a choice. I grabbed Sookie's bag and went around to open her door. "Get out" I said to her.

"Why are you so grumpy?" she grumbled.

"I'm not…just…" I took a deep breath. "Russell will be waiting."

I steered Sookie inside the doors and tried to catch the eye of the guy on the front desk. He gave me a nod and I hoped the car was safe for now. We walked to the elevators and I hit the over-ride button that would take us straight up to the delivery ward. If the fucking elevator ever came.

"Do you still need to push?" I asked Sookie.

"What?" she asked.

"Do you need to push?"

"Maybe" she said quietly.

Fuck, this wasn't good.

The elevator arrived and I had to tell some complete fucking moron who tried to get on with us that we were going straight up to delivery. He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I really wanted to just push him out, but Sookie had watched one husband be escorted out of the maternity ward, I didn't think she wanted me to go too.

She was busy leaning against the wall of the elevator anyway and didn't seem particularly interested in what was going on. Eventually the guy stepped out and we could move off. The whole exchange probably only took thirty seconds, but it might as well have been a fucking hour.

And when the elevator arrived at the top I still had to get Sookie along to the reception desk and she walking at a snail's pace now. When we got to the desk it took a moment to get someone's attention. Sookie seemed remarkably calm now, but I certainly fucking wasn't. We needed to get Sookie into a delivery room. We needed Russell. But no one else seemed to be that concerned.

When a nurse finally approached us she asked who I had with me. "Sookie" I said. "Stackhouse. She needs to push."

"Um…does she?" the nurse said, looking past me to Sookie.

"Yes, she does." The nurse looked a bit sceptical, but, thank fuck, Russell showed up at that point clutching a cup of coffee.

"So it's time, is it?" he said.

"She needs to push" I said to him, hoping like fuck he'd listen to me. He took a closer look at Sookie who was bent over and panting.

"OK, we need a room" he said to the nurse.

The next bit was a blur. They gave Russell a room number and we walked Sookie in there, got her on the table and I pulled off her pants and underwear. I expected her to ask about that nightgown she liked to wear, but she didn't. She'd gone to that place she went when the baby was coming, and it was scary, but I was kind of used to it now. She'd come back. The baby would be here soon and then it would all be OK.

And from the sound of it, the baby would be here very soon. "Yeah" Russell said. "She's crowning. OK, Sookie, push with the contractions."

I stood beside the bed and held Sookie's hand and watched her abdomen ripple as the baby moved down and out. They'd attached a monitor to her to hear the baby's heartbeat and a nurse was watching that. "It's OK" she said to Russell.

"The baby's nice and happy" Russell said. "So let's just get her out, OK. Nice big push."

Sookie screwed up her face and pushed, letting out a breath only at the end. She lay there with her eyes closed panting.

"Nearly there" Russell said. "And another one."

Sookie pushed again. And again, And again. "Here's the head" Russell said.

"Unff" Sookie said.

"And one last push" Russell added, before I saw him pulling the baby out. She let out a high-pitched wail and kind of shook her tiny fist at Russell. She was beautiful, but she was maybe just a little bit pissed about the whole thing.

"Hi" I said, as Russell passed her up to Sookie. Sookie slowly opened her eyes and looked at the baby.

"This wasn't the plan" Sookie said to her. "We weren't going to do this today. I think I left the lasagne on the bench. Bob will eat it."

"Well done" I said to Sookie, kissing her forehead. It was amazing to watch, every fucking time. I was just fucking glad we'd got here, and delivering the baby had actually been someone else's problem, because fuck, it wasn't a job I wanted.

Russell was busy with, well, whatever the fuck he had to do now with the placenta and Sookie and I just sat and looked at her. She was lovely. So very, very lovely. They both were. "We need to get you a name" Sookie said.

"Yeah" I agreed. It didn't seem too important though. We had time.

I heard Russell say "I think that's it" and then he handed me the scissors so I could cut the cord. The nurse came over to take the baby away to check her over, and I followed to where they were weighing her. I was better at converting the kilos these days. "About 8 pound four" I said to Sookie.

"Uh-huh" she said, but she seemed kind of listless, and a bit pale. I guess the shock of the quick birth was setting in. I wondered if she'd get the shakes again.

Russell took over checking the baby out and working out her Apgar score. She passed. I kind of knew she would. No one who'd been that determined to enter the world would have anything wrong with them, surely.

I didn't really register it when a nurse said something about blood pressure. And I probably should have paid more attention when Russell went back to Sookie's bed and said "Shit" quietly to himself. And then he said something that really did worry the fuck out of me. "I'm not happy about that blood loss, where's the placenta?"

The nurse brought the bucket, or whatever it was, that held the placenta back to Russell and he pulled it out and examined the edges carefully. I just stood there, holding the baby. The baby who should really have a fucking name.

"Yeah" Russell said, half to himself. "That's where it is." He dumped the placenta back in the bucket and lent over to talk to Sookie. "Sookie" he said. "Sookie". She made a noise, but didn't really respond.

What the fuck was wrong with Sookie?

"OK" Russell said to the nurse. "We need to go into theatre. Phone them and say we're on our way." Russell straightened up and came over to me. "I think some of the placenta got left behind" Russell said to me. "Where it's still attached to the uterus, it's causing a bleed. Her cervix is closing up because of the injection I gave her before, so I have to operate. I just need you to sign…fuck."

I think that was the first time I ever heard Russell curse. I've never heard anything fucking scarier.

A nurse I hadn't seen before turned up with something for me to sign and then Sookie was wheeled out. I didn't even say goodbye, and it probably wouldn't have mattered because she looked barely conscious.

I wished I'd told her I loved her. I wished I'd told her she'd be OK and she'd be back with us soon, but I didn't know that and I wasn't sure it was so.

I realised I should have told Russell that he had to make sure her uterus was OK, because I was pretty fucking sure she'd hate it if she lost it. But maybe she'd hate being dead more. I'd fucking hate it if she was dead.

No one really died from having a baby anymore, did they?

I wasn't sure what to do next so I just stood there, holding the baby, who was making mewling noises. I tried bouncing her in my arms to comfort her, but she wasn't buying it. I wasn't feeling particularly comforted either. What would really comfort me about now was having Sookie back.

I wondered how long she'd be.

Eventually another nurse showed up. "How is she?" she asked, coming to look at the baby, who just stared at the nurse in confusion.

"I think she's hungry" I said.

"Oh…um. I'll bring you some formula, if you like…" she offered.

"I think my wife would want to feed her" I said automatically. Then I realised Sookie might be gone for a while and the baby would need something. "I guess that'd be OK" I said.

The nurse arrived back a while later with some formula and what looked like a little shot glass. "If you cup-feed her she won't get confused" the nurse said, and she helped me get the baby propped up and put the cup to her lips.

"Can she use a cup?" I asked. I thought it seemed a bit advanced.

"Oh yes" the nurse said. "It's automatic." And sure enough it was. "You're very clever" I whispered to the baby, but the food seemed more interesting than I was in that moment and I'm not sure she really cared what I thought.

When the baby gave up drinking the nurse and I managed to find her some clothes in the Sookie's bag, and we dressed her and tidied her up. It felt fucking good to be actually doing something, and not thinking about where Sookie was, and whether she was OK.

Russell was a good doctor; he wouldn't let anything happen to her. I was sure of it.

I fucking hoped so anyway.

But when the baby was dressed and all wrapped up in a blanket, the nurse just patted me on the shoulder and said "Don't worry. She'll be back soon." And then she left me. Well, me and the baby.

I wished she had a name because I really wanted to talk to her and it seemed wrong to keep calling her Potato now. I wanted to tell her about her mother, and how awesome she was and how she shouldn't worry, because she'd be back soon and there'd be better food than the stuff she just had, but I didn't know how. I was scared that if I mentioned Sookie's name I'd break because I really, really just fucking wanted her back now.

I looked at the bassinet and wondered if I should put the baby in there so she could rest, but I didn't want her to think she was all alone in the world. Fuck knows, I felt more alone than I ever had in my life about now.

So instead I sat down in the chair and I just held her. It was kind of comforting. For me, anyway. I hoped it helped her.

"It's OK" I said out loud. "It's all going to be OK." But I wasn't sure that I was. I was starting to feel a bit panicked, and I wondered how long it was going to take. It was just placenta, that couldn't be that difficult to get out?

And if Sookie didn't come back, then it was just me. It was just me and five kids and one of them wasn't even an hour old and would never get to know her mother. And everything, every fucking thing they needed would be on me, forever. It was the fucking scariest thought I'd ever had in my life. Because I couldn't do it without Sookie, that was never part of the plan. The plan was we did this as a team, the plan was the kids had two parents, the plan was that Sookie didn't fucking leave me.

I looked at the baby and she'd fallen asleep. I sat there and tried to just concentrate on being calm. It would be OK, of course it would.

And then something occurred to me. I wondered if my dad had been this scared. It was hard to imagine, but maybe when my mother had left he'd felt this way, wondered if he could manage bringing me up, by himself?

I thought about him, and about the effort he'd actually put in to that exercise. I doubted he'd been scared. Pissed off and angry was more his status quo.

No, my dad was a fucking selfish bastard and I doubt he'd wasted more than a minute thinking about whether he was going to be able to look after me properly. He was just angry. Angry that she left him. That she left us.

But Sookie wouldn't leave me. Not willingly. I fucking hoped she wouldn't anyway. And after all these years I couldn't understand why my mother had. Now that I had kids myself I really couldn't understand it, I couldn't imagine just walking away. I couldn't.

And then all of a sudden I could. The fear that Sookie was going to leave me and I was going to have to do this on my own was so thick that it was almost palpable. And that fear made me want to run. Run from everyone, my kids included.

She'd been scared. And she'd run. And I hated the fact that she wasn't strong enough to fight her fear, hated that she'd left me, hated that she'd left me with him and never once came back to check on me.

But maybe I didn't hate her anymore.

I looked down at the baby, who was still asleep. At least she wasn't alone. She'd never be alone. "We should find you a name" I said to her. "I wonder if your Mom packed the list. She likes lists. I wonder if you'll like lists."

SPOV

I slowly became aware of the movement in the room around me. I heard a voice say "She's awake" and someone, a nurse I think, came over and took a tube out of my nose, which made me grateful as I found it highly annoying. It took me a minute to think about what else was troubling me.

"The baby?" I asked. "Where's the baby?"

"With your husband" the nurse said. "We'll take you back to that room in a minute." I closed my eyes and tried not to worry, but I really wished they'd hurry up and move me. I couldn't even remember what this baby looked like, if I tried to pull up an image I was sure it was one of the other babies I'd had. Everything about the birth was kind of fuzzy, and the time after that was even fuzzier. I wasn't really sure how long I'd been with her before they'd taken me away.

Russell appeared at my bedside and I squinted at him. "You had some placenta left behind" he said. "But we've got it all out now and the bleeding's stopped, so you'll be fine. You'll just need to stay here for a few days so we can monitor you."

"OK" I said, hoping that if I kept it brief they would just move along to getting me back to Eric and the baby, who I really, really wanted to name.

Russell left and the nurse came back, and then I felt them wheeling the bed I was in. I still felt groggy, so I closed my eyes and just waited. I felt a bit sick as well. I hoped that went soon.

When I opened my eyes again, Eric was leaning over me. Thank God for that. Although, he looked kind of strained, and possibly like he'd been crying. I felt bad about that.

"I'm OK" I said.

"I know" Eric said, leaning over to brush my cheek. "They said the operation went well."

"Is she OK?" I asked, looking at the bundle Eric was supporting with his other arm.

"She's perfect" Eric assured me, and then he laid her down next to me in bed.

"Yeah" I said. "She is. But she'd be more perfect with a name. Did you figure out who she is?"

Eric nodded. "Pamela" he said. "I think she's Pamela."

I tried to remember if that had been on the list. I didn't think it had been. I didn't hate it though, and I still felt kind of guilty for being wheeled out of the delivery suite and into surgery and leaving the pair of them to fend for themselves. "Well" I said. "It beats Potato."

"Well, that was my plan" Eric said. "To come up with something that would."

"That's a good plan" I said. "Best one anyone's had all day."

**Thanks for reading!**


	108. Bonus Chapter: The Voices

**A/N Yeah, so the toddler started daycare this week. She loved it, although the teachers all commented on how many words she knows. She likes to show off. Sadly after two days there she contracted a stomach bug and I have spent the day cleaning up pools of vomit. The joy!**

**Tomorrow though is the start of the Rugby World Cup. New Zealand is hosting it and many of the games, including the opening ceremony and the first game (NZ vs Tonga) are being held at Eden Park in Mt Eden, so there's a lot of activity here. And I have a very excited daughter who is a bit vague on the whole rules of rugby thing, but is convinced that the All Blacks are going to win (because her friend's dad said so). Although maybe New Zealand will do well too. She hasn't quite figured out that the All Blacks _are_ the New Zealand team. **

**Disclaimer: Not my characters.**

SPOV

It was the constant voices that I couldn't shut out that were starting to get to me. Everywhere I went they followed me, and as much as I'd like to ignore them, I simply couldn't.

No one ever tells you that's what it's like when you're Mum.

Even when I thought I might get to be alone, I just didn't. Like when I was in the laundry folding washing. It was kind of a boring activity, but could be quite relaxing. If, that is, I got to be by myself and just let my mind wander.

But there was no chance of that when Amelia followed me in there and started telling me everything that was going on in her life. "So then" Amelia continued, although I wasn't sure there'd actually been a beginning as such, she seemed to have been part-way through this whole speech when she arrived in the room with me. "What happened was that Chloe wanted to hang out with us at lunchtime, but Em said no, and I thought that was kind of mean, but I didn't want to tell Em that she was being mean, because that would just be mean and I didn't want to be mean. I'm not mean am I?"

"No" I said, "You're not mean." Mostly she was only mean to her siblings, but I figured that came with the territory. Mostly Jason was only mean to me and I'd coped.

"No, well…so I wasn't sure if it was OK then, to hang out with Em, and not Chloe, but Chloe was sitting with Sienna when I looked over, and I think she was OK…"

Amelia's story was interrupted by the sound of Felicia shouting in the kitchen "No! Sam! You can't have one!" And then Sam shouted something, but I couldn't make out what it was, although it sounded fairly indignant. Tray yelled "You's not bossin' us!" and I wondered if I should go and figure out what they were up to, except that Felicia burst into the laundry to tell me what the fuss was about instead. "Mum!" she said. "Mum, Sam was trying to take one of the biscuits and I said he couldn't…"

"Well, they're still a bit hot…" I said. The chocolate chip biscuits I'd made earlier were still cooling. Unfortunately leaving them out just tempted everyone.

"I said that!" Felicia yelled, and I wasn't quite sure why she felt the need to yell at me.

"Don't yell!" Amelia yelled at Felicia, echoing my thoughts, but maybe not delivering the message in the best way possible.

"Shut up!" Felicia yelled back.

"I wasn't taking one, I was JUST LOOKING!" Sam yelled, having come into the laundry to defend his reputation.

"I want a BISCUIT!" Tray yelled, from the kitchen where he still was. He was pretty loud though, so it wasn't difficult to hear him, even over the sound of his brother and sisters. I wondered where Eric was. He'd been around in the morning, but somehow on Sunday afternoons he liked to hide in his office and pretend to work. I say pretend, because usually Pam followed him in there and I think that put a serious dent in how much work he actually got done as she repeatedly made him pretend to drink tea out of her little purple teacups and talked at him incessantly.

I guess it was only fair that at least one of the kids wanted to talk to Eric, rather than to me, but for a long time it had been like they had their own secret language. Pam seemed to have grasped all of the basics of conversation, there was punctuation and inflection and obvious pauses between sentences. She just hadn't had any actual words. You could hear her chatting away as she sat on the floor next to Eric and she'd say something like "Ah-dah bah dah do. Da da bah? Oh, duh buh dose. Doo-dah!" And then you'd hear Eric say "Doo-dah indeed, Pam. It's clearly doo-dah."

But she was definitely starting to pick up more actual words now, which I think made Eric a bit sad, because he couldn't just make up her side of the conversation. At 21 months though, she was still a bit confused about the correct names for a lot of things, and you just had to take a stab at what she meant.

"You can't eat the biscuits yet" I told the assembled kids, and then I realised that Tray might not have heard that, so I squeezed through the throng to step into the kitchen. "No biscuits" I repeated.

"Not fair!" Tray complained.

"Soon" I told him. "They'll be ready soon."

"I said that!" Felicia complained, coming back into the kitchen to join me.

"I know you did…but just, you know. Don't shout at your brothers" I tried.

"They don't listen!" Felicia yelled.

"I don't have to listen to you!" Sam yelled back at Felicia. Since he'd started school himself, he'd been balking all her attempts to be in charge of him and Felicia was upset totally by the change to the natural order of the world. It wouldn't have done any good to try to explain that Amelia had had exactly the same problem when she'd started school herself.

"I'm older!" Felicia told Sam.

"Well, I'm the oldest, _actually_" Amelia said, having wandered in to see what was happening. "So you should listen to me."

"You're not the boss of me!" Felicia said, dismissively.

"Well, then. Maybe you're not the boss of Sam" I tried, but Felicia pulled a face.

"But, Mum! I was JUST TELLING HIM. You said he couldn't have a biscuit, and I was just telling him that. I'm allowed to JUST TELL HIM!" Felicia was getting quite worked up.

"Well, I was talking to Mum, and you interrupted me" Amelia added. "Interrupting's rude."

"But it was IMPORTANT! Sam was trying to take a biscuit, and I had to tell her" Felicia said, eyeballing Amelia.

"I wasn't! I WAS JUST LOOKING!" Sam yelled.

"Can we eat them NOW?" Tray yelled.

I was done with the yelling. There was too much yelling around here. "OK, everyone. Just…quiet. Be quiet. No more yelling. And no biscuits…yet. So, no biscuits and no yelling and I'm going back to the laundry." I turned around and walked back into the laundry to start my task again, taking a deep breath as I picked up the first garment that needed my attention.

"When?" Sam yelled from the kitchen. "When can we eat them?"

"If you can't see me, I can't hear you" I called back, which I realised didn't make any sense, but I was trying to encourage them to talk to me, rather than just yell at me.

Sam walked in, sighing loudly. "When can we eat the biscuits?" he said. "Tray wants to know" he added. Yeah, only Tray wanted to know of course.

"Soon" I said. "I'll check them when I've finished here."

"No, I'll check them" Sam said and he ran off, and then I could hear an argument between Sam and Felicia about whether he was allowed to check them. "I am!" Sam yelled. "Ask Mum!"

"Mum!" Felicia called. "Mum, Sam's touching them!"

I wanted to pretend I couldn't hear them, I really did. But it would only get worse if I didn't, and probably end in Sam and Felicia trying to physically kill each other in the kitchen.

I really wished Eric would hear some of this and make an appearance, but, obviously, he was really trying to lay low at the moment.

I walked into the kitchen, put a finger on one of the biscuits and said "They're still too warm, so all of you, go and find something else to do that doesn't involve hanging about in the kitchen."

Felicia sighed, Sam sighed, Tray looked up from where he was blocking Bob getting to his food bowl and they all looked at me like I was the meanest person who ever lived. "But it's boring here!" Felicia tried.

"The backyard is amazingly exciting, go and take a look."

"No, it's not! It's booooring!" Felicia moaned again, but I could tell she was losing the will to complain. The boys started to drift towards the door, and Felicia followed. I figured that there would still be yelling, but I'd be less likely to hear it. Or at least pretending that I couldn't hear it would be more credible.

I went back to the laundry and Amelia wandered back in. "I'm kind of bored" she said.

"Well, do you want to help me fold?" I offered. Amelia looked at me like I was an idiot. "No" she said. "I want to do something exciting."

"What's exciting?" I asked.

"Not that" Amelia said, sounding kind of definite. I couldn't really disagree, but I thought that I might enjoy it a bit more with some peace and quiet.

Pam came tripping into the room next, trailing a small pink handbag on the floor. "Bupples?" she asked. Yeah, I'd forgotten I'd promised her that.

"Um…soon" I said.

"Are you doing bubbles?" Amelia asked, and I nodded. She sighed. "That's so boring" she said dejectedly.

"You used to love bubbles" I reminded her, and she looked like that couldn't possibly be the case.

"Bupples" Pam said, as if saying it enough would just make me do it. "Bupples, doo-dah, duh. Ba-dah!"

"Soon" I repeated.

Eric walked in then, chewing with his mouth open. "Hot" he said, through the mouthful of what I assumed was the biscuits no one was supposed to be eating yet. I was just grateful Sam couldn't see him breaking all the rules.

"Mummy!" Pam cried, grabbing Eric's leg. "Mummy!" Yeah, mostly that was what she was confused about. Despite many, many attempts to get her to use Daddy, she just refused, to the point where Eric could walk in the door at night and be greeted by Felicia yelling "Daddy!" at him, while Pam trotted along behind yelling "Mummy! Mummy!" Somewhere in her little mind, she was right and everyone else was wrong.

"Daddy" Eric corrected, having swallowed the biscuit that was too hot to really eat.

"Mummy" Pam said contentedly, plonking her little bottom on Eric's foot. "Mummy, bupples."

"That's Daddy" Amelia said, pointing to Eric, while Pam just looked at Amelia, her big blue eyes seeming none the wiser. "Why doesn't she say Daddy?" Amelia asked.

"I don't know, but she will soon" I assured Amelia.

"It's weird" Amelia informed me. "Because he's not Mummy, that's you."

"I know" I said. "But I don't mind." Well, I did kind of. Pam did call me Mummy, but only when Eric wasn't around, and I had to be careful not to say things like "Shush, Mummy's here" if she cried in the night and I went to comfort her, because she'd just cry harder and stretch her arms out toward her bedroom door as, clearly, Mummy wasn't there. It was just me. The weird person who sometimes substituted for Mummy.

"And I don't mind, either" Eric said, beaming down at Pam. Well, of course he didn't mind, Pam's whole world revolved around Eric, what was to mind about that?

Eric managed to extricate himself from Pam's grasp and he came over and hugged me from behind, nuzzling my neck. "You're not helping" I muttered. "And you're scratchy."

"But you don't mind" Eric said, kissing me behind the ear.

"I might" I said, trying to squirm away.

"Mmm" Eric said, sounding like he didn't believe me and giving my backside a friendly squeeze. I hoped he remembered the kids were in here with us. Some of them anyway.

"Bupples" Pam piped up. "Bupples!"

"She wants to do bubbles" Amelia informed us, as if Pam hadn't been clear about that. "Mum said she could, but now she's folding stuff, which is boring. Bubbles are boring, but washing is more boring than bubbles."

"Bupples!" Pam yelled. "BUPPLES!" Yeah, she'd learnt a few things from the big kids. If all else fails, raise the volume levels.

"Can you take Dances with Bubbles outside and get her some bubbles?" I asked Eric, who was still trying to imitate a limpet and attach himself to me. I loved him very much, but sometimes personal space was nice. Still, at least he wasn't yelling.

That didn't last long though. There was a shout from outside and Eric looked out the glass panel of the door that led to the deck, and then he opened it and yelled out "Do not grab each other around the neck!" and then he closed the door again. Yeah, he was still the loudest person here.

"So…bubbles?" he asked me, looking confused. I guess the confusion was due to the fact I wasn't immediately racing out there to cater to Pam's desires, but I had stuff to do. Important stuff. Laundry folding was important, because if we ran out of clean clothes to wear there was going to be trouble. And yelling, lots and lots of yelling.

"Yes please" I said. "Bubbles."

"Um, OK" Eric said. "Come on, Pam. Let's do bubbles" he started to walk back into the kitchen and Pam followed him. "Mummy" she said. "Mummy bupples."

"Daddy" Eric tried.

"Mummy" Pam said, sounding confused by Eric's insistence on it being something else. She loved him very much too, but sometimes I think even she had trouble figuring out where he was coming from.

So that left me with just Amelia again. I wondered if she was going to pick up where she left off with her story of what had happened at school. But no, she decided to steer the conversation in another direction entirely.

"You go all funny" she said. "When he does that."

"When who does what?" I asked. It was getting a bit hot in the laundry, so I opened up the door to the deck and left it open, which meant the voices from outside drifted in. I could hear Pam yelling "Mine!" at someone, and then she burst into tears. Eric I think was trying to console her. There were other voices out there as well, but I couldn't make out what they were saying, mostly it was just a wall of noise.

"Daddy. When Daddy does the kissing thing, and grabs you like that. You smile funny, and you giggle."

"I don't think I giggle" I said. I was pretty sure I didn't.

"Yeah, you do. Is that normal?"

"Why wouldn't it be normal?" I asked. "If I giggled?" I added, because I didn't giggle.

Amelia sighed. "But it's all…you know. Giggly. And you're, um, like old. And a mum. And really old. So it's weird."

"Well…no. It's not weird." Mainly because it didn't happen.

"I think it's weird. When I was at Maisie's house the other weekend her parents didn't do that."

"Well they're unlikely to do anything in front of you" I said.

"But you do stuff in front of me!" Amelia protested.

"Well, you're here all the time…it's just the law of averages."

"What law? There's a law that says you have to do that in front of me? That's really weird!" Amelia exclaimed.

"No, no." Sometimes I forgot Amelia wasn't as old as she seemed. "It just means…well, if you spend a lot of time around me and Eric then at some point you're bound to see him kiss me."

"And then you giggle."

"I'm pretty sure I didn't giggle" I said.

"Yep, you do. You sound a bit like Pam does when Daddy tickles her and she giggles and does that little squeal."

OK, well Amelia was just making stuff up now. I figured if maybe I didn't reply to that she might give up and go away. But she didn't, she just stood there, watching me. "What else are we doing today?" she asked after a while.

"Nothing" I said. "It's Sunday afternoon, I don't have to entertain you guys on Sunday afternoons.

"Well, that's no fun" Amelia grumbled.

I sighed. This was when you missed them having homework, because I didn't have anything I could direct her towards. Normally we'd do her spelling words and write sentences for them on Sunday afternoons. Some of her sentences gave a slightly skewed view of our household though. I'm not sure that a really good use of delicious was in the sentence 'Daddy thinks Mum is really delicious because he keeps licking her, like Bob licked all the cream off Tray's bun when he wasn't careful with it.' She did slightly better though with vicious, which got written up in 'Daddy says that Bob is vicious when he plays with the skinks he catches, but he's mostly cuddly.'

"Well, I'm sure you could find something. Why don't you join the others?"

"It's boring out there!"

"You could blow bubbles for Pam?"

Amelia sighed. "Oh, alright then" she grumbled, before stomping off. I tuned back in to what was happening in the back garden. It was noisy out there, but it all seemed to be happy noises. "Get the bubbles, Pam!" Felicia yelled, and Pam yelled "Bupples!", so they at least were having fun.

When I'd finished the washing, I had one last glance out at what was happening outside. Felicia was holding something above her head and Sam was yelling "That's mine!" while trying to get it off her. Yeah, she was possibly going to regret doing that to him when he was taller than she was. "You guys can have a biscuit now!" I called out the door, and they all started to run back towards the house.

Thankfully dinner was mostly Eric's responsibility tonight; given it was summer and therefore prime barbecue season. Although he did get called away from the kitchen while he was marinating the steaks due to the amount of yelling coming from elsewhere in the house. He arrived back in the kitchen carrying Pam.

"What was happening?" I asked.

"Pamzilla struck again" Eric said, while Pam ignored him and went back to examining the treasure she'd purloined during her escapade. By the look of it she was now carrying a Transformer around. She had a bad habit of sitting down in the middle of whatever game the boys were playing and destroying everything they'd carefully set up and stealing their possessions. I think it had originally started because she wanted to hang out with the boys, but once she'd cottoned on to the fact that she caused a huge amount of fuss by barging in, and she'd kept it up.

"Mummy" Pam said, gazing adoringly at Eric. She liked it when he held her up like this and they could talk face to face.

"Daddy" Eric said, pointing to himself. Pam just blinked. "Who's that?" Eric asked, pointing at where I was standing making a salad.

"Mummy" Pam said, sounding miserable about that fact.

"Who's that?" Eric said, pointing to Pam herself.

"Pom!" Pam said.

"P-a-a-a-am" Eric repeated, drawing her name out more than he usually did.

"Parm?" Pam asked.

"Close enough" Eric muttered. "And who's this?" he pointed to himself.

"Mummy!" Pam said, happy she knew that one.

"But who's that?" Eric asked, pointing to me again.

"Mummy" Pam said, completely flat.

"I don't get why she thinks there's two mummies" Eric asked.

"There's a different inflection" I pointed out. "You get the happy sounding Mummy, I get the kind of blah-sounding one." That seemed about right, because at the moment, I felt a bit blah. Summer plus a houseful of noisy kids was kind of draining.

"Where's Daddy?" I tried. Pam looked at me, blinked, and then turned her head and looked at Eric. "Mummy" she said, pointing to him.

"I think she knows" I said to Eric. "She just thinks you look more like a mummy, or something…" I had no idea what was going on in Pam's head really, except that whatever she called him, Eric was pretty much her number one person in the entire world.

"Yeah…I just. I'm Daddy, Pam. Daddy" Eric said. Pam looked at him, and I swear she almost rolled her eyes.

"Mummy" she said again.

"OK, well…just try and use Daddy" Eric said, putting Pam down on the ground, which didn't make her look particularly happy. She much preferred it when Eric just carried her around.

Dinner was the usual noisy affair, no matter how much you tried to regulate the talking there was just no hope with that many people at the table. And, briefly, a cat, although Amelia had been told she wasn't allowed Bob in her lap at the dinner table and she definitely wasn't allowed to give him the steak she didn't want. She'd pouted at that, as had Bob, I think. He thought that Amelia's increasing reluctance to eat meat was a huge bonus.

After dinner it took me a while to track Eric down so we could have our weekly scheduling session. It mostly worked, and at least Eric no longer had the excuse that I didn't tell him things and he couldn't figure out my scrawls on the calendar. It was about the only time I'd had to talk to him all day, without the five other voices butting in and talking over us. But we still got the odd interruptions.

EPOV

Sookie was looking tired, even I could tell that. And I got that summer was a difficult time for her. Sure, she wasn't working as she didn't run any classes this time of year, but at the same time she had all five kids home with her, all the time. And they fucking clamoured for Sookie's attention all the time, although, I had to admit, that maybe she wasn't the best at getting them to fend for themselves. She seemed to want to wade into every fucking argument and every request for help and never got anywhere fast. There was a constant cry of "Mum!" or "Mummy!" going on, and Sookie felt compelled to respond. Although, sometimes it was just Pam looking for me. I hoped she'd be less confused soon.

But to me half the fun of the kids was finding out what they did if you didn't go running every time they wanted you. I'd loved them all as babies, well, the ones I'd known as babies, but I think I was actually enjoying it more now they were all growing up. They were all such different personalities that it was fucking good fun to see what they did. Sure, some times you had to step in, like when Bob's fucking furry face peeked over Amelia's plate at dinner and I had to point out that I hadn't been out there cooking steak for Bob, not when he was perfectly capable of catching his own. It would just be nice if he fucking ate the mice, instead of partially disembowelling them and leaving them on the back deck. It wouldn't be so bad except for the boys standing around discussing the fact you could see its spine, and was that black lump the poo it had done before it died?

I just maybe wasn't sure whether the fact that I sometimes pretended I couldn't hear what was going on and just let them figure it out themselves was actually allowed. Was it OK to use your kids as a kind of social experiment to see who did what? I mean, no one had actually died, so I thought it was OK. I just wasn't confessing to my tactics. Certainly not to Sookie, although I think she had an idea. Certainly there was a lot of muttering about how it 'must be nice to be so deaf' when I decided to ignore, say, the sounds of Tray and Sam wrestling in the family room. There didn't seem to be a lot of point intervening, they'd just blame each other, and, despite Sam having a size advantage over Tray, they were mostly pretty evenly matched. I couldn't see the point of wading in and having to listen to the tale of woe that accompanied it. If you left them alone, it was over pretty quickly, or as soon as they realised it gave Pam a perfect opportunity to touch their toys.

Despite the fighting and moaning about each other, I still thought the kids were a lot of fun, I just wished Sookie was having as much fun as the rest of us were. But she seemed a bit fucking grumpy at the moment. I had a plan though.

"Where were you?" she said, when I went to join her in the kitchen for what she liked to call Schedule Night.

"Filling in this" I said, putting the health insurance form in front of her. "You can post it off in the morning."

"Oh, OK" she said, taking the form from me, and glancing over it. "It hardly seems worth claiming for some of these" she said. "All those three dollar charges from the pharmacy."

"But they add up" I pointed out, although I still couldn't get used to the idea that the government fucking paid up for the medicines we got prescribed, and some of the stuff for the kids when they were very small was free. But as cheap as they were, we still paid for the insurance, and it seemed wrong not to claim on it.

"I guess" Sookie said, looking down the form. "You put my pill on here though, they won't pay for that."

"Well, I guess that's three bucks we'll have to trim from somewhere else in the budget" I said. "Although…"

"No" Sookie said, "No, I don't want that." She wasn't keen on the idea of a vasectomy, and I really wasn't that hot on it either, but I thought it made sense. The whole aftermath of Pam's birth and Sookie requiring surgery had been fucking scary. I didn't want to go through that again, or even risk it, and the whole pill thing was fiddly and annoying now. If Sookie's schedule got mixed up, or she ended up on some other medicine, or that time she drank grapefruit juice and had a panic because it said not to on the pill box, then we were back to condoms.

But Sookie would sigh and mutter about how I was too young, and how I might change my mind, and what if she died and I married again? Somehow pointing out that she might be less likely to die on me if she wasn't going to be pregnant again didn't cut it, and I really fucking didn't see how I was old enough to have five kids and not old enough to stop having kids, but it was one of those arguments that never got anywhere fast and sometimes it was better to just shut up about it. For now, anyway.

So we went through the schedule and I found out that I was subbing in for Sookie on the walking bus on a Tuesday in a couple of weeks' time, once school had started, so that she could get to work in time to set up the hall. "Yeah, OK" I said. "I can do that."

"I'll take Tray and Pam though, so that'll save that problem" Sookie said. Yeah, Tray wasn't happy about Sam going off to school without him. I often wondered whether he'd cope better with losing Sookie or I, or even both of us, as long as he still had Sam to tell him what to do. He didn't always do what Sam said, and sometimes he tried to actively fight it, but he seemed a bit lost whenever Sam wasn't around. "And you'll have to wear the vest" Sookie added.

Fuck, I hated that stupid Day-Glo yellow safety vest you were supposed to wear when you were in charge of the walking bus. I couldn't see the point. Most of them could see where I was, and the kids were more likely to run off than I was, although it was fucking tempting the first time I got stuck with a little girl who cried all the way to school. No way was I wearing that fucking stupid vest.

"Mmm" I said to Sookie, hoping that covered it. And then Sam walked into the kitchen. "Aren't you supposed to be asleep?" I asked him.

"Yeah, but I had to ask Mum something" he said, looking at me as if he wanted me to challenge that fact.

"What, sweetheart?" Sookie said, as Sam came over to stand beside her chair.

"Um…um…what are we doing tomorrow?" Sam asked. Yeah, maybe he hadn't really needed to ask that right now. But he'd take any excuse to have Sookie to himself. Well, mostly to himself.

"Oh, I hadn't really decided. What do you want to do?" Sookie asked.

"Well, can we go to Aunty Tara's? And use the pool?" Sam looked hopefully at Sookie and from the look on her face I could see what was going through her mind, she was wondering how she'd manage keeping five kids from drowning each other.

"We'll see" Sookie said.

"That always means no" Sam complained. He wasn't really wrong.

"No, it means we'll see. It's supposed to be raining tomorrow anyway" Sookie tried.

"But I like swimming in the rain! Aunty Tara says it's actually warmer in the rain" Sam complained.

"Mum said she'll see tomorrow" I said to Sam. "So back to bed."

"Oh, alright" he huffed. "'Night, Mummy" he reached up and kissed Sookie's cheek. "'Night Dad" he said, and then he shuffled off out of the kitchen.

""Night!" Sookie called out to him. And then she sighed. "I don't know if I can face them all at Tara's pool" she said.

"No…might be better in the weekend" I agreed.

"Yeah…although, did you see the look Sam gave me? He looks more and more like you every day. _Especially_ when he's grumpy with me."

"What? I don't get grumpy with you" I said.

"Yeah, sure. So anyway…" Sookie said, scanning her calendar. "I think that's it…oh no, hang on. Did I tell you about Zumba on Wednesday night?"

"No. What the fuck is Zumba?"

"Oh, that exercise class Tara wanted me to go with her to. I think it's supposed to be a fancy kind of aerobics. Tara and I did a lot of aerobics when we were in school, there used to be cheap classes at the Papatoetoe Community Centre…"

I decided I might just step in at this point. "Uh-huh, cool. So exercise. Well, that's fine. Am I making dinner then?"

"Um…well that would help" Sookie said, and then she thought for a minute. "So, you'll do Supermarket Surprise again?"

I shrugged. "I might" I said, maybe a bit defensively. The kids loved Supermarket Surprise. I drove them to the supermarket and let them pick whatever they wanted from the meals you could microwave. Tray and Sam were slowly working their way through the curry section, and had been particularly taken with the Fijian Taxi Driver curry, possibly because of the name more than the actual taste. Felicia would try to insist on having a dinner that consisted entirely of appetisers like spring rolls, dim sum and samosas. Amelia would take ages examining all her choices and then still pick the same macaroni cheese every fucking time, and Pam would turn away from the dinners and yell "Mine!" while pointing to whatever yoghurts had cartoon characters on them, until I picked something for her. The kids loved it because for once they got what they wanted even if it was different from what their siblings were eating, and the only problem for me was that you could only microwave one meal at a time.

Sookie seemed a bit sniffy about the whole thing though, but I think that's because she thought it wasn't really dinner. Fuck knows, I'd lived on enough of that shit growing up. Sure, her cooking was better, which was why I could never understand why Amelia wanted to pick something she got at home anyway, but no one had ever died from eating a frozen dinner.

Well, no one I _knew_. So the kids would be fine.

"Well, I'll leave you my car then. So you can drive them all. To the supermarket" Sookie said, still sounding a bit disapproving.

"If you don't, we can always walk there." It would take three times as long and part-way home someone was bound to give up and sit on the ground while whinging, but it was do-able if we had to.

"Well, that's it then" Sookie said. "That's all I had to tell you…so, um, coffee?"

"Yeah" I said, standing up and going to the machine. I got it switched on and ground some beans, and when I looked back at Sookie she was still just sitting at the table, with her chin resting on her hands while staring at the wall.

"Are you OK?" I asked her.

"Yeah…" she said slowly, turning to face me. "I just…well, it's a bit full-on. With all the voices."

"What voices?" I fucking hoped Sookie wasn't hearing voices.

"The kids" Sookie said, frowning. "All the constant chatter, and fighting, and asking for things, and wanting me…it's just. Well I don't get a break at the moment. It'll be better soon. And maybe I'll feel better after some exercise…"

"Well, that'll be a break for you" I said. I wasn't sure what else I could do. Although I did still have my plan. Maybe that would work to distract Sookie.

SPOV

I had no idea why there was a beeping noise. And a flashing light. It was dark and it had been silent up until now. Because I'd been asleep. But I wasn't asleep now. I was awake because bloody Eric's bloody phone was buzzing all over his bedside table.

"What's happening?" I hissed at Eric, who didn't seem to have woken up, despite the noise and the light. I rolled over so I was facing him. Yep, eyes still closed.

"Wha'?" he said, and then he realised what I was referring to, and he rolled over and turned it off.

"What time is it?" I hissed. I had no idea why he'd set his alarm for this early. Normally this only happened if he had a plane to catch.

"Um…two…" Eric said, trailing off.

"Two in the morning? Why the hell is your alarm set for two in the friggin' morning?"

"Oh…well, I had a thought" Eric said, running his hand along my side. "I thought we could have sex on the deck."

"Really?" I asked. "You want to get up in the middle of the night and have sex outside in the cold?"

"It's not that cold" Eric said. "It's summer. And anyway, I thought if I woke you up…properly…" he leaned in and nuzzled my neck, before pulling back again, "Then we had sex. I seem to remember that was an agreement."

"It's not enforceable before 6am" I informed him, as his hand snaked up my tank top and grabbed my breast.

"But you're awake now…" Eric said, trying for more nuzzling.

"Because of your bloody phone! If you hadn't set the alarm, I'd still be asleep."

Eric pulled back. "But if I hadn't set the alarm, there'd be no sex on the deck, Sookie. It has to be now so the kids won't catch us."

He had a point about that. I didn't really want to scar them for life. But still…it was late, or early, or whatever. It was sleeping time.

"It's sleeping time" I said to Eric.

"Not now, I can't sleep _now_" Eric said, pushing his groin against my thigh so I could feel his growing erection.

"Try some hot milk" I grumbled.

"But I want hot you" Eric said, rubbing himself against me some more. "Come on, you know you want to."

I sighed. It was very, very difficult to switch off my libido when Eric was laying half on top of me like this, kissing me and generally feeling me up. Bloody Eric.

"Fine!" I said. "We'll do it, but only because you woke me up now. When the kids all want to get up at 6am you're doing breakfast."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, maybe not really grasping what I was saying.

"So you can't just roll over and pretend to be asleep" I added.

"Mmm" Eric said. "Let's not worry about that now." And then he kissed me, and that shut me up for a while. It was a good kiss, but I was starting to think that maybe the deck was over-rated. Maybe we could just have sex in bed.

"Maybe we should stay in here" I murmured to Eric.

"Not the same" he said. "It's better on the deck."

"Why?" I asked.

"Just is" Eric said. "You go all freaky and exhibitionist. It's hot."

"OK…well, no" I said. "That's not right. I don't do that at all, I just…you make me do it."

Eric sighed, and propped himself up on his elbow. "Sookie, I can't make you do anything, if I could I'd get fucking roast lamb and Yorkshire puddings for every dinner, but I don't. So if you really didn't want to fuck me on the deck, you wouldn't. But you do." He sounded pretty confident on that fact, I wasn't so sure.

"You're as bad as Amelia" I said. "She thinks I go all giggly when you come up behind me and kiss me."

"Yeah" Eric said, having another go at getting my pyjama top off. "You do. I like it."

"I don't giggle" I said, and then he tickled my waist and I did. "Stop it!" I warned him.

"You giggle and squirm and do all the fun things" Eric said. "But come on because we're wasting time. Valuable deck time." Eric rolled away from me and climbed out of bed.

"Are you getting the blankets?" I asked.

"Yep" Eric said, as he disappeared out the bedroom door. I sat up in bed and tried to muster the same enthusiasm Eric had for sex on the deck. The sex bit I was on-board with, at least now I was a bit more awake I was, but actually getting out of bed was the less appealing prospect. I swung my legs out of bed and stood up, just as Eric arrived back in the room with two blankets.

"You're not naked" he said.

"Well, no. I didn't have a blanket" I replied, taking the one he handed me. Eric sighed, pulled off his underwear and wrapped the blanket around his waist. I pulled my tank top over my head and then got a bit stuck on the shorts.

"What's wrong?" Eric asked.

"The cord on my pyjama shorts is knotted" I said, trying to get it untangled in the dim light in the bedroom.

"Well…we could just cut it" Eric said. "Or I'll just break it." Yeah, he was impatient.

"No, bugger off" I said. "I'll do it, just give me a minute." All I needed was someone else getting antsy because I wasn't doing things on their timetable. Eric kind of hopped from foot to foot a bit, but he did back off. I finally got the cord untied, and then slipped out of my shorts and wrapped my blanket around me, under my arms. "I hope it's not too cold" I said, as Eric grabbed my hand and opened up the door from our bedroom onto the deck.

"Light?" I whispered. "Is the light switched off?"

"Sookie I don't think it's been switched on for a while" Eric said. "I turned it off because Felicia kept complaining about it going on at night."

"Really?" I asked. "You never put it back on? Well, that's not safe."

Eric just shrugged. I think. There wasn't a lot of light from the moon so I'd take the movement in the arm that was holding onto me as a shrug.

Eric let go though so he could push the ottoman closer to our bedroom. That way if we had to abandon the project it wasn't going to be so far to run. We hoped, anyway. So far we'd been lucky.

"How do you want to do this?" Eric whispered.

"I don't know" I whispered back. "This was all your plan."

"Um, OK" Eric said, and then he sat down on the ottoman and opened his blanket up. I took that as my cue to join him. I hiked up my blanket and straddled his lap.

"See?" Eric whispered in my ear. "This is nice. And it's just us." We kissed, and he definitely did have a point about it being just us. Well, us and some far-off traffic noise. It was peaceful, if slightly chilly. While the days in January were hot, the nights were still cool as we hadn't got to that humid period that usually hits in February.

We kissed for a while and enjoyed the feel of our bodies rubbing together under the blankets. It might have been just as nice in our bed, but this did feel...well, a bit naughtier. No one knew where we were for one thing. And this wasn't something that parents did, surely? Not even mothers who supposedly giggled like schoolgirls. No, this was proper grown-up sex.

And when Eric entered me I stopped even thinking about how nice it was without the voices, or whether any of them were suddenly going to pipe up and interrupt us. The only voice I could really hear was my own, and occasionally Eric's, when he'd say things like "Fuck, Sookie", which I could deal with, because at least he didn't want anything from me. Well, I think he was kind of keen for me to have an orgasm, but I was pretty much with him on that one, so it didn't feel like he was making unreasonable demands on me.

EPOV

I really fucking hoped the whole sex on the deck thing was going to give Sookie the time out she needed. And once we got out there, and there was actual sex on the deck, I thought it was a really fucking good plan indeed. Sookie would always protest a little, and try to make out that I was the one who wanted it more than her, but really, she was pretty into it. Well, a lot into it. I could kind of tell that from the way she was riding me.

And after we'd both finished Sookie certainly seemed relaxed. So I figured my plan had worked, because Sookie just needed to relax. I felt that if she just relaxed a little bit then maybe she'd feel a bit better about the constant demands of the kids. That I couldn't quite fix for her.

We stayed joined together, both panting slightly, for a few minutes. "See?" I whispered to Sookie. "I knew you'd be into it. You're such an exhibitionist."

"Oh, phfft" she huffed. "Everyone has these ideas about me. You were the one who set an alarm for this."

I chuckled, and Sookie carefully climbed off me and walked back towards the bedroom door. I followed and locked the door behind us, before dropping the blanket and looking for where I'd left my underwear. I couldn't see where they'd gone, and I was feeling kind of sleepy now, so figured I'd worry about it in the morning. I got into bed and watched Sookie put her pyjamas back on.

"Try not to knot them this time" I said, as she was tying her shorts.

"Yes, thank you Eric" she said, a bit curtly. And then she got into bed and I hugged her to me. Hopefully we'd get some more sleep now, because I was fucking tired.

"That was great" I murmured, when I'd managed to get myself comfortable. I put my arm over Sookie and relaxed against her.

"It was" she said. "It's nice when there's no voices all talking at me."

"You just need to tune them out" I said to her. "They'll be OK."

"Well, it's easy for you" Sookie said. "But they all want me all the time."

"They'll be fine on their own" I said. "Just…leave them to it." I was really sleepy now and just hoped that Sookie didn't want to talk anymore. Waking up for sex was one thing, but having deep conversations in the early hours of the morning was more than I was capable of.

SPOV

Early morning sex is certainly one way of getting some alone time. Mostly the kids leave us alone at night. But not all the time. We'd only been back in a bed for a short while when I heard Pam's little voice. "Mummy?" she said. "Mummy!"

"I think that one's for you" I said to Eric. But then I realised he was snoring. And the snores hadn't stopped despite the fact Pam was getting more insistent by the moment. "Mummy!" she yelled. It was definitely Eric she wanted.

But it was also definitely Eric who was fast asleep behind me. I tried jabbing him in the shin with my heel, but it didn't wake him up, it just made him move his leg away. So I wriggled out from under Eric's arm and went to deal to Pam, who probably wouldn't be impressed it was me and not Eric who was answering her call. It had been nice without the voices while it lasted; I just hoped I got another reprieve from them. Sometime soon.

**So a lot of our prescription medicines are government funded, or part funded anyway. Usually you pay about $3 per item at the pharmacy. We have a government agency, Pharmac, who are responsible for negotiating contracts with the pharmaceutical companies to buy what we need. It has it's plusses and minuses. On the one hand, it makes a lot of stuff more affordable. On the other, you don't get a lot of choice; often you get generic products, or you're limited to, say, one type of pill which is funded. If that doesn't suit you, you're back paying for your own. Also you'll sometimes find the decisions about what is and isn't funded are quite controversial. When they changed which asthma inhalers they funded there was a lot of backlash, and they refused to fund the breast cancer drug Herceptin for a while, and when they did fund it, it was for a much shorter course than many specialists recommended.**

**Fijian Taxi Driver curry does exist. Fiji actually has a large Indian population who consider themselves slightly separate from Indians proper, and many Fijian Indians have moved to New Zealand, so the curry is a reflection of that.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	109. Bonus Chapter: The Gym

**A/N Yeah, I had a really crappy week, and got a bit stressed about being able to get this written and out to you. Silly, I know, because it's really only me that cares. But yay it's done now!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, I just made them all sweaty.**

SPOV

It started with the Zumba class. At first, I wasn't sure about going. It had been a long time since I'd done any kind of organised exercise, mostly I just ran around with the kids. Or after the kids, because somehow, even though the boys were still shorter than me, they were fast. And determined to get away. Even Pam could be pretty evasive. So the idea of bopping around in a gym with a bunch of people who were bound to be younger, fitter and better dressed than me didn't really appeal.

But Tara was kind of insistent. Tara really wanted to go, but Tara wasn't good at doing things by herself. Sometimes when I looked back, I really think that's how our whole friendship had started, because I had been the one stupid enough to accompany Tara on her many hare-brained schemes, like the time we'd joined the Culture Club at school so she could stalk that 6th form rugby player, or the time we'd spent every Saturday afternoon going to Georgie Pie in East Tamaki Road because another guy she liked worked there, or all the times I let her talk me into going to the movies with her and JB, and JB's very lame friend Nick. So old habits are hard to break, and when Tara started pleading, I caved, even though it was a pain in the bum to schedule and I suspected the kids would end up eating microwaveable carcinogens for dinner, thanks to Eric's liking for Supermarket Surprise as a meal option.

So I agreed that I'd go with her, and met her at the appointed time outside of some gym in Newmarket. It was kind of intimidating, and I felt even worse when I realised Tara was decked out in a beautifully co-ordinated outfit courtesy of the Nike shop. Even her shoes matched the colour scheme. I hadn't been sure what to wear so I had on cropped track pants, which hopefully didn't cling to my thighs too much, and a tank top that had seen better days. I had had to shout myself a new sports bra, which had been kind of a miserable experience. For one thing, it was a bloody ridiculous size. For another, I was pretty sure that these days, my boobs weren't where they had started out and it really wasn't pleasant having some strange woman measuring me for the bra.

But I had made it here, and now I just had to make it through the class. "I hope it's not too tough" Tara murmured; as we watched a girl, who was probably half our age, stride past in very clingy lycra.

"Yeah…I kind of feel old now" I confided. Most of the time I didn't really, because most of the time I didn't even think about it. I didn't have time to think about it. But 42…well 42 was getting on a bit.

My mother had been 46 when she died, which was a totally sobering thought.

We walked into the gym and the thumping music stopped me dwelling any longer on my own mortality. If the music was this loud in reception, how bad was it going to be inside? We paid for a casual session at the desk and walked in.

It was loud. Even to my ears. And I lived in a house where everyone yelled all the time.

"This volume is kind of ridiculous" Tara shout-whispered to me. "I mean…how are you supposed to hear yourself think?"

"I guess you don't think" I shout-whispered back. "I guess you just workout."

Tara shrugged, and we went into the locker room to stow our bags, and then found the room where the Zumba class was going to be held, and found some places down the back. I hoped it wasn't going to be one of those small classes where the instructor makes everyone come forward. Tara and I watched everyone else file in and find some room. I didn't think we were the only middle-aged women there, but I still felt kind of old. Still, it probably sucked worse to be the one guy in the class. Or maybe not. He looked kind of flamboyant.

"I'm starting to have second thoughts" I said to Tara, as the instructor waltzed in and started checking her headset and that her music was all cued up.

"Why?" Tara asked, frowning at me. "You love this stuff."

"That was a long time ago" I said. "Like…in another lifetime." I couldn't quite remember at what point I'd stopped going to aerobics, but I'm pretty sure it coincided with when things got more serious with Bill and I spent a lot of time travelling from Papatoetoe to go and see him.

"It'll be fun" Tara said, although even she sounded a bit doubtful.

It was fun, once I got the hang of what was going on. I might have been middle-aged and definitely not the fittest person there, but I didn't completely suck. Tara completely sucked, but then she'd always had more enthusiasm than co-ordination. I remembered when we'd tried a Box-fit class once, years ago, and nearly come to blows when she'd mistaken her left for her right, but at least in Zumba the worst thing she could do was step into me.

And she did, twice at least. But it was OK, because I was enjoying myself and I'd been crashed into by Eric enough times now that I was mostly impervious to that kind of thing. He didn't always look where he was going either. And it was usually totally my fault for just standing there, right next to him, where he couldn't see me. Or the times I apparently stopped randomly in the middle of the shopping centre and he didn't get enough warning to brake or something. He was just lucky I didn't squeal like Bob did. Well, mostly I didn't squeal. Sometimes it really hurt.

By the end of the class though, I realised that my fitness did indeed suck totally. I was exhausted. But it felt kind of good to be exhausted from actually doing something, rather than just being ground down by a million and one requests to do stuff for other people. I picked up my little hand towel and wiped the sweat off my face. "Well that wasn't so bad" I said to Tara.

"Are you kidding me?" she asked. "That was horrible. Just horrible. I can't believe McKenna does that three times a week. Or so she _says_. I didn't see her tonight." Tara scanned the people who were departing the class and I realised that maybe the point of being here wasn't just to get some exercise. I should have known, Tara never changed.

"So…you don't want to come back?" I asked. I actually felt kind of disappointed at that.

"I might" Tara said, shrugging. "I guess I have to do something", she patted some non-existent fat on her hips.

"Cool" I said. "Well, I'm keen to come back next week."

"See I told you you'd enjoy it" Tara said. "But you never listen to me."

"Well maybe that's because you said I'd like the demolition derby at Waikaraka Park too, and I didn't." I especially hadn't liked sitting awkwardly on a picnic rug with Nick, while Tara and JB had made out.

Tara shrugged. "It's way better when they smash up caravans, anyway."

"Uh-huh, and do your posh friends from Remmers know about your dark past?" I asked.

"Oh, Sookie. It's the only reason they invite me to dinner at their houses. So I can talk about growing up rough."

"Um…" I said. "I don't remember it being _that_ bad?" OK, Papatoetoe was in South Auckland, but there were far worse bits of South Auckland. _Really_ bad bits of South Auckland. Where we lived was practically middle class.

Tara shrugged. "It's all the same to them. Most of them went to St Cuth's, or Dio."

"Oh. Yeah. OK." I guess if you had to gone to one of the really posh schools everything else would be a bit outside your frame of reference.

I said goodbye to Tara and walked back to my car. I was sweaty, and kind of exhausted, but I felt good. Good enough to want to come back the next week.

So the next week I turned up again and got to admire yet another new outfit that Tara had bought especially for jumping around in. I hoped the class would seem a bit easier now that I'd been once, but I think it was harder. Possibly that was because I'd spent part of the day running after Pam while she screamed "No!" and tried to get away. I didn't know quite what her problem was, other than that I wasn't Eric, or Mummy. He was a bit worried about that, but I thought she'd figure it out in the end. Or she wouldn't, and maybe I could hand her over and concentrate on the other kids while Eric dealt with Pam's desire to not wear her own clothes, not eat what was put in front of her, and not sit still where I'd asked her to stay.

But at some point during the Zumba class, probably around the time I was trying to master the steps while at the same time keeping an eye on Tara to make sure she didn't come straight for me again, I started to enjoy it again. Probably I enjoyed the fact that I was at least mostly concentrating on myself, and didn't have a whole heap of other people interrupting me. Unless Tara actually did forget to step left instead of right.

By the fourth week in a row Eric was starting to get a bit curious. And he'd decided to expand his cooking repertoire. "We had green spaghetti" Sam announced, as I walked through the door. "Is that OK? Because I haven't seen green spaghetti before. And it's not like green eggs and ham" the last comment was directed to Eric, who'd appeared behind him.

"There was nothing wrong with the spaghetti" Eric huffed. "Anyway you ate it."

Sam shrugged. "It was dinner" he said. I wasn't quite sure how it happened but somehow Sam had absorbed one lesson from Eric, and that was eat what was there because you might not get fed again. And no one had ever forgotten to feed Sam. Well, once I think I forgot to make him a sandwich at lunch, but when you're feeding five kids it's hard to keep track. But he got something in the end. And yet he still thought it was compulsory to eat everything in sight.

The grocery bills were bad enough already. I didn't want to even contemplate what that situation was going to be like when he was a teenager.

But apparently even if you were willing to eat it, it didn't mean you accepted it. "But it was green" Sam grumbled. "Spaghetti's not meant to be green."

"I liked it!" Felicia said waltzing in to the hallway, and then looking me up and down. "Were you running?" she asked. "You don't run!"

"I went to Zumba class. At the gym. Remember?" I asked her. Felicia shrugged. "I didn't know where you were" she said. She didn't sound particularly worried at that thought.

"Well you could have asked…" I said, but Felicia had walked off, totally indifferent to me. Pam rocked up though. "Mummy!" she yelled happily, while grabbing Eric's leg.

"I was the one who wasn't here" I grumbled, which Eric picked her up.

"You liked dinner, didn't you Pam?" Eric asked her, and she nodded. "Yup" she said.

"But it was green!" Sam said again.

"Did you use pesto?" I asked Eric.

"Yeah" he said. "I couldn't find the other sauces. You have a confusing system in that pantry."

"It's not confusing" I said, not adding that it wasn't really a system either. I just shoved things wherever there was a bit of space given I didn't usually have a lot of time to devote to putting away groceries, I just had to get it done before moving on to the next task.

"Obviously not to you" Eric said. "The rest of us are screwed." And then he walked off holding Pam.

"I could have told him where it was" Sam grumbled to me. "But he didn't ask me. He just made the spaghetti green."

"I'm sure it was nice green spaghetti" I said. I kind of hoped there was some left over for me.

Sam shrugged, and I'm not sure whether it was meant to indicate that he wasn't sure whether or not it was nice, or whether the fact it was green over-rode anything else you might think about the meal.

I took a nice warm shower and then went to the kitchen to see about some dinner. Sure enough there was a tiny bit of the spaghetti left in the pan, and I put it on a plate for myself, before putting the saucepan in the sink to soak. At least there weren't too many food splashes on the cooktop of the oven this time. I was rather fond of my nice Swedish oven, and Eric was rather careless with it, which annoyed me because it looked nicest when it was all clean and shiny, and not covered in dollops of sauce.

The spaghetti was indeed kind of green, but it was very nice. There was ham in it, and peas. I knew where Eric had got the idea from; the weekend paper had included a recipe that wasn't too dissimilar the previous weekend. Eric liked to peruse the recipes, which at first I thought was a bit odd for someone who didn't want to watch any cooking shows, but then I realised that he was leaving the paper open to the recipe page any time something caught his eye, in the hope I might be inspired to make, say, Texas-style beef ribs with a bourbon sauce. Sometimes the inspiration was helped along a bit by Eric saying out loud "This looks OK" as he looked over the page, and he wasn't above enlisting the kids either, although Sam kind of blew Eric's cover the time he handed me the paper and said "Dad wants these brownies."

I was just finishing my food when Eric came back in carrying Pam, who was now wearing pyjamas. "Say goodnight to Mummy" he said to her.

"Ni-night" Pam said, refusing to call me anything.

"Mummy" Eric prompted.

"Mummy" Pam agreed, looking at Eric and putting a tiny hand on his cheek.

"I give up" Eric muttered.

"Night, Pam" I said, kissing her cheek as Eric held her down to me, and then he carried her out of the room.

I rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher and went to help tuck the other kids into bed. Sam was still grumbling about the spaghetti, which I could tell was driving Eric bananas. "It was good spaghetti" I said.

"Green food isn't normal" Sam said.

"I got green teeth!" Tray announced from his bed, opening his mouth to show us.

"I told you to brush them" Eric said. "Didn't you? I left your toothbrush out for you."

Tray thought for a minute. "Nah" he said. He didn't seem particularly repentant.

"Well go and do it now, I put your toothbrushes out" Eric said. As Tray left the room he turned to me and said "If I don't watch him every fucking minute he doesn't do anything I ask."

There wasn't much I could say to that. It was kind of true for me as well. Tray came back in and Sam muttered "Finally" while glaring at Tray, but Tray seemed kind of oblivious to that one.

"So are they done?" Eric asked Tray.

"What?" Tray asked Eric, as he climbed into bed.

"Teeth" Eric said. "Remember?"

Tray looked thoughtful, and for a minute I thought he'd forgotten why he'd been sent back to the bathroom in the first place. But then he said "Yeah" and we could carry on with saying goodnight.

Felicia was easier, mainly because there was only one of her and she hadn't forgotten anything, but she still wanted to question Eric in great detail about why Tray had come back out of the bedroom, just to make sure she hadn't missed out on anything important.

Amelia, by virtue of being the eldest and having reached the rather grand age of nearly 11, was still up and wandering around. "Did you have fun at Zumba-ing thingee?" she asked, when I found her in the family room, watching TV.

"Yeah" I said. I had, really.

"What do you do?" Amelia asked me.

"Oh, well. It's exercise. To music. With a bit of dancing."

"I guess that could be fun" Amelia acknowledged. "Can I come next time?" she looked at me hopefully

"Um…" I said, trying to imagine losing my nice bit of me-time, even if it was me-time that involved being all sweaty and jumping around a lot. And dodging Tara. And feeling slightly dowdy compared to the rest of the participants.

No, the positives still out-weighed the negatives. "It's just really for grown-ups" I said. "You know, women. Like me."

Amelia sighed. "Old people. So it's lame then." She turned back to TV.

I was about to disagree with her, but then realised where that might lead. "Yeah" I said. "I don't think you'd enjoy it."

Eric was in the kitchen making coffee when I found him. "I don't think the spaghetti was that bad" he said.

"No, it was very nice" I agreed.

"But Sam seems to think I'm trying to poison him. The fucking looks he was giving me at dinner. You'd think I'd never cooked anything in my life before."

"I guess normally I do it" I said. "He's used to that."

"He just likes you better" Eric grumbled. "He thinks I can't cook, Tray doesn't listen to me, and Amelia thinks she's really in charge, Pam thinks I'm her mummy, and Felicia constantly wants me to relay to her every conversation I have with everyone else. It's fucking hard work when you're not here."

I knew how he felt. "It is" I agreed. "But you don't mind me going?" A part of me didn't really want to ask him, in case he said he did, but I felt it was appropriate at the moment.

Eric sighed. "No, as long as you enjoy it, you go. I'm fine."

"And at least Pam doesn't miss me" I said. "I figure if we've got interchangeable names, it doesn't matter whether we're both here or not."

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly. "But she'll get it eventually."

"That's what we keep telling ourselves" I agreed.

After several weeks of Zumba class the receptionist at the gym talked Tara and I into buying one of those 10 session concession cards because it would be cheaper. A part of me baulked at the outlay, because I might stop enjoying it and I might stop going and then it would have been a waste of money, and I wasn't fond of wasting money.

But obviously I wasn't going to stop liking it any time soon because the first test was when Tara went to Rarotonga for a holiday. I was deeply envious, not just of the fact that she was going to spend a week on a beach, but that she was leaving her kids at home with JB's parents for the entire week. It sounded like absolute bliss.

I still went to Zumba though. Even without Tara. In fact I actually went twice that week, although I made sure the second class was a later one so that I could be around for dinnertime because I wasn't sure that Sam was going to cope with Eric cooking more than once in a week. As it was he watched me leave and I felt guilty about abandoning my kids again to bounce around in a gym.

About ten minutes into the class though, I'd forgotten that guilt and I was busy trying to learn the new routine the instructor was showing us.

Tara came back from Rarotonga and immediately got a cold, probably due to the change in temperature. I'd seen her photos after she posted them online and it did look pretty nice there, even though JB had made her get off her sun lounger and go snorkelling and driving around the island with him.

So she didn't go to Zumba that week, but I did. And I went by myself the next week too. Tara finally turned up again, but to be honest, it had kind of been nicer without her. She bitched about it a lot, complaining about how hard it was and how she hated being hot and sweaty. She was kind of drag, and I didn't really need her stomping all over my happy place.

Because it was kind of my happy place, here in the aerobics room at the gym. It wasn't my only happy place, of course. I'd always been fond of the bathrooms attached to the delivery suites at the hospital, for one thing. But Zumba class was different. It was a place I could just be Sookie for a while, rather than Mum. Or whatever Pam thought I was, anyway.

The following week they were doing a special at the gym for a months' membership, and two free personal training sessions. The receptionist was doing her best to promote it when we had our cards stamped for the Zumba class.

"Maybe that'd be more me" Tara mused, as we walked into the gym afterwards.

"I don't know" I said. "I'm not really sure I'm up to actually working out." I glanced over at the weight area and it all looked kind of…well, not me anyway.

"Oh, it might be fun" Tara said, as we walked into the room where the Zumba class was. The instructor gave us a wave, and I waved back. "Plus, you know, it's supposed to be good for us."

Tara was kind of right in that regard. Stored in the part of my brain that held all the useless information I picked up were two facts, one was that pregnancy leeched out all your calcium, and the other was that doing weight-bearing exercises was good for preventing osteoporosis. So maybe I should be lifting some weights?

But the idea seemed kind of foreign.

As we were leaving after the class, Tara walked back to the reception desk. "OK" she said to the receptionist. "We'd like to take up the trial memberships."

"We would?" I asked.

"Yeah, come on. I don't want to do it by myself. Please?" Tara asked. Honestly nothing had changed since we were 14.

"Oh, fine" I said, hoping it wasn't too expensive.

We filled in the requisite forms and paid our money. "You get two free sessions with a personal trainer" the receptionist said. "So someone will give you a call to set up the first appointment."

"Oh" I said. "OK." I had absolutely no idea what a personal trainer did, but the idea of having one terrified me. It sounded so…posh. I glanced at Tara. Yeah, she thought it was a bloody good idea. Probably all those women she had lunch with all the time had their own personal trainers. But to me the only thing worse than lifting weights was maybe having someone standing there watching me lift weights. I'd hate it, I was sure I would.

And sure enough I didn't like the personal trainer at all. Her name was Frannie and she was kind of mean and off-hand, and seemed to have a rather unhealthy interest in my diet, and she was less than impressed when I volunteered that mostly when I was at home, I ate what the kids left. Anyway, I wasn't here to discuss my diet, I was here to…well, I wasn't really sure. Some of that equipment frightened the hell out of me.

So Frannie took me through some exercises, told me repeatedly I needed to work on my 'core' and said I needed to come to the gym at least six times a week to see any results. Well, that was never going to happen.

And every time she gave me an exercise to do, she kind of sneered at me. She certainly wasn't overly impressed with the weights I could use. She'd put me on a machine, put some weights on it, and then get me to, say, push the handles forward. When I couldn't, she'd sigh and change the weights and make me feel bad about the whole thing.

Part-way through the whole session, just as Frannie was pulling another sour face, I figured out where I'd seen her before. She'd been on one of those TV shows where they make people lose weight due to a lot of shouting and repetitive clips of the same workout session. Yeah, Frannie would have been great at that, but, well, she wasn't my friend.

I started to think this whole going to the gym thing was a huge mistake.

And when I got home there was a crisis to deal with anyway, so I didn't exactly get to dwell on it. I walked in and found Sam standing there. I wasn't sure how long he'd been waiting for me, or why he wasn't ready for bed yet. "All I said" he announced, as I was barely through the door "Was that I'd thought of a new game for the trampoline. And that was IT. So it's not my fault."

"OK" I said slowly, not really sure what had happened. "I'm sure whatever happened it will be fine."

"Yeah…but. Oh, well it's not my fault anyway." He turned around and wandered back into the house, and I decided to pretend that I didn't then hear the roar from Tray, the thud as he obviously tackled Sam, and Sam yelling "Fuck off Tray!" with a slight American accent. I was shattered after that workout and didn't have the energy to break up fights. Surely Eric was around here anyway.

But then I heard the other noises coming from further in the house. They weren't happy noises at all.

When I got to the kitchen I found the source of the noise. Pam was face-down on the floor crying at Eric's feet. It was, I had to say, a magnificent tantrum and she'd gone a pretty nice shade of purple. She was wearing her pyjamas with the feet, but she was also wearing one of her hoodies, her small pink gumboots and a sparkly headband she must have stolen from Amelia. Poor Pam, even though she was turning two in a couple of weeks she had almost no hair and what she had was so wispy and fine and white-blond that it was practically transparent most of the time. But she still insisted on having hair accessories like her sisters, although their hair couldn't be more different. By the time Amelia was this age, I could put her hair in plaits.

Eric looked at me and didn't say anything; there wasn't much he could say. And Pam was kind of noisy anyway. I finally made out what it was she was saying between sobs. "P'leen!" she cried. "P'LEEN!"

"She heard Sam talking about the trampoline" Eric said. "And then found her jacket and boots and wanted to go out there. And no, I can't make her understand why we're not going out there right now."

"It's dark, Pam" I tried. "You don't want to go out in the dark."

"P'LEEN!" Pam screamed. "P'LEEN!" And then there was a lot more sobbing. I was really tempted to just walk out of the room and leave her to Eric, who was probably the one she wanted anyway.

"I'd tried the dark" Eric muttered. "I've also tried, bedtime, it's too cold, no one else is going out there, I've said no, we'll do it tomorrow if you stop crying and behave and Felicia suggested we should offer her a bribe, but I think that was in the hope that the bribe was something edible that I would feel compelled to share around."

"Um…" I said because really, I was kind of out of ideas. Eric seemed to have tried them all.

"Come on" Eric said, bending down and scooping up the still-prone Pam. "It's bedtime."

"P'LEEN!" Pam screamed at Eric. "P'LEEN!" And then she put her head on his shoulder, wiping her nose rather effectively on his shirt, and sobbed. "P'leen" she said forlornly.

"No trampoline tonight" Eric said to her. "It is bedtime."

"P'leen" Pam said between sobs. "P'leen."

"Oh Pam" I said, reaching over and stroking her back. "Mummy will let you go on it tomorrow." And as soon as I said that, I realised my mistake because she immediately looked at Eric. "That mummy" he said, nodding at me.

"Mummy p'leen!" Pam wailed, and I realised we weren't getting anywhere fast. She was kind of looking for stuff for to be miserable about now.

"It's OK Pam" Eric said. "It's just the trampoline. It's always there."

"P'Leen!" Pam said, reaching out towards the door to the deck, just in case Eric wasn't really certain about where she wanted to go.

I decided that maybe a distraction was in order. "Hey Pam?" I asked her. "Do you want to sing?" and then I launched into _Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star_.

"No!" Pam wailed. "No!"

"Um, I don't think she wants to sing…" Eric said, looking like he might laugh. I pulled a face. My singing wasn't great, but it wasn't _that_ bad, despite what everyone in the house seemed to think.

"Is she still going off about the trampoline?" Amelia asked, as she walked into the kitchen.

"Well…she's not happy" I said.

"You're all sweaty" Amelia informed me. "It's kind of gross."

"Thanks, Amelia."

She shrugged. "It's true though." And then she left again.

"Come on Pam, bedtime" Eric tried, but she was still sobbing. Eric's shoulder was pretty much a mess of tears and snot by now, although I'd seen him covered in worse. He looked a bit strained though. If Pam didn't calm down soon it was going to be impossible to get her into bed.

Amelia came back in and I mentally braced myself for more comments about the state of my dress. But instead she thrust something in the direction of Pam and Eric. "She can have this" Amelia said, shrugging.

Pam stopped crying and looked at what Amelia was offering, and then snatched it off her. I caught a flash of green and blonde and realised that it was the Tinkerbell doll, the one that Eric had bought for Amelia all those years before.

"Tinksabell" Pam said, holding it up to show Eric.

"Yeah" Eric said thoughtfully.

"Flyeen!" Pam said. "Fly-een." She was holding the doll out so she could fly it around, having seemingly forgotten all about the trampoline.

"Are you sure you don't mind her borrowing it?" I asked Amelia. Pam was always trying to liberate stuff from Amelia, actually all of the other kids were, and Amelia had gotten less and less tolerant over the years and was pretty good at hiding the things she really loved, although she wasn't pleased with the fact that putting stuff on the higher shelves of her bookcase was becoming less effective as a preventive measure.

But Pam had wanted to get her hands on Tinkerbell for a long time. I'd bought a cheap fairy doll from Kmart hoping that would satisfy her, but apparently, it wasn't the same, and it languished in Pam's toybox. No, it was Tinkerbell or nothing for Pam.

"She can have it" Amelia said. "I'm…" she stopped for a moment and looked sad. "I don't really play with her anymore."

"Oh" I said. "Oh, well. That's a really nice thought Amelia" I said. Sometimes even my kids surprised me. I went to hug her but she stepped backwards. "No!" she hissed. "You're still sweaty."

Eric sniggered in the background while I stood there feeling a bit unwanted. "Oh, OK" I said. "Well, it's a nice thing to do for Pam anyway."

Amelia shrugged. "I like Pam-Pam. Even if you didn't name her Lula. Lula would have been cute!"

"Lula!" Pam said joyfully.

"See? She likes it. I'm just going to call her Lula anyway."

"I think that might confuse her, Amelia" Eric said.

Amelia turned to look at him. "Well it hasn't yet" she said, and then she left the kitchen.

"Um…not sure whether to worry about that or not" I said to Eric.

Eric shrugged. Pam was busy poking at his face now and demonstrating all the words she'd learnt in what seemed like a very short space of time. "Eyes" she said. "Nose. Ears. Mouf."

"Right, well you better get Pam and Tinkerbell into bed then."

"Tinksabell!" Pam shouted joyfully.

"Did you see Sam and Tray?" Eric asked me, as he walked out of the kitchen with Pam.

"I think there was a fight to the death going on" I said.

"Oh well, one less to get into bed then" Eric commented as he and Pam left, just as Felicia arrived in the room.

"She cries SO much!" Felicia said to me, and then she looked me up and down. "What were you doing?" she asked.

"Oh, I went to the gym. I had that thing with the personal trainer."

"What did you do?" Felicia asked, sounding genuinely interested.

"Well…the trainer, um…Frannie, she told me what exercises to do and showed me how to do them."

"What? Like running and stuff? Like we do at netball training?" Felicia had branched out from just soccer to soccer and netball, making her life a bit busy during winter. However, she was also keen on tennis lessons, so maybe summer wasn't going to be much better for much longer.

"Yeah…more like what to do with the weight machines. And the weights." Yeah, that part had been scary when Frannie had been darting around putting various weights on barbells and attaching cuffs and things. I wasn't sure I'd be up for doing it by myself.

"Oh. That sounds kind of fun" Felicia said. "Can I come next time?"

"Oh…it's just really for grown-ups sweetheart" I said, thinking that Felicia and Frannie would probably get on like a house on fire, united in their scorn of my abilities. Family soccer matches in the backyard always involved a lot of yelling about how Mum wasn't doing it right, even though my skills were a lot better than they had been before kids. I was better at cricket, anyway.

"Oh" Felicia said sadly.

"And anyway" I said, trying to reassure her. "I'm not sure I'm doing it again. It wasn't really me."

"Mmm" Felicia said diplomatically, looking me up and down again. "You look pretty sweaty. I don't think you're really used to, um, doing stuff like that?"

"Yeah…I'd better take a shower" I said, and headed off to the bathroom.

But somehow I did end going to my next appointment with the personal trainer, only it wasn't the same one, and that was probably why I went.

I had been intending to tell Frannie that I was going to cancel. They were free appointments, after all, and although the idea was grab me as a client, I got the feeling Frannie wasn't going to be upset if I disappeared out of her life.

I'd been side-tracked though. Not by anything exciting, just by life, and before I knew it was the day before my next scheduled session. I was just thinking that I really should ring Frannie when my cellphone rang. "Can you grab my phone?" I asked Felicia. I was making dinner and she was sitting at the counter doing some homework.

"I'm not your slave" she grumbled, as she slowly reached for the phone, which was sitting on the kitchen bench.

"Hello" she said into the phone, as Amelia walked in. "Who's Felicia talking to?" she asked me, obviously concerned that Felicia had some kind of secret life going on.

"It's for me" I hissed, as I wiped my hands on a tea-towel and took the phone off Felicia. It was Frannie, who was very apologetic but said that she couldn't make our appointment the next day. I did an internal happy-dance that I was getting off the hook, but then she said she'd asked a favour from another trainer she knew and he was going to do the session.

Oh, well. Poo. That didn't help me get out of it at all. That just made me feel guilty that she'd gone to the effort to make sure I didn't miss out and now some other poor person was expecting me to turn up and be there. Crap, crap, crap.

So I thanked Frannie for doing that for me, and assured her I'd be there the next day to meet someone called…Quinn. God I hoped whoever that was, he was nicer to me than Frannie was.

"I thought you weren't going back to see the personal trainer?" Eric asked me, as I got ready the next day.

"I wasn't, but she couldn't make it, so it's someone else, and I didn't have the heart to cancel after they'd all arranged it. No doubt she has to pay him and the gym might not pay her if I don't show up."

"Um, I don't think you have to worry about that" Eric said. "You're not really solely responsible for their livelihoods."

"Yeah…but it's only once" I said, as I tied my sneakers. "And it can't be any worse than last time. Honestly, when Frannie said to me 'My grandmother could do better than that' I was tempted to leave there and then. I know that's her catch-phrase from TV, but I didn't think it was really necessary."

Eric frowned, and looked like he wanted to say something else. In the end he just said "Well, just do what makes you happy."

"I don't think it'll exactly make me happy, but it's only an hour. Surely I can survive an hour?"

I was slightly worried when I met the trainer that I wouldn't survive five minutes. He was huge and looked like what he probably was, which was a body-builder. He was bald and had one of those traditional Samoan thigh tattoos showing beneath his shorts. I wondered if he'd had it done the traditional way, with the little hammer rather than with the modern machines they used for tattoos now. He looked like he might be tough enough to cope with hours of hours of pain as the tattooist worked.

Probably that wasn't the thing I should have been focussing on. Probably I should have been working out how the hell I was going to get out of the session without him accidentally killing me. He couldn't be used to clients like me, surely? I bet he normally got rugby players and other body builders and maybe the occasional twig-like but still super-fit celebrity TV presenter. Not mums like me who hadn't done this kind of thing…well, since the last time their stupid friends talked them into a joining a gym back in the '90's.

Stupid bloody Tara.

Of course Tara kind of liked her trainer, but no, I got stuck with the scary ones. First Frannie with her face-pulling and judgement and now this guy. God knows what he'd do to me.

"OK, so you're Quinn?" I asked him, hoping that maybe I was wrong.

"I am" he said. "And you're Sookie? The client Frannie couldn't see?"

"Yeah, that's me" I said, without much enthusiasm. I looked into the room where they held the classes and wondered what was on. Spin class. I might like that. I might not like working out with Quinn.

"OK, so have you worked out much before?" he asked me.

"Only really last week, with Frannie. I've been here a couple of times with my friend Tara, since we signed up for membership. But mostly we used the treadmills. Before that…it was a long time ago. And I didn't really use much of…that…" I said, waving my hand to encompass pretty much all of the weight room.

"No problem" Quinn said, looking down at the clipboard he was holding, and then looking up again. He smiled at me, and I felt a little bit reassured. He seemed nice. I didn't think he'd deliberately try to the kill the poor woman he'd been left in charge of. For one thing, I thought the gym would take a dim view of people dropping dead while working out, and for another, well, I was kind of…I was kind of middle-aged. I really, really, really, hated that term, but it was true these days. I didn't feel any different, but I could see people were starting to treat me differently. I'd been called 'madam' not that long ago, and I couldn't remember the last time I got 'miss'. Surely no one expected middle-aged women to do much more than a few minutes on the treadmill and some crunches?

"OK. Let's get started" Quinn said, leading the way through the gym. I did my best to keep up, although I was fairly adept at this now, having spent quite a few years trying to keep pace with Eric. Even when Quinn started dodging around the equipment I didn't fall too far behind, because well, my house had a lot of kid's crap in it, all of it in the way all of the time.

"How about five minute's warm-up on the treadmill?" Quinn asked.

"Yep" I said. "I can do that." I stepped onto the machine and Quinn pushed all the buttons for me, which was helpful because I was still getting the hang of them and it seemed like every second machine in here had a different configuration. So that was a point in his favour. Last week Frannie had just stood there watching me, barely containing her frustration while I tried to figure out why pushing the 'Quick Start' button hadn't yielded anything other than a persistent request for me to enter my weight using the arrow buttons.

"I hope Frannie's OK" I said to Quinn as the treadmill started moving and began with a nice slow walk.

"She'll be fine" Quinn said dismissively. "And less likely to get such bad chest infections if she gave up smoking."

"She smokes?" I asked, sounding a bit shocked. Surely that wasn't part of her super-fit image, the one she had as an extremely minor TV celebrity.

Quinn shrugged. "She likes it because she thinks it keeps her thin, which is all she cares about. She'd also be better if she stopped the crazy diets, last one was a detox. Celery juice only for three weeks. She was a total bitch the whole time, every time we trained together she'd just sit there and bitch at me until I got her weights for her, and then she'd bitch about lifting the weights, and then she'd bitch that she was bloated and uncomfortable. It was all I could do not to tell her she was a bitch. I don't know why I put up with her."

Wow, that was a lot of information about Frannie. "So she's your girlfriend?" I asked.

Quinn snorted. "No way" he said. "We did our personal training diplomas together, and normally we train together. Although she says she's not competing this year, so it's just me."

"Body-building?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer.

"Yep" Quinn said. "I'm doing the Auckland Champs in June. I just gotta get my quads looking better, and my lats need a bit of work, too." He turned around so I could look at his lats. Honestly, all I could see was a wall of muscle in a tight t-shirt. I wasn't entirely sure what lats actually were.

"OK" I said, feeling somewhat at a loss.

Quinn made the treadmill speed up and I concentrated on not falling off, so conversation lapsed for a bit. When the five minutes was up he looked me up and down. "Your fitness isn't bad" he said. Nicely he didn't add 'for your age' but I wondered if he was thinking it.

"Well, I've been doing some Zumba classes for a couple of months now" I said. "Plus I run around after the kids a lot."

"How many do you have?" he asked.

"Five" I answered, and I waited to see what reaction I got. Usually there was surprise, but I got a lot of stuff besides that. Some people looked at me like I couldn't figure out contraception, or I'd joined a baby-breeding cult, or they made the obligatory joke about how we mustn't have a TV. Of course Eric never got any of that, there was always a kind of grudging admiration for the man who was obviously so remarkably virile that he was single-handedly populating the Mt Eden schools. Maybe that was a bit unfair, but I was pretty sure that's how it worked. I was a bit silly, he was amazingly potent.

Maybe that made us a good pair, I don't know.

But Quinn just shrugged. "Big family" he said. "You must be doing your Kegels, so that's good."

Oh, OK. I hadn't realised personal trainers were that concerned with every muscle in my body. It seemed a bit…weird. So I just nodded.

"Sorry" he said. "I didn't mean to upset you. It's just lots of women with kids give me a long list of stuff they can't, or won't, do due to, um, you know. Incontinence. So it's nice to not have too many restrictions."

"OK" I said, still feeling a bit weird, but maybe superior to these other mythical clients, that possibly Quinn had just made up to make me feel better. Who knew?

"So I think we'll start with some…legs" Quinn said. "Let's do some seated leg extensions."

"Um, OK" I said, not sure what that was until Quinn led me over to the machine. Right. That one. I did not have happy memories of the previous week and trying to get my legs to push the damn bar up while Frannie sighed and tutted and said "Stop! I'll drop the weight, then" like it was the biggest thing anyone had ever asked of her.

But Quinn, thank God, didn't start me out with such a heavy weight. I could actually get the thing to move first try. Although by the tenth repetition it wasn't feeling so good. "Ow" I said.

"Ow? What's ow?" Quinn asked, looking a bit concerned.

"Here" I said, pointing to the middle of my thigh. "It burns." Burning was never a good sign as far as I was concerned.

"Burning's a good sign" Quinn said. "Well, there it is. That's the muscle you need to work." He put his hand on my thigh. "Now lift again" he commanded, and I did, gritting my teeth and pushing the bar across my lower shins up with all my might. "Yep, that's working" Quinn said. "Good job, Sookie."

He moved his hand away, and smiled at me. And I smiled back. Sure it hurt, but it would pay off in the end, right? Plus I'd done a good job. Maybe this wasn't so bad.

By the end of that first session with Quinn, I was pretty exhausted, but in a totally different way to the previous week. Frannie had had me manically running around the gym, from exercise to exercise, constantly lowering weights and tweaking things and telling me I wasn't doing it right and I'd have to practice. A lot.

Whereas Quinn was much more organised and a lot less frantic. Also he had a better idea of what weight I could do, and it was more likely he'd increase my weights after the first set than drop them in disgust like Frannie had done. And that gave me a sense of achievement.

Also, he actually bothered to tell me what muscles each exercise was designed to work. He'd put his hands on me and show me. I learnt where my lats were, they ran down the side of my back below my arms. And I found that if I concentrated really, really hard during an exercise I could actually get the right muscles to 'fire' as Quinn put it. And every time I did that, well Quinn would say how well I'd done and I'd be pleased as punch. It felt good to be trying something new and not sucking at it totally.

"Well, that was a good session Sookie" Quinn said, when our hour was up. "So I'd advise doing a warm-down and a bit of stretching before you go home. And I'll see you around, sometime."

"Yeah, thanks for that" I said. "Um…is it possible to book another session with you?" I figured it would be worth it just to learn how to use all the equipment.

So the next week, I spent another hour with Quinn and the week after that as well. Although Frannie was back at work by then and glared at us across the weight room. Yeah, I guess as an independent contractor she wasn't pleased about seeing her potential income walking off with someone else, but tough. I liked Quinn better. She had her chance and she blew it.

But by then my cheap month's membership at the gym was up. I wasn't sure what to do. I liked working out, possibly even more than I'd liked Zumba. Not only did I get a challenge, something I hadn't had for a long time, but I also enjoyed my time on the treadmill at the end of the session. I could let my brain wander off without interruptions. It was blissful.

Tara however, had given up on the gym. "How do you feel about golf lessons?" she'd asked me.

"I think you need to talk to Felicia about that one" I said. "She'd love it. Me, I can't see the point of hitting the stupid ball around a field."

"It's a course, Sookie."

"Well, whatever. I like the gym."

"You do?" Tara said, wrinkling her nose. "Oh well."

So now I was in a quandary. Did I pay for an exorbitant year's membership up front, or an even more exorbitant pay by the month scheme? Or did I just cut my losses and give up as well?

"So, are you staying on at the gym?" Quinn asked me at the end of our session.

"Don't know" I confessed. "The receptionist was pressuring me before to sign up for a year, but I'm not sure if I really want to. It's kind of pricey at this gym."

"Yeah…" Quinn said. And then his voice dropped. "Hey, uh, I do know another gym where you could go. Most of my clients train there….it's just; well it's different to here, anyway."

"Cheaper?" I asked, immediately realising that I was never going to completely get rid of the legacy of being a Stackhouse.

"Yep" Quinn confirmed. "And, uh…well it has a different clientele. There's less, um, well it's mainly body-builders. A few power-lifters…" he trailed off. I got the picture, not many middle-aged women escaping from their families at that gym.

Still, how bad could it be?

"OK" I said. "Well, maybe I could try it there? Do you think they'd let me, just once?"

"Oh, I'm sure they would" Quinn said, his face brightening. "It's got new owners and they're trying to bring in new memberships right now."

"Cool" I said. "Let's set up a time." I'd give it a shot I thought, and if I didn't like it, I could walk away and go back to Zumba.

Maybe I'd even shout myself some new workout gear.

EPOV

It started with the stretchy pants. There hadn't been a lot of stretchy pants around recently because Sookie kept moaning about the size of her ass, her thighs and her stomach. I didn't see anything wrong with any of them, but she was convinced that after Pam's birth she'd ballooned into some kind of gigantic blob-person who everyone was going to find kind of gross.

So at first, when she'd started doing those exercise classes where you jumped around a lot, I had thought it was good thing. After all, if she was miserable then it made sense to do something about it. And as much as I was kind of sad that she was jumping around somewhere I couldn't see, you could pretty much guarantee that all the other participants would be other women or gay men, and the proportion of people in the room likely to get any enjoyment out of watching Sookie's boobs bouncing, was pretty close to zero.

At least, I hoped that was the case.

But at some point the whole going to whatever the fuck weird name that class had, had morphed into going to the gym. And training. With some guy. Called Quinn. While wearing stretchy pants. New stretchy pants. Bought specially, I assumed, for these trips to the gym, or training sessions, or whatever the fuck was going on.

I didn't want to be suspicious, because really, it was Sookie. And I doubted I had anything to be suspicious about. Sure, it hadn't been much fun the first time I'd suggested having sex and she'd brushed me off because she had sore muscles from the gym. And she hadn't been that impressed when I'd said that was OK, because she could just lie there if she liked.

So it wasn't that I thought the gym was just a front for something else. But still, it was kind of weird that she had this, well this whole other thing that I knew nothing about. I was just curious. That was all. I couldn't help but wonder what was going on when I was home with all the kids and Sam got stressed about what I was feeding them, Amelia tried to order everyone else around, Pam raced about giving a running commentary on what she was doing, "I runeen, I sitteen, I cwyeen", Tray tried repeatedly to tackle all of his siblings, and Felicia followed me around informing me what all the others were doing at any point in time. It could be kind of exhausting, but in a totally different way to how Sookie was being exhausted at the gym.

She'd come back tired, and sweaty, and complaining of some new term she'd learnt, delayed-onset muscle soreness or something, which would sometimes make her hobble about and wince when she sat down. But mostly, mostly she looked happy when she came back.

And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

I mean, I'd gone to gyms before. Sure, not recently, but I kind of knew what happened. And it wasn't ever that fucking great. I didn't think the whole gym experience was that fucking wonderful.

And then I wondered whether Sookie expected me to join a gym as well, not that I could go at the same time Sookie did. Aside from the fact it technically wasn't legal to leave the kids alone yet, I wasn't sure we'd still have five of them when we got back. But when I suggested the idea to Sookie she was kind of off-hand about it saying, "I don't think you need to. You still run with Calvin occasionally, and then there's the kids…" And I could get her point; just a trip to the park beside Mt Eden could be a workout in itself with five kids. I could easily spend nearly an hour getting them all on and off the flying fox and running along beside it, and then the boys would always want to climb up the rocks beside the park into the rather fucking scary looking parts of the bush, where obviously the vagrants and teenagers hung out at night, and try to find the best sticks to turn into swords. So that really did fucking keep me fit.

I just wasn't sure that Sookie needed to quite put as much effort into getting fit at the gym. It just…well, it didn't seem like her, somehow. It wasn't that I didn't want her to change, or get new interests, or have a life outside the house, or any of that. I wasn't a selfish ass.

Well, I liked to think I wasn't.

But it still made me uncomfortable all the same. And I knew why it did, and it was for the stupidest fucking reason in the world because Sookie was not my mother and this was not the fucking PTA fronting for some kind of affair.

But it was weird all the same.

And then, when it had been going on for a couple of months I finally got my chance to find out what went on. We were doing schedule night when Sookie suddenly said "Oh yeah, I'm not training on Wednesday night because Quinn has a modelling thing."

"Modelling?" Who the fuck was this guy?

"Yeah, he's a sports model, so he's off at Piha for the day, doing, I don't know what…"

"What's sports modelling?" I interrupted.

"Um…don't really know. I assume you model sports stuff. Maybe surf-wear if it's at Piha? Anyway, the point is my training got moved to Saturday afternoon."

"Oh, um. OK." I wasn't thrilled about trying to entertain five kids by myself, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

"So maybe you could come to the gym at the same time? They said I could get you in on a guest pass?" Sookie looked at me hopefully. Well, this was new. I hadn't been asked to go before.

"Um…but what about the kids?" I asked. I couldn't see the five of them sitting quietly in the reception area of a gym for more than about ten minutes. Maybe not even five minutes. Maybe even two would be pushing it, because ever since Sam started school Tray had made it his mission to annoy the shit out of Sam at every opportunity. I wasn't sure whether it was his age, his personality, the fact he was worried his buddy was doing interesting stuff without him, or a combination of all of it, but keeping the pair of them from killing each other was a full time occupation.

So, yeah. No fucking way were our kids going to sit down and behave for any amount of time.

"Well I think I've fixed that" Sookie said. "See?" she pointed to some tiny writing in a square on her calendar. "Amelia is going to Chloe's birthday party _and_ it's a sleepover. Her mothers are a bit nuts, I think. Felicia is going to Caitlin's for the afternoon to make up for the fact she's not having a sleepover. I think they're going ice-skating and then to McDonald's. And so that leaves us with three problems to dump over the fence at Kennedy's, if I ask her nicely. So that should work."

It sounded promising. "We'll just have to remind Sam about the spiders" I said.

"Yeah…" Sookie said. "Ever since he found out Kennedy's a bit phobic he keeps trying to give them to her, and no matter how many times I tell her that she's got nothing to fear from Avondale spiders, she doesn't believe me."

"No, so we'll tell him to quit with the spiders, because otherwise Kennedy will do that funny hand-flapping dance you did when he showed you that weta."

"I didn't flap my hands!" Sookie said, indignantly. "I was just trying to show him to where the weta needed to go."

"Uh-huh, sure" I agreed. "But I'll tell him, no spiders for Kennedy, and no wetas for you."

"No wetas for _anyone_" Sookie grumbled. "They need to just be left alone, in their natural habitat."

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"They're native…insects, Eric. You shouldn't mess with them."

"Sure. But it's not at all because they scare the fuck out of you."

"Sometimes you scare the fuck out of me, Eric, but mostly I'm used to whole crackers with soup thing now."

SPOV

I had never thought I would be the type of person who'd really, really love the gym. Especially not working out at the gym. With weights. It always seemed a bit scary and intimidating, and I think when I'd joined a gym with Tara before we had mainly stuck to the cardio circuit, followed by many long chats in the sauna. I certainly hadn't worked this hard.

And having a personal trainer, well, having Quinn as a personal trainer had certainly meant that I was working hard when I was at the gym. I was getting used to having sore muscles after a work-out now, but at first it took me by total surprise. I hurt. All over. It wasn't fun.

And I think it took Eric by surprise too. Certainly the first time he announced that he was horny, in a typically subtle Eric-fashion by pinning me to the bathroom vanity with his groin and saying "I'm horny", and I had to admit that really I was too sore to attempt anything due to a heavy work-out the previous day, Eric looked a bit pissed. Well, a lot pissed. He didn't say anything, but I was pretty sure that my punishment was the tickling that he and Pam subjected me to the next morning. Pam had poky little fingers and a tendency to yell "Tiggle Tiggle!" in your ear as she was trying to tickle you. She thought it was a huge laugh, and me telling her that we weren't a tickling family, in the same way we tried, mostly in vain, to tell all the kids that we weren't a hitting family, didn't work when her dad was leading the charge.

But I could cope with the tickling and the sad faces when there was no sex. What I was finding a little bit worrying was Eric's increasing surprise that I needed a personal trainer. He would kind of ask me what it was he actually did that I couldn't do myself and it was hard to explain really. I mean, I knew that if I didn't have someone standing there pushing me to up my weights I probably wouldn't be working out as hard as I was. But did that make me lazy? I wasn't sure, so I was a bit cagey with my explanations to Eric.

He did seem to show an interest in my new gym clothes. The first time I put them on he examined me closely and said "New pants." I nodded and went back to trying to get my sneakers on. Eric then ran his hands over my backside before frowning. "Are you not wearing underwear?" he asked.

I was tempted to point out that he was being a little bit personal, but instead I just shrugged and said "G-string". It wasn't comfortable, but I didn't really want to have everyone staring at my knicker line and my new work-out pants were kind of clingy.

"Really?" Eric asked, as he pulled the waist-band of the pants out, trying to get a look.

"Yes" I said, swatting him away and turning around. He just decided to stare at my chest then.

"Your boobs look kind of flat though" he commented.

"It's kind of the point, Eric. If I don't strap them down I'll end up in all kinds of trouble."

"Yeah…" he muttered, and then he had to go and find out what all the shouting from Sam was about this time.

And then he started wondering whether he should join the gym. And although we knew that if he joined my gym we couldn't both go at the same time, I figured it was probably time to take him along so he could see what it was like. And maybe meet Quinn. Or maybe not, because I wasn't sure I really wanted them in the same room, or gym, together. It would be weird. Like combining two totally separate worlds.

But I should probably do it anyway. So when Quinn had to move my training to a Saturday I invited Eric along. It meant finding a selection of places to stash our kids, and I was never sure how much Kennedy really enjoyed having the boys. Pam wasn't a problem, mostly she wanted to wear Kassidy's clothes, much to Kassidy's dismay, and the entire visit would consist of Pam repeatedly removing her track-suit pants and putting on Kassidy's skirts, while Kassidy looked on horrified. She didn't have to live with a communal wardrobe like the kids in my family did. But the boys were a bit of a handful even for us, so I always felt a bit bad shuffling them on to someone else.

It was only for an hour or so though, so I hoped that Kennedy would cope, or, at the very least, that it wouldn't rain so when she locked the pair of them outside with Max the dog she wouldn't feel too bad about it.

So that just left me with worrying about what Eric was going to think of my gym. When I'd first turned up at the place, after Quinn had said he'd show me, it wasn't quite what I expected. I felt quite intimidated for one thing. I was about the only woman there, and certainly the only one who wasn't a body-builder. And all the guys were huge. They were mostly Maori or Pacific Islanders, and wearing those belts around their waists which denoted how serious they were about lifting those weights. Heavy weights. Really heavy weights.

I worried that I was going to stand out like a sore thumb. There certainly weren't many other white, middle-aged women having a quick work-out there. It was just me, really.

But it wasn't that bad. In fact it was quite good. In some ways, it was less intimidating than the previous gym. For one thing there were less thin women in lycra. Sure the odd girlfriend would turn up wearing her best work-out clothes but I didn't feel like anyone was comparing me to them. And if they were, sod them.

I didn't think they were though. The guys were friendly, but not too friendly. They'd say hello, and maybe help me with my weights if Quinn wasn't around, but mostly they just let me be and I let them get on with lifting half a house. It was lovely to just be a person in the background for once and not the focus of everyone's attention because they wanted me to do something.

EPOV

We spent the early part of the afternoon ferrying our children to various places and telling them to behave. I was hoping for at least a 90% strike rate with that, any more would be pushing our luck totally. But eventually it was nearly time for Sookie's training session at the gym and we headed there. The gym wasn't quite what I expected.

Somehow I maybe hadn't paid that much attention to the fact she'd changed gyms at some point and I was still picturing the first place she'd gone, the really upmarket gym that Tara had picked out. This one, in an industrial part of Mt Eden, was not so upmarket. It was in a large building, behind an office supplies store and near to the railway crossing.

As Sookie pulled into the parking lot I glanced at the large blue sign on the parking lot opposite it. It read Mt Eden Correctional Facility. "Is this near the prison?" I asked Sookie.

"Yeah" she said, as she parked the car.

"Is that safe? When you come here at night?" I tried to see if the parking lot had many lights. It didn't look like it did.

Sookie sighed. "I don't think the inmates will be hanging around the prison long enough to get me if they do escape" she said. "And anyway, one of the guys inside would come out if I screamed."

Yeah, right. From what Sookie had said, this gym seemed to be populated mainly with body builders. I had assumed they were all men until the time she announced that "One of the body builders said I had a really sexy walk when I was on the treadmill tonight." That statement had been slightly fucking worrying and I'd had mental images of a gym full of guys standing behind Sookie as she swung her hips to the music, oblivious to their attentions. But then she'd burst out laughing and said "Don't worry; it was one of the women body builders. Her name's Linda. She's actually really nice when you talk to her, but she's not competing this year because she had to have some bowel surgery."

So it was possible there were lesbian body builders there as well, which didn't really get rid of the uneasy feelings I had that Sookie and her stretchy fucking pants were just heading for trouble. Add in escaped convicts and anything could happen.

And that was before you even included Quinn. Quinn who, according to Sookie, was the best fucking thing to ever happen to a gym.

We got out of the car and walked towards the entrance. The place didn't look much better on the inside, and it certainly hadn't had a lot of money spent on it. It was pretty fucking dismal. I couldn't believe Sookie liked it here.

Standing by the reception desk was a tall guy. A tall, bald guy. Holding a black and white cat which could have been related to Bob. Well, that was fucking weird.

"Hey, Quinn" Sookie said to the guy. "I brought Eric." He reached out one hand to shake mine and I took it. Why the fuck he was holding a cat I had no clue.

"Hey, Sooty" Sookie said to the cat, before scratching him behind the ears. That made him purr. "Oh" she said. "I brought him something." Quinn put the cat on the ground and Sookie pulled some of Bob's cat treats out of the pocket of her jacket and put them down for him. There was more rusty-sounding purring as the cat gobbled them up even faster than Bob did.

"Are they pretty good?" Sookie asked the cat, and then she turned to me. "Doesn't he look like Bob?" she asked. "I wonder if they're related?"

I shrugged. Who the fuck knew how cat lineage worked?

"He's the gym's cat" Sookie continued. "He's been here since he was a kitten and this was a sheet-metal works." Sookie was still scratching the cat behind the ears while Quinn looked on fondly. I had no fucking clue what was going on, but it didn't seem to be a work-out. Did the pair of them just hang out with the cat every fucking time she came? I hoped like fuck Bob didn't find out because he'd be jealous as shit if he thought Sookie was seeing another cat on the side. Thank fuck he'd never know.

Me, I wasn't sure whether I had to be jealous or not. I looked at Quinn again. Sure, he was a big guy…but he had that weird fucking tattoo on his leg. I didn't think Sookie was the type to like guys with tattoos. Or bald guys. Or guys who probably stood around holding surf boards while they got their pictures taken. No, I couldn't imagine her actually wanting to spend any time with Quinn, if it wasn't for their mutual interest in some poor fucking cat.

So while Bob had a reason to be jealous, I was pretty sure I was OK. And I wasn't really jealous anyway. And I was just here for the work-out and to show an interest.

So it was all good.

Eventually the mutual purr-fest broke up and Sookie walked over to the reception desk. "Is it OK if I get Eric in today? As a guest?" she asked the receptionist, and the woman nodded. Sookie swiped her membership card to get in through the gate, and then the receptionist buzzed Quinn and I through. I wasn't sure if it was a good sign or a bad sign that I was 'Eric' and not 'my husband' to these people. Did that mean she'd already told them about me, or did it mean she was just bringing me along as another person that she knew?

Fuck, I had no clue. But I wasn't jealous, I knew that much.

And at least she hadn't said 'life-partner', because probably that was what all the lesbian body-builders brought with them.

Sookie walked over to some lockers and put her handbag inside, after pulling out her towel and water-bottle, and then she closed it and went to walk off. "Shouldn't you have a lock for that?" I asked.

She laughed. "Yeah, no one's going to steal my stuff, Eric. It's not that big a gym. And we all kind of know each other anyway."

I shrugged. It didn't seem safe, but, fuck it. If she had to cancel all her credit cards then she'd figure out she was wrong. In the meantime I followed Sookie and Quinn, who were now deep in conversation, through the weight room to where the cardio equipment was. It was a little chilly in here, due to the fact that in lieu of any kind of air-conditioning they'd just put up the large roller doors in the side of the building.

Sookie stepped onto a treadmill and pushed some buttons to get it to start moving. I got onto the one next to her and tried to do the same, but I couldn't quite get it. In the end Quinn pushed something and it started.

"Thanks" I said, wishing like fuck he'd just butt out and left me to do it by myself. I wasn't fucking paying him to train me.

"No worries" Quinn said, and then he went back to looking at Sookie as she power-walked along chatting. I watched Quinn watching Sookie and realised where his eyes were. Fuck. I'd thought that a bunch of guys standing behind her might be bad, but now I realised that any guys standing in front of her got a pretty good view too. Sure, whatever the fuck it was she put on under her work-out top did a pretty good job of holding her boobs down, but nothing was going to be 100% effective on that front. And Quinn was currently reaping the benefits of that.

Fucker.

And so I copied Sookie and walked along on the treadmill and just glared at fucking Quinn who was pretty oblivious to what an ass he was being. Fuck, you think he'd have some respect for his clients. Who were paying him. To be professional. And not stare at their boobs.

After about five minutes Sookie stopped her treadmill. "I'm going to start the session, you OK here?" she asked me.

"Yeah, I might run for a bit. And then, um…do some weights." I looked around the room. Fuck, some of those guys were lifting serious amounts of weight.

"OK" Sookie said, before jumping off the treadmill and walking off with Quinn.

I increased the speed and started jogging, while keeping one eye on Sookie and Quinn. They didn't seem to be doing anything particularly odd, although I could see Sookie kept talking to him a lot. I could only see she was talking because the constant soundtrack of Metallica, Linkin Park, and bizarrely, Def Leppard, drowned out most of the other sounds in the gym, apart from the occasional loud clank of weights, or a shout from someone straining with a lift.

Sookie did, I notice, stop talking when she was on the leg press, but only when she was actually doing her sets. And when she was, with her feet flat on the board pressing the weights up with all her might, she got a really fucking determined look on her face. A look that only came out a few times, most notably when she was giving birth.

So that was a bit fucking weird. I mean, having a baby wasn't fun. Fuck knows, I'd been there, and there was nothing fun about it. Pam's birth had been downright fucking traumatic. And yet here Sookie was, pushing herself in the same way for…I had no fucking clue why. Because she wanted to be thinner? Surely if that was all she wanted she should be over here running with me, and not over there watching Quinn add more weight to the leg press machine while she glared at him.

Then they switched to the leg extension and did one set, and then another on that. She was really fucking glaring at him at now. And he was smirking. The prick. Because he'd had his foot on the machine for the last set making Sookie work harder than ever to lift the bar up. And Sookie had realised and was pissed as all fuck at him. This was totally understandable, because, quite frankly, the guy was a total fucking tool. You didn't piss your clients off like that by playing dirty tricks on them. You were supposed to respect their boundaries.

And not stare at their tits.

Quinn laughed and Sookie looked like she wanted to punch him in the nuts. I kind of hoped she would. Maybe use one of the dumbbells even. That could be quite entertaining.

And then I realised a couple of things. One was that I would pay good money to watch Sookie beat the shit out of Quinn, because he just fucking annoyed me. The other was that if it came to a match between Sookie and Quinn, my money was on Sookie. She was pretty fucking tough. The woman had had five kids after all.

Yep, she could fucking destroy him if she had to.

Safe in that knowledge I gave up on the treadmill and went to do some weights myself, glancing over at Sookie and Quinn only occasionally. Annoyingly, they seemed to have made up and when Sookie was on the seated row machine, they were back to fucking patting that cat again, because he was trying to share the seat with Sookie.

Bob was going to be so seriously fucking pissed with her.

The cat finally gave up its spot next to Sookie's ass and Sookie went back to her exercise. And then was when I realised something else. Sookie had fucking muscles. You could see them, in her back, when she pulled the handles of the machine towards her. That was…well, it wasn't that I thought Sookie was delicate or anything like that. And I definitely didn't think she was the brick out-house she sometimes called herself, but I just didn't necessarily think of Sookie as having muscles. Sure, she must have them, otherwise she'd never be able to throw Tray over her shoulder and carry him off to the naughty spot when he was being particularly annoying, because he wasn't a small kid.

None of the kids were that small. Apart from Pam. And she just hadn't caught up yet.

No, this was something different. This was like…fuck it. I didn't know what it was like. It was pretty fucking hot though. And I was pretty fucking pissed that Quinn kept putting his hand in the middle of Sookie's back like that as she was doing her reps. That was just…unprofessional, surely? I mean couldn't he just watch her back to see if she was doing it right?

I had been intending to do some bicep curls but at some point I'd given up and was just watching Sookie. One of the big guys wandered over, a young Polynesian guy who was possibly in his '20's. "You alright, mate?" he said to me.

"Yeah" I said. "I'm great."

"Oh, you're with Sookie, eh?" he said, smiling. "She said she had an American husband, eh? My cousin's from American Samoa."

"OK" I wasn't sure what to say to that. I guessed it was nice that someone here knew I was married to Sookie, but I hoped like fuck I wasn't supposed to know this cousin. But the guy just grabbed some weights and nodded to me again, and then lumbered slowly back down the gym again.

I started doing what I actually came here to do, which was work out, and after a few minutes Sookie and Quinn walked past me. Well Quinn walked past. Sookie actually stopped and asked if I was doing OK, and I said I was, and then she carried on to another area with Quinn.

I did a few more sets, kind of half-heartedly. The gym wasn't really my thing. Sure, I'd used to belong to one in Shreveport and I'd gone pretty often, but it was more because I thought I should go. And I didn't have much else to do outside of work.

Plus it was usually full of women. This one was a fucking dead loss if you were looking to pick anyone up. There was one other woman here, apart from Sookie, but I was pretty sure she was in the lesbian body builder camp. So really, Sookie was it.

Fuck, was that why she was so popular?

Because I had noticed that most of the guys here seemed to know her, and would smile, or say hello as she passed. They didn't look like the kind of guys who were here to pick up women of course, they seemed more concerned about getting as many weight plates on their barbells as they possibly could, and then proving to their buddies that they could lift the most. So I guessed she was safe, from them.

Quinn was a different matter. Sure he was big like the other guys here, but most of them looked kind of fat as much as anything. Quinn was kind of muscly, and Sookie obviously liked him.

I realised I'd pay good money to watch anyone beat the shit out of Quinn. Because in some totally irrational part of my brain, he was fucking annoying me by paying that much attention to Sookie. And sure, he was doing it because she was a client, and it was his job, but did he have to smile at her quite so fucking much?

And I really fucking did not see why Sookie doing shoulder raises required Quinn to have his hands on her sides. If they got any higher he was going to be touching the sides of her boobs.

I wondered if that other guy would wander back so I could tell him I did know his cousin. Maybe he'd beat up Quinn for me? He was a pretty big guy. I was sure he could do it.

Eventually I decided it was all too fucking much and I went back to the treadmill. I think I'd liked it better when I didn't know what went on here. Or when I thought that Sookie was being indoctrinated into a nest of lesbian body builders. Because the lesbians I could beat the shit out of myself.

I looked over at the female body builder again.

I could maybe beat the shit out of them myself. Or sic Tray on them, he was pretty fucking rough. At any rate, I figured Sookie was pretty safe with lesbians. They'd maybe see her as some kind of exotic pet…or something. But Quinn, yeah, he was fucking touching her again. That man had no boundaries and it pissed me off.

Sookie finally appeared on the treadmill next to me, looking sweaty and flushed like she normally did after a workout. I guessed it was nice to have proof that it was the result of actual exercise, and not some other activity. Even if the exercises involved her being felt-up by a large bald man with a ridiculous fucking tattoo on his leg.

And why was he bald anyway?

"So have you been OK without me?" she asked, wiping her face on her towel and starting the treadmill up.

"Yep" I said, probably a bit tersely. "I am fine."

"OK" Sookie said slowly. She was quiet for a bit, although the music continued to blare over the speakers. It really was fucking loud in here. "It wasn't that bad, was it?" she said in the end.

I wanted to tell her it was really fucking bad, and that it was pretty fucking awful watching Quinn continually feel her up, but she looked kind of happy and I didn't want to bring her down.

I'd tell her later, I decided. I'd tell her later that she probably should find a new trainer that wasn't going to stare at her boobs and touch her inappropriately and generally just be a douche. Because fuck, I didn't think this Quinn guy was the right trainer for her.

I shrugged. "It was OK" I said.

"I like it here" Sookie said. "It's nice and peaceful." I couldn't see what was so peaceful about the blaring music and the guys shouting and dropping weights. Mostly it was just like a big, noisy fucking barn. With weight machines.

Sookie stopped the treadmill and jumped off. "I'm going to go and stretch" she said, and she walked over to the area where the mats were. By the time I got there, Quinn was already there, talking to her again. And helping her stretch out her hamstrings, by holding her leg and pushing it back over her head while she lay on her back.

Well that was fucking intimate. I kind of felt a bit surplus to requirements joining them, so I hesitated and Quinn caught my eye. "You should stretch too, Eric" he said, which fucked me off because I sure as fuck wasn't paying him to tell me what to do.

"Yeah" I agreed. So I lay on the mat next to Sookie and did a few half-hearted stretches. It wasn't something I was really good at. Which of course, Quinn fucking noticed and he tried to help me, by doing the same thing to my leg that he'd done to Sookie's. Fuck, he didn't understand about personal space. At all.

Eventually, it was time to go. Thank fuck for that. "OK, I'll see you at the usual time on Wednesday?" Quinn asked Sookie.

"Yeah" she said, smiling at him. "I'll be there."

Fucker.

SPOV

All the way home from the gym, Eric was a bit quiet, and I wasn't sure why. Well I kind of guessed why. He was a bit pissed that I had a life outside the home, that he wasn't a part of. I hoped that was it anyway. I hoped it wasn't something worse, like he preferred me to be a fat, lazy housewife, forever chained to the kitchen sink.

Something was up anyway.

So we got home and I parked in the driveway and looked over at Kennedy's house. "I suppose we should go and get the kids" I said. "Before they do something we'll regret. Who's less sweaty?" I looked over at Eric.

"Maybe we should shower first?" he said. "The kids are probably fine for the moment. I can't hear them."

I snorted. "We haven't got out of the car yet."

"Yeah, but our kids are loud, remember? We'd hear them. So they're fine. But we're…well, you need a shower." He opened his door and got out of the car.

"And you sound like Amelia" I muttered, getting out myself and hoping there weren't any faces at Kennedy's window likely to rumble us. Because I had to admit, a child-free house sounded pretty good. Even better than a child-free gym.

I followed Eric inside as he walked past Bob who was hanging out near the front door. "Yeah, you should fucking worry" Eric muttered in Bob's direction. Poor Bob, Eric was always threatening to not feed him.

"I'll be back soon, Bob" I said, as he looked up at me pleadingly.

By the time I got to the ensuite Eric was already naked and had the shower turned on. He still seemed in a weird mood. "Are you sure you're OK?" I asked him.

"Yep" he said, stepping into the shower and not really looking at me. I sighed, and then took off my clothes and followed him in.

"You're not um…you're not feeling funny about me going to the gym?" I asked Eric.

"What?" he asked.

"The gym. I mean…does it bother you? You know, because I'm spending time off by myself?"

EPOV

I knew I was being kind of an ass, but I couldn't seem to stop. I mean Sookie wasn't doing anything wrong, and it wasn't her fault that Quinn was the biggest fucking ass in the world. And now that I didn't have to watch him touching her any longer I could probably admit that he hadn't really been doing anything inappropriate. But maybe he'd wanted to.

I couldn't really stop him wanting to though. Fuck, I wanted to touch Sookie most of the time. And now we were both in the shower together I really wanted to move on from thinking about Quinn and onto more touching Sookie.

"No, it's fine" I said to her. "It's no problem really…it's just, not what I expected I guess."

"I know!" Sookie laughed. "It's not the girliest gym in the world. But it kind of suits me. I mean, mostly they all just leave me alone and I don't feel like anyone's judging me or anything. It's lovely really. And it's so quiet! There's no voices when I'm all by myself at the gym. Although it was kind of nice to have you there today to talk to when I was on the treadmill. Normally I plan out the menus for the week while I'm walking."

And then it hit me. She didn't actually count Quinn. She kept talking about being at the gym by herself. Fuck, he might as well have been a piece of the equipment for all she cared about him.

"It was nice to be there with you" I said, looking her in the eyes. Mostly. Mostly I was looking her in the eyes. "So how tired are you after the workout?" I asked.

"Yeah, I noticed you stashed that in here" Sookie said, pointing to the bottle of lube I'd put on the shelf before Sookie joined me. Shower sex was great, but you kind of needed the help. And at this point, we'd had so much post-baby sex that we were past the embarrassment.

"Well, it pays to be prepared" I said, putting my arms around Sookie. "Plus, you looked hot working out. You've got muscles" I reached up and started massaging her shoulders.

"Yeah, not really. I've seen the people who work out at that gym. I think even Sooty has more muscles than me. But he's had a hard life."

"You're going to make Bob jealous" I warned her.

"Phfft. Bob knows he's my number one cat" Sookie said. "I don't think he minds me talking the occasional other cat."

"Not even when you're sharing the seated row machine with the other cat?" I asked.

"Well, it's not like I'm sharing a bed with him. Or my lap. Bob knows what's what."

Yeah, Bob was probably OK. I bent down to kiss Sookie and forgot completely about the other cats she'd been touching.

The seat in our shower had been a fucking brilliant idea on my part, because it solved the whole problem of Sookie being too short otherwise for shower sex. And when Sookie lowered herself down onto me, as I sat on the seat, I pretty much figured I was Sookie's number one…well, whatever the fuck she told people I was. Eric I guess. She didn't have another Eric after all.

"That was the best after-work-out work-out I've had in a while" Sookie said, as we towelled off.

"Yeah" I said. "It was great. It made going to the gym totally fucking worthwhile."

Sookie laughed. "Yeah, not your thing was it?"

I shrugged. "I think I prefer just…well, the gym of life really."

"Yeah, you've got the kids to keep you fit" Sookie said. "They do a pretty good job."

"They drive me fucking mental" I said. "But at least I get to run it off."

Sookie laughed again, and I figured out something else. I was the only one that got this laugh from her. Quinn got the polite 'I think I should laugh now' laugh, but this one, the genuine 'yeah, I know completely what you mean' laugh. This was for me. Only me.

"Yep, it seems almost a shame to go and get them from next door" Sookie said, "But Felicia will be home after dinner and she might get too excited if she thinks she's suddenly an only child."

I laughed at that. Yep, this was nice. Just me and Sookie hanging out.

"So what is for dinner?" I asked. "You know, if you've been hanging out at the gym preparing menus?"

"Oh, um. The Mediterranean fish bake. The one with the tomato soup and the breadcrumbs, you know?"

I thought for a bit. "Is that the one that has zucchini in it?" I asked.

Sookie stopped drying herself and rolled her eyes. "No, it's got courgettes in it. Honestly you're as bad as Sam who's kind of obsessed with what has 'sting onions' in it. Trying to tell him they're really spring onions is a losing battle."

"Oh, OK. I like that dinner." I did, and it sounded way better without the zucchini.

"Yeah, well thank God I'm feeding you and not someone like Quinn" Sookie said, walking into the bedroom.

Fuck, did she have to mention his name? I'd been on quite a nice post-sex high, and that was guaranteed to bum me out. "Quinn?" I asked.

"Well, any of them really. The body builders. They eat such weird meals. You know he's spent about three weeks now living on cabbage and chicken. With curry powder for flavouring. He says it's his favourite, but, I don't know. It sounds like a recipe for disaster."

"Yeah…" I said. It certainly didn't seem like a recipe for fucking romance. "Maybe he could even give Tray a run for his money?"

"Yeah, well you guys have to stop laughing and encouraging him" Sookie said, opening a drawer and taking out some underwear. "He's only four; he doesn't quite get the social nuances yet."

"He's fucking impressive though" I said. "You have to admit that."

"I'm admitting nothing. And it's all your half of the DNA anyway. Let's just hope he never takes up body building, because apparently Quinn's mother is completely bamboozled by the diet and keeps trying to feed him up on taro."

"Um…he lives with his mother?" I asked.

"Yeah…mother, sister, auntie…a whole bunch of them. In Mt Roskill."

OK. Total fucking loser. I knew it. "Well, I think Tray'll be OK" I said.

"Yeah" Sookie said absently. "But let's hope Kennedy survived their visit."

"Without any spiders."

"Did you warn them?" Sookie asked.

"Um…probably" I said. No, I hadn't, but I was pretty sure Sam had the idea by now. Surely the yelling and the flapping hands were great big fucking indicators.

"Yeah. Should be OK then" Sookie said, pulling on her jeans. "OK, let's go and get them."

"Or…we could have coffee first?" I suggested. Sookie glanced at the clock on her nightstand.

"Yeah, bugger it. Let's have coffee first. It might the last time Kennedy ever offers; we should make the most of it while it's just us."

"I'll start the coffee machine then" I said, walking out of the room and giving Sookie a pat on her ass as I passed. Fuck it, maybe the gym wasn't so bad for her after all.

**A/N ****Papatoetoe is pronounce Pap-ah-toe-ee-toe-ee (but is more correctly Pap-ah-toy-toy).**

**Waikaraka Park (Why-ka-rack-ah) is where they hold the stock car races and demolition derbys.**

**Remmers is short for Remuera (Rem-u-ear-ah), which is the suburb Tara lives in. It's quite posh.**

**St Cuth's is short for St Cuthberts. Dio is short for Diocescan. They're the two very up-market private girls' schools in Auckland.**

**Georgie Pie was a NZ fast food restaurant until they all got bought out by McDonald's. Still so sad. East Tamaki Road is pronounced East Tam(like Pam)-ack-ee Road.**

**We say plaits instead of braids. So we plait hair, or put it in plaits.**

**Courgette is what we call zucchini, but don't tell Eric they're the same!**

**Taro (Tah-row) is a Polynesian root vegetable.**

**And yeah, I used to be a body-builder. Not one of the scary lesbian ones, and not a steriod taking cheat (it's banned in NZ), but I used to eat a weird diet and live at the gym. And lift very, very heavy weights. And then paint myself a weird bronze colour for competitions. Not sure what's the weirdest hobby I've had, that or writing fan-fiction. It's a close contest, I'm sure :)**

**Thanks for reading!**


	110. Bonus Chapter: Rest In Peace

**A/N So here it is, this is the final chapter (finally!) for this story. I've at last got through all the gaps I intended to fill in to take us up to the epilogue at the end of Homestay. A huge, huge thank you to all of you for sticking around and continuing to read the stuff I put out there, and for letting me know what you thought of it all. It meant a lot to me.**

**There will be another story after this, and possibly a one-shot before that, so stay posted. I'm not around much the next week or so, so if I don't reply to your review, it is on my to-do list and I still appreciate the effort!**

**Disclaimer: Not even after all this time would I ever be able to lay claim to any of these characters.**

SPOV

I was kind of worried about Bob. Granted, it was the middle of winter and he never did a lot in the middle of winter. Mostly he tried to find somewhere very, very quiet and child-free and just hunker down for the day, appearing only for meals. Of course trying to find somewhere child-free was usually easier said than done around our house, but Bob was pretty enterprising and also good at blending in with the stuff in the linen cupboard, so that it sometimes took me a moment to work out why my clean towels were coming up with cat fur all over them.

But this seemed different. He didn't look right. It was hard to describe why he didn't look right, but if I had to I would say he looked miserable.

Of course when I said this to Eric, he looked at me like I was an idiot. "I don't think he does, Sookie" Eric said, as he was putting the lasagne dish away in the high cupboard for me. "I don't think cats do look miserable."

I sighed. "But it's Bob…and he's just not himself."

Eric snorted. "He's exactly himself, he was trying to trip me up earlier so I'd feed him."

"Oh" I said, looking over to Bob's bowl. "Did you feed him?"

"Well, I didn't exactly have a fucking choice" Eric said. "If you don't, he doesn't fucking go away."

"But he didn't eat the food" I pointed out. "Look." Eric did look over at the bowl, and then he frowned.

"Bob probably got someone else to feed him afterwards" he said.

"Well I don't know who" I said, taking some plates out of the dishwasher. "Usually no one ever wants to feed him because it's not exactly an exciting job."

"Sam?" Eric suggested, as he moved some cups out of the dishwasher and placed them neatly next to the coffee machine.

"No, I don't think he's that enamoured of Bob" I said. "Mostly he just ignores him."

"Well, maybe he's finally figured out how to get his food out of the pantry himself" Eric said. "Coffee?"

"Yeah" I said, gathering up the cutlery to return that to its drawer. But I was still worried about Bob.

The next day I found Bob sitting on top of the dryer in the laundry, enjoying the sun that was coming through the window. "Are you OK?" I asked him.

Bob just looked at me and blinked. He looked old and tired. When he did get so old?

I reached out my hand and patted his back. "It's OK Bob baby" I said to him. He managed to cobble together a purr for me, but I wasn't sure his heart was in it.

"I think I might have to take Bob to the vet's" I said to Eric that night, as we got into bed.

"Has he been fighting?" Eric asked.

"No. No it's not an abscess." That was the trouble with cat's mouths, they were germy things and they did insist on biting each other during territory wars. And when abscesses burst, boy did they smell.

"So…OK" Eric said, clearly not that interested in Bob if there wasn't the prospect of foul-smelling pus ending up on something important.

"I just…I just don't know where the time went" I said.

"I know" Eric said. "I think it was better when Pam didn't know so many words. When we went to the mall after I picked her up today I got a five minute presentation on why the Tinkerbell needs a friend. She's lonely, and apparently the Barbies and Kens are kind of boring. There's some dark-haired fairy that's dying to move in here, just currently she's residing in the toy department of Farmers."

Well that wasn't quite what I meant, because I was talking about Bob, but I guessed it was kind of along the same lines. Also, it made me curious.

"You went to St Luke's after you picked her up?"

"Um…what?" Eric said.

"You heard." That might work with the kids, but not with me.

Eric shrugged. "I am not admitting to anything" he said, while smiling at me. I kind of got why he would have been there, it wasn't long until my birthday. I wondered if I could get any information out of Pam.

Probably not, she might be great at talking now, but that didn't mean she didn't enjoy a good secret now and then. And I could pretty much guarantee there'd been a sweetener for keeping her mouth shut. Ice cream at least. Or..."So, you bought her the doll, I take it?" I asked Eric.

"Well…she had some points…" Eric mumbled.

"About one plastic doll needing another plastic doll as a friend?" I asked.

"I think it was more about how there had to be certain types of fairies to make some kind of balance…oh, fucked if I know really. I zoned out for a while and she kept rambling."

"Skills we learnt when Amelia was three. Nice to see they still come in handy from time to time." I commented.

"Indeed, Sookie. Very handy."

"At least she didn't strip off in the middle of the mall again" I pointed out. When Pam had been about two she'd been really fond of removing clothing at every opportunity. Mostly pants, but sometimes tops as well. Once when we'd been sitting in the Esquires coffee shop that was right in the middle of the mall and slightly distracted by doling out fluffies and muffins to everyone in the right combinations, Pam had done an impromptu strip-tease. It might not have been so bad if every time she took her clothes off, she didn't finish with a bum-wiggling dance of joy that looked hilarious when the dancer was still in a nappy. Luckily we had some excellent video of her doing it at home which was going to come out at her 21st birthday party, because, well, we were that kind of parents.

"Yeah, there was that" Eric said, and then he leaned over in bed to look at the book I'd just pulled out of my bedside table. "What's that one?" he asked.

"Oh…it's a mystery" I said.

Eric looked disappointed. "Really?" he asked. "And how many people die?"

"Um…one. So far. I'm not exactly reading it for the high body count."

"No…I'm not entirely sure why you're reading it. It looks, well it looks kind of dull" Eric said, reaching over and twisting the book so he could examine the cover better. That kind of stopped me from reading it.

"It's alright" I said, wondering where Eric's book was and why he wasn't reading that one. I guess because it was more fun to annoy me. It was kind of like if you put the kids somewhere and asked them to behave and just do something quietly, you could generally guarantee that at some point Tray would get bored and start annoying everyone else. He normally had a five to ten minute window when he could control himself and then he just cracked and he'd start by trying to get a reaction from Sam or Pam, and the whole thing would snowball from there. He just didn't understand that sometimes other people didn't want you to be in their face all the time.

I couldn't possibly imagine where he might have got that trait from.

"The cover looks terrible" Eric said.

"It's supposed to be someone's living room" I said. "It looks like a living room."

"It looks like an old person's living room" Eric said dismissively, letting go of the book.

"Well…it's an old lady who's murdered."

"So…if she's old, why does anyone care?" Eric asked me.

"OK, look. You read your book about whatever genocide you're interested in this week, and I'll read mine." I gave Eric a look that I hoped conveyed my desire for him to leave me alone.

"I bet it was a neighbour" Eric said. "Or, you know, whoever came in to look after her. Or someone who stands to inherit her money."

"She didn't have any money" I said.

"So…neighbour then. She probably saw them doing something they didn't want anyone else to know about. An affair, maybe? And so someone killed her for it. There you go, that's the plot. Sounds kind of lame to me." Eric finally turned his attention to his own bedside table. "Where's my book?" he asked.

"There" I said, pointing to where it was, under the pile of other crap he'd stacked there. There were some rogue emails in that pile too, which had drifted in here from Eric's office. I was really going to have to stop buying him new printer cartridges.

"Oh, yeah" he said, reaching for it and opening it up.

I turned back to my book, the worries about Bob still niggling away in my brain. Sadly the book didn't do much to distract me from them. Eric was right, it was kind of lame, but it was from a series I'd read a lot of as a teenager. I was going through a nostalgia phase in my reading at the moment and kept trying to read the kind of stuff I'd liked a long time ago. Some times that worked, and some times that didn't.

But at least Eric hadn't yet found the real guilty secret I had stashed away.

I read a few pages and then turned to Eric. "What's your book on?" I asked him.

"Um…Russian history, leading up to and around the Revolution."

"Oh, so lots of dead people then."

"Well, the serfs were serfs for a reason, Sookie. And emancipating them caused a lot of the shit that led to the Bolsheviks gaining power."

"Oh. Cool." I put my book down and sighed. "Still worried about Bob" I said.

"I think Bob'll be fine" Eric said. "There's unlikely to be any revolutions around here for one thing."

"I don't know. I think Amelia's about to revolt. I don't want her to be a teenager. Tara says that Charlotte has only recently stopped yelling at her for trying to ruin her life. I'm not sure I could take several years of that."

"Yeah, but remember. We're great at blocking our kids out. Plus, the others will drown her out most likely."

"Mmm. Maybe you're right." The conversation lapsed and I worried about Bob a bit more.

I looked over at Eric. "This book is kind of boring. Want to have sex?"

Eric turned to me. "I thought you'd never ask."

I forgot about Bob until the next morning when I heard Sam yelling from the kitchen. "Mum! Mum! Bob threw up!" he yelled. I wondered why the news of someone throwing up was never accompanied by the word 'Dad'.

I guess because you don't call in the person who is Not Good With Vomit.

"Coming!" I called back, and walked back out of our bedroom.

"Mum, do you know where my jumper is?" Felicia said, ambushing me.

"No. Should I?" I asked which made her pull a face.

"Well…I don't know where it is" she whined.

"I don't either, but you'd probably better start by looking in your school bag." Felicia sighed, and stomped off, leaving the way clear for me to get to the kitchen. But possibly not in time.

"Oh, for fuck's sake Bob!" Eric yelled, just as I walked through the door.

"Don't blame Bob, he's not well" I said, walking over to get paper towels to start cleaning it up.

"I think he just ate too fast" Eric grumbled. "He needs to learn no one's going to steal his food." Eric completely missed the look I gave him after that one because it was a lesson that wouldn't go amiss with some of the other people around here too.

"He hasn't really eaten" I pointed out. "I think it's off to the vets." I mopped up the vomit, which was pretty much just undigested cat biscuits, under the watchful gaze of both Eric and Sam.

"Cats are so gross" Sam muttered, and then he turned to Eric. "Can we get a dog?" Sam had been angling for a puppy for a while and he was smart enough to know that Eric, who kind of wanted a dog himself, was the better bet in this instance. He was working on wearing him down.

He didn't have far to go.

"Dunno" Eric said, and Sam wandered off. "Do you really think he's sick?" Eric asked me, as I put the paper towels I'd used in the bin.

"He's…well, he's not a hundred per cent" I said. I looked at Bob who was sitting on the deck washing his face. When he'd finished he started down the steps and it was hard not to miss the way he gingerly walked these days. I knew he'd been getting older, but I maybe hadn't been paying that much attention.

"OK, well I guess it's the kitty doctor then" Eric said, putting his cereal bowl in the dishwasher.

"I want to go to the kitty doctor!" Pam said. "My doctor's not a kitty. She wants to put things in my nose."

"Kitty doctor's for Bob" Eric said, walking past and patting Pam on the head.

"Oh. Is his doctor a kitty too?" Pam asked.

"No, just a person. Who looks after cats" I said.

Pam thought for a minute. "Sounds dumb" she said in the end.

I looked around; it was just Pam and I in the kitchen. "Sooo" I said to her, as I gathered up the lunchboxes so they were ready to go into everyone's bags. "Did you go to the shops with Daddy yesterday?"

"Um…we went to the mall" Pam said, managing to neatly throw an Americanism in there. "I's not supposed to tell though."

"About going to the shops?" I asked.

"Just about…stuff."

"Stuff you can't tell me? That's OK."

"Daddy said I shouldn't say." I was about to tell her she didn't have to say anything, when she looked at me and said "If it's a akceedent, it's OK."

Well that confused me. "If what's an accident?"

"Um…well..." Pam looked down, and then up again, only now she had a kind of glint in her eye. Whatever this was, she was pretty keen to spill the beans. Poor Eric, it was always better to do the present shopping without the kids in tow. I'd learnt that one. Not only did they spill the beans at the first opportunity, they were fond of inappropriate choices. Having once argued with Sam and Tray in Kmart for a good twenty minutes over the fact that Daddy didn't really want a belt sander, no matter how cool they thought it was, had really drummed that into me.

"Akceedents just happen" Pam said. "And they're not anyone's fault…" I kind of hoped they hadn't been having a discussion about Tray's arrival. "So Daddy didn't _mean_ to do it."

"OK, well…that sounds OK then" I agreed, kind of at a loss for what else to say.

"So, it's fine. That he forgot to do my seatbelt up. 'Cos it's not like I fell out. He was going slow. Pretty slow. I'm OK." Pam beamed at me.

"Well, I guess you are" I agreed.

"So it's fine. Daddy said I didn't need to tell you, because it's a akceedent, but it's fine. Because it was. So that's OK, right?" Pam looked at me.

"Yeah, that's fine." Well she was still in one piece.

"OK" Pam said, and then she looked at me. "What's in my lunchbox?"

"Food. Food you like. Now go and get your shoes. And check that Mr Fluffy is in your bag."

"Oh…OK" Pam said, looking worried about the prospect of going to pre-school without her bunny Mr Fluffy. Not many of the kids had had official cuddlies, there was Sockie, who was still tucked away in a drawer in Felicia's room, and Sam had been kind of fond of that Barbie doll he'd pilfered from Felicia, but Mr Fluffy was very important to Pam and he had to go with her everywhere, even if he just stayed in the bag these days. He was a large, beige bunny rabbit with floppy ears and Pam had loved him on sight. It was probably just a good thing Amelia stepped in and named him for Pam or he might have been labelled 'Mummy' as well. She'd finally grown out of calling Eric that, but it had taken a while.

I think she'd refused to use anything else for Eric just to be perverse.

"Is Bob sick?" Amelia said, wandering in with her hair all over the place.

"Yeah" I said. "I'll have to take him to the vets."

Amelia bit her lip. "I hope he's OK. He will be, won't he?"

"Yeah, he'll be fine" I said, a bit dismissively. At this point I was more worried about getting everyone out the door on time. "But shouldn't you be finishing up getting ready?"

"Yeah…" Amelia said slowly, and then I noticed she was still clutching her copy of _Twilight_ in her hand. I guess that explained the delay this morning, she'd been reading it. Again.

A couple of months earlier she'd discovered that the girls at school had read it and been desperate to read it too. So we'd requested it from the library and when it came in, I'd said I'd have to read it first. Amelia huffed and stomped and generally didn't think that seemed like a good idea, but I stuck to my guns and that night sat in bed reading.

Of course the first thing that happened was that Eric stole the book and went looking for the sex scenes, despite declaring "It'll be kind of gross. Like necrophilia."

I got the book chucked back at me pretty quickly. "That's just…fucking odd" Eric declared. "The sparkling. Why do they sparkle? It's like they My Little Pony-ised them."

"My Little Pony what?" I asked, picking the book back up.

"Yeah…you know, they took the idea of real horses and then turned out something that was small, sparkly and pink. I think they've done the same thing to vampires."

"And…you care, why?"

"And I don't fucking care. That's the point. Good luck reading that shit." Eric picked up his own book and ignored me. For about five minutes. He did keep repeatedly asking me if I was enjoying it, which made it harder to enjoy. I wasn't really enjoying it anyway.

"I don't know if you'll like it" I'd said, when I handed it over to Amelia. I was slightly dazed by the whole thing, but at the same time glad it wasn't as lurid and sensational as _Flowers in the Attic_, which had been the thing to read when I was 12. God, that was a dreadful book. _Twilight_ I just thought was a boring book.

"I will" Amelia said. "Em said it was really good and it's like, beautiful how they're just destined to be together. And he can't live without her." Amelia's eyes were shining at that thought. "It's just sooo romantic."

"Well, read it and see what you think" I said. I didn't want to tell her I thought it was drivel, because that would just make it more appealing, but I hoped she'd figure it out on her own.

But she didn't. She loved it. Passionately. And then she read the other books in the series. Those I just flicked through, and Eric didn't even want to look through them, and just muttered a lot about how deeply odd the sparkling thing was.

And now of course Amelia had spent her pocket money on her own set of the books so she could re-read them at every opportunity. I was hoping it was just a phase.

"You better go and do your hair" I said to Amelia.

"I know" she sighed, and then she left the kitchen still clutching her book.

I made an appointment at the vets for the next morning and got Eric to drop Bob off, as the surgery was just down the road from his office. Neither of them looked particularly happy as they left in Eric's car, although Eric was mostly concerned with the fur on the carseat and the potential for scratches when he had to get Bob out of the cage at the vets.

I was hoping they'd just give Bob a once over and send him home. Maybe he had some kind of bug and needed antibiotics. But when Eric rang me, later in the morning, it wasn't good news.

"They're keeping him overnight" Eric said. "For some tests."

"What kind of tests" I asked.

"Um…kidney?" Eric said, not sounding that sure. I knew I should have taken him.

"They think his kidneys have gone?" I asked.

"Um…yeah? Something like that. Apparently it happens to a lot of older cats" Eric said, sounding kind of off-hand about it all.

"And then it kills them" I said flatly. "They can't do anything for kidney failure in cats."

"Oh" Eric said. I guess not sure of what to say to that. "But it's Bob, so he'll be fine."

"I hope so" I said. It was pretty much all I had time to say before I was due to start the next class. And I really did hope so.

EPOV

I hadn't really thought much about how old Bob was. He was just there. He'd always been there. Apparently he pre-dated the kids, and he certainly fucking pre-dated me. I always got the impression he was just waiting for the day we all left and he could have Sookie back.

But maybe it wasn't going to happen. As soon as I mentioned kidney failure to Sookie she just sounded awful. I didn't know it was that bad. I didn't fucking know anything about cats. Well, I knew that Bob was a sneaky fucker who'd do anything to get on Sookie's good side in the hope of getting something he wasn't supposed to have, but I didn't know they died when their kidneys gave up.

Sookie didn't say much at home that night. Well, usually it was hard for either of us to talk to each other with all the kids around. Usually they were either trying to get our attention or just yelling at each other. And there was a lot of yelling at each other. Mostly Sookie didn't even wince these days with all the shouts of 'fuck off!' that echoed around the house.

But later that night, when it was just her and I and we were in bed, she put her head on my chest and said "I don't know if I can make the decision."

It took me a minute to figure it out. I thought we were still on the topic of where to go for her birthday. The boys had voted for the Indian restaurant in the village, and there was a another camp in favour of Thai, although its members kept changing due to the shifting alliances amongst the girls.

But no, this was about Bob, not food. "Um…well. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

"But…I just. It seems wrong to let him suffer. But I'm not sure it's my decision to make. That seems wrong too."

I wanted to remind her that he was a cat and it was probably only because the New Zealand government were a bunch of pussies themselves that he was allowed to live at all. After all, if they really cared about their stupid, flightless, unable to protect themselves from a mouse, native wildlife they should have rounded up every domestic cat years ago and tossed them into the sea.

But it wasn't the best time to put forward that line of thinking. Even if it was true.

I thought about what Sookie was saying for a moment. "It would be cruel" I said. "To let him…" I figured live was probably the wrong word here, "…go on, if he was suffering."

"Yeah, I guess" Sookie whispered. "But I don't want to make the decision. I don't feel…I don't know. Old enough or something. To make decisions like that."

I figured it was just that she was too emotionally attached to Bob. "I think…I think you'll know what to do" I said. I hoped she didn't want me to decide. He wasn't my cat really, and I wasn't fucking taking the blame if Sookie regretted it afterwards.

"Mmm. I guess the same goes for you" Sookie said quietly.

"Me?" Maybe I was making the decision. I fucking hoped not.

"Yeah. When I'm…well, if something happens to me. Like Bob. Hopefully by that time they'll let you…you know. So I don't suffer. Don't let me linger on and on if I'm not really me."

Oh fuck, that was a depressing thought. "Um, yeah. I don't…I don't think I can…" I said. I didn't want to even contemplate that scenario. Bob was one thing, Sookie was something else entirely. No way was I sending her off to her death.

But Sookie wasn't giving up that easily. "Just promise me" she continued, "that if they ask you the question, you'll tell them to turn off the machines. That's all you need to do. Turn off the machines."

Maybe I could do that. I didn't want to though. I voted for giving Amelia power of attorney. Or not, she'd probably get a weird idea about whether Sookie could be fixed. Or maybe Sam. No, he wouldn't do it either. Fuck it. I guess I was stuck with the job.

"OK" I said. "I'll tell them."

"Promise?"

"Yeah, I promise." I hoped it was a promise I could worry about keeping a long, long time in the future.

SPOV

When I picked Bob up from the vets, he looked kind of miserable and forlorn. And he wouldn't make eye contact with me, which I guess was meant to convey he'd felt completely abandoned.

I noticed for the first time in a while how much white fur there was now in the black patches in his coat. I wondered if he felt old and couldn't understand when the world had changed, like Gran who could never get her head around the number of cars on the road. Did Bob remember fondly what it was like when he'd been a kitten? And he hadn't lived with a houseful of kids?

I'd never know, and for some reason, that made me a little bit sad

The news wasn't good. The test came back showing advanced kidney failure. I felt even more miserable that I'd missed it for so long, but the young vet was very reassuring and said that it could have been a very quick decline.

At any rate, we had to make a decision. We could do what we could to make him comfortable, or we could decide to let him go peacefully.

I didn't think I was ready to let anyone else in my life go, peacefully or otherwise. Bob came home with me, blinking at the bright sunlight pouring through the windscreen of the car. "It'll be fine" I said to him. "You can just rest and I'll look after you. You can even have some of our dinner if you want. We're having chicken schnitzel. That'll get you eating." Well, I hoped it would.

But it didn't. Bob even turned his nose up at people-food. He just looked sad and sick and miserable.

"Is Bob OK?" Amelia asked me after dinner.

"No" I said. "His kidneys are failing and he's very ill. I think…well. I think we might have to put him to sleep."

Amelia looked shocked. "Kill him? You can't kill him! It's Bob. You're just being mean."

"No" I said. "Trust me, it's quite the opposite. I'm trying to spare him any suffering."

"It's because you don't want him around, isn't it?" Amelia spat out, and I realised she was addressing Eric who'd walked into the kitchen as well.

"Me? No, this is not my decision to make" Eric said, holding his hands up like he was surrendering. It really wasn't really the most helpful thing he could have said right then, because Amelia turned on me again. "You had to keep having kids" she said. "You had so many kids and now there's no room for poor Bob, and he needs us and you don't care" and then she ran out of the room, crying.

I shot Eric a filthy look and followed her to her bedroom. "I don't want to talk to you!" Amelia spat out. "You want to kill Bob and he hasn't done anything!"

"Honey" I said, sitting down next to her on her bed. "I don't want to kill Bob. I don't want Bob to die, but I don't want Bob to be sick and suffering because of it either."

"He's OK" Amelia sniffed. "He likes it here with us. You know, with you and me, anyway."

"He does. We're his family. I've had him a long time. Before I had you even." Amelia looked a bit uncomprehending at that, the world without Amelia in it was a weird and distant country as far as she was concerned and she really doubted its existence.

"Before Eric too" Amelia muttered, and I noticed that he was back to Eric. "And he wants a dog. They all do. So they want to get rid of Bob, because you said they couldn't get one because it would upset Bob. So they want Bob to go so they can get a stupid, smelly dog!" The volume rose dramatically during that outburst. Amelia was really upset.

"No" I said. "No one is trading Bob for a dog. But Bob can't live forever…"

"He's not that old. He's only a bit older than me."

"Cats are different. He's quite old for a cat." Granted Gran had had a cat who had lived to over twenty, but she was a rare exception. Bob was definitely getting on.

"Bob's special" Amelia declared.

"He is" I agreed.

"So…he shouldn't have to go."

I rubbed Amelia's arm and she stared at the wall, pointedly ignoring me. "How about" I said. "You and I, we take extra-special care of Bob over the next few days and see how he goes. And then, if we think it has to be done, we make the decision together."

Amelia looked at me. "You'll let me decide?"

"We'll do it together" I said. "Sometimes…when you're family, you have to make the tough decisions." In some ways, I was grateful not to be facing the prospect of making tough decisions for my elderly parents, although I wasn't quite sure that made up for the years I'd missed with them.

And then of course there was Bill, and to this day I worried that the tough decisions I'd made regarding him and whether I could be around him anymore were the right ones. I looked at Amelia who was kind of staring at her bedside table. I wondered what she remembered, and whether there was something in that episode that was behind her fear I'd just send people, or, I guess, cats away if they weren't wanted anymore.

"I love Bob" I said. "He's as much as a part of the family as any of you are, and no one is going to send him anywhere if it's not right. But sometimes you have to let go."

"I don't want to let go" Amelia said. "That's…that's just not fair." She sounded like she might cry.

"I know it's not" I said. "But that's just the way it goes sometimes." I reached over to hug Amelia and she decided to accept it. Sometimes these days she wasn't so keen on me comforting her.

"It's not fair" Amelia said, and she was actually crying now. "Why can't it be fair?"

I didn't have an answer to that one.

EPOV

There was a cloud of gloom hanging over the house, and I really hoped it lifted in time for Sookie's birthday because I wanted that to be a nice day for her, not another day she and Amelia sighed and fretted over Bob. And I had to admit, when I looked at him closely, he didn't seem, well, quite right. For one thing I couldn't remember the last time he'd brought Sookie any of his disgusting presents. There hadn't even been so much as a leaf recently, and, for a while there, we'd been getting two to three leaves a night when Bob had obviously realised that they were so much easier to catch than mice or rats.

But now we got nothing. And I knew why, I could see how much effort it was taking Bob just to move around. If you watched him closely you could see him gathering himself before he stood up or jumped. He'd take a deep breath, set his shoulders and then move. It was kind of painful to watch.

And it was really painful for Sookie and Amelia who were dealing with the whole issue of when they were going to make a call on euthanizing him. Only you couldn't say that to them. It was 'putting him to sleep' or 'putting him out of his misery'. Whatever way you said it, it was a death sentence.

Poor fucking Bob.

Amelia and Sookie both looked tired and drawn and their appetites were probably suffering almost as much as Bob's was. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing on the night we were having roast chicken, because as the boys got bigger they made it their mission to horde as much food as they fucking could, and then eat it as fast as they possibly could.

Sam and Tray were sizing up each other's plates like they normally did. I could almost see Sam counting roast potatoes in his head. It didn't matter how many times I told them you had to take volume into account as well, because not all the potatoes were equal size (although it would make things so much easier if Sookie cut them that way), they never listened.

"Tray's got more potatoes" Sam grumbled.

"Nuh" Tray said, while happily drowning everything on his plate with gravy, possibly in an attempt to disguise his pile of potatoes, or just because he liked gravy. It was hard to tell.

"How many have you got?" Sam asked Tray. Tray shrugged.

"You've got the same" I said to Sam. "You have to look at, um; well how much of the plate is taken up by the potatoes as a whole."

Sam looked at his plate, and then at Tray's plate, and then back at his own plate. "He's definitely got more" Sam complained. "And he's already eaten some. Look!"

Tray was shovelling potatoes in pretty fast, so it was hard to tell. "No, I don't think so" I said. "Anyway, eat your dinner Sam."

Sam wasn't buying it. "Mum!" he called to Sookie, who was rinsing a dish at the kitchen sink before sitting down. "Mum I didn't get enough potatoes!"

"Yes you did" I told him. "And leave Sookie alone."

Sam glared at me, and then waited expectantly for Sookie to appear with more potatoes. Except that she didn't.

"That's all the potatoes dished up" she said, taking her seat. "There aren't any more."

Sam looked at Tray's plate again, most of Tray's potatoes were already gone so there wasn't much to compare to now. Then he looked around the table at what everyone else had. "You're not having any of mine" Felicia warned him. "Anyway, you've got heaps."

He finished up by looking at my plate, but he was shit out of luck if he thought I was handing over perfectly good potatoes. In the end he gave up and started eating.

But then Amelia spoke up. "You can have some of mine" she sighed. "I'm not hungry."

"Cool" Sam said, holding his plate out and not really showing any concern for his sister.

"Me too" Tray said, still with his mouth full. Amelia gave him a couple of potatoes too, while Felicia gave her a look which I think was meant to convey that she was a bit mental for handing over perfectly good food. Sookie just bit her lip and pushed her own food around.

I had no desire to be Bob's executioner but I could see his days were numbered, if, for no other reason than the fact that if the boys got used to getting extra food at every meal, there'd be a revolt when they didn't.

"Bob'll be alright, won't he?" Felicia asked me at bedtime.

"Um…" I said, trying to think of a way to phrase it. "I think he's getting old and no one, not even cats, live forever." Felicia wrinkled her nose, as if a world without Bob was unthinkable, I guess for her it kind of was.

"He'll be alright" Felicia said confidently. "It's like when he got bitten by that bloody annoying cat from down the back. I mean…well. The vet can fix him." She nodded and seemed satisfied with her own view. I didn't have the heart to tell her otherwise.

Sam, however, was more worried about Sookie. "Mum's sad" he said to me.

"Yeah" I agreed. "She's worried about Bob."

"Well…that's not good. Can't you do anything?" He looked up at me, and I wasn't sure what he expected. "Like…maybe get her a new cat?"

"I don't think another cat would replace Bob" I said. "It would be like replacing one of you guys."

Sam looked thoughtful. "Maybe she'd like a dog, then? Instead of a cat?" Well, maybe he wasn't being quite as altruistic as he seemed. He'd wanted a dog for a while and kept asking for one. I kind of liked the idea, but no way was a dog and Bob going to mix and I wasn't quite so cruel as to wish Bob a hasty demise just so we could get another pet.

"No dog" I said to Sam. "Not at the moment." He pulled a face but didn't pursue it. I just hoped that eventually the situation got resolved because the limbo we were all living in was kind of shitty.

SPOV

Despite the worries over Bob, I still managed to have a nice birthday. If you called getting jumped on at 6.30am by enthusiastic kids shouting "Happy Birthday Mum!" nice. I guess it fell under nice in my book anyway.

I managed to shuffle around enough under the pile of kids to see that there were some presents in the pile too. Despite the fact we seemed to have the most enormous bed in existence at times like these it still seemed as though there still wasn't quite enough space for all of us.

My presents were lovely. I had the new pyjamas I'd asked for, although I hadn't specified which ones. The ones I was given were pink with red roses on them, and in much better condition than most of my existing ones. I also had some new, fancy fileboxes for my office and a plethora of homemade artwork.

I opened Eric's present last, although by that stage most of the kids had lost interest in what I was doing, and were mostly trying to push each other off the bed, or, in Pam's case, horde the wrapping paper for art projects. Every time the boys would roll onto a piece she hadn't collected yet there'd be a wail of "Noooo!" and the threat of some tears. In the end Eric had to help her gather it all up and he kind of missed me opening the tiny box his present came in.

"Oh" I said. "It's that ring." Pam and I had been killing time at the mall one day, waiting for everyone else to finish in the bookshop, and we'd been looking in the window of the jewellery shop. They had a whole bunch of coloured stone cocktail rings and Pam and I had admired them. This one was a lovely aquamarine, surrounded by many tiny diamonds. It was beautiful.

"Yeah" Eric said, while glaring at Tray and daring him to try to grab Sam again. "It took me ages to find a kid who thought they knew what you wanted, and then all I could get from Pam was 'the pretty sparkles at the sparkly shop' I had no fucking idea…" At this point Sam interrupted with, "Don't use that word", but Eric carried on over the top of him, "…what the hell the sparkly shop was, but she was adamant it was at the mall, so it took a lot of walking around to find it."

"It's the sparkly shop because when you look in, it's all sparkly" Pam said, looking at Eric like he was a blithering idiot.

"It's the lighting, Pam" Eric said to her. "They want you to think it's all sparkly."

"Well it is" Pam said, totally missing Eric's point about sales displays.

Eric looked like he was going to try to make his point again, but then gave up. "Anyway, I finally figured out what she meant and she said you liked that one. I think Pam preferred the pink one really…"

"I like pink!" Pam interjected.

"So I wasn't sure. I liked that one though. I thought it would go with your eyes."

"Oh, that's lovely. It's beautiful, it really is."

"You don't want to add in anything about me being mushy and American?" Eric asked.

I shrugged. "It's kind of a given." I slipped the ring on and kissed Eric.

"It's pretty" Pam said, lifting up my hand to look at it. "But blue is really a boy's colour. The pink one was better."

"Pink's a _dumb_ colour" Felicia said dismissively. She'd been thrilled when Amelia had finally grown past wanting pink clothing and the hand me downs had started to be a little less girly. It was hard being number two. On the other hand, Pam got a lot of stuff handed down from her brothers and she was pretty happy if anything arrived in her wardrobe that looked even remotely girly.

"You're dumb" Sam said, which earned him a swat from Felicia. He dodged, but in doing so, just about flattened Pam, which in turn set off another round of retaliations.

"Oh, you're all so childish and STUPID!" Amelia said loudly, which actually made me kind of glad because at least she was interacting with us, rather than being miserable about Bob. So that was a nice change.

"OK, everyone! Off the bed before someone gets injured" Eric said, and everyone slowly sloped off.

"Thank you" I said to Eric again. "It's lovely."

"I'm glad you like it" he said. "I…well; it's nice that you're happy anyway." He kissed me again lightly and then left the room. I could hear Tray in the hallway bailing him up. "Are we having French toast? 'Cos it's a birthday and we get French toast on special days and birthdays are special days…" I didn't hear the rest, but I was kind of with Tray. I hoped for French toast too.

We did get French toast, and then that night, we went out for dinner as planned although it was hard to leave the house knowing that Bob had refused his dinner and was just huddled by the bi-fold doors to the deck looking miserable.

We'd decided on Indian food in the end, everyone enjoyed it, although Amelia and Felicia had developed a taste for buttered prawns that was proving to be a little bit expensive. Tray and Sam were mostly concerned with proving they could manage more chilli than the other, and Pam ate two samosas and then barely touched her butter chicken, so Eric had to finish it up for her. Well, he probably didn't have to, no one was going to stop him going to the ice cream shop for dessert afterwards if he didn't, but Eric wasn't good with food just sitting there, going to waste.

But when we got home from our trip to the ice cream shop, which had left the poor girl behind the counter looking slightly stunned as she dealt with the five kids all clamouring for different flavours, Bob was still hunched miserably on the same spot in the floor, his food still uneaten.

This couldn't go on.

When I went into Amelia's room to say goodnight to her, she asked me if Bob was still just sitting there. "Yeah" I said. "He is."

"He's really sad" Amelia said.

"Yeah."

"I don't want him to be sad" she said, her eyes starting to glisten.

"No" I said. "I don't either."

Amelia was quiet for a bit, and I just sat on the bed. "They can't make him better, can they?" she whispered.

"No" I said. "They can't."

"Then…then we have to stop him being so sad" Amelia said, as tears ran down her cheeks.

"I think it would be the right thing to do" I agreed, trying desperately not to cry myself.

"Then why do I feel so sad about it?" Amelia wailed. "If it's the right thing, why isn't it easy?"

"Because we still have to say goodbye to someone we love" I told her. "And that's never easy." And as hard as this was, there was a part of me that hoped she never had to deal with anything worse.

"But at least we get to say goodbye to him properly" I continued, hugging Amelia hard. "We can tell him we love him and that we'll miss him and then we can make his pain stop."

"OK" she agreed.

We made an appointment for late Saturday morning and spent the next day saying goodbye to Bob and preparing ourselves. Amelia was a mess and cried herself to sleep. Felicia looked hurt that we'd even contemplate putting Bob down, and told me I was a 'horrible meanie' and acted like it was all my fault, which did nothing to alleviate the guilt I already felt about the whole thing.

I wanted to ask Eric what he thought, but the decision had been made and it wouldn't do any good for all of us to re-hash it endlessly. We were doing it, and we were doing it for Bob, not for our own mental health.

Unfortunately, though, when it came time to take Bob to his final appointment, I realised that I just couldn't do it. I could not send my cat to his death. I couldn't be there, I couldn't have him look at me while it happened. What if he didn't want to be dead? What if he thought I was going to fix him? What if he hated me forever because of it?

Eric looked at me like he thought I should be committed. I could almost hear the thoughts forming in his head as it was blatantly obvious he wanted to tell me that Bob was just a cat.

"He's not just a cat" I said. "He's Bob."

"I know" Eric said.

"And…I don't think I can do this. I mean, I waited for Amelia to come around to it but really…really it's me. I can't be there."

Eric put his arm around me. "It's OK. I'll take him by myself" he said. And that just made my heart sink.

"He'll think I'm abandoning him" I said. "He'll be so hurt that no one who loved him was there at the end."

"Well I think he's fond of me" Eric said, a bit indignantly. I wasn't sure how to break it to Eric that he maybe wasn't as comforting to Bob as he thought he was. Sure, he probably wasn't going to yell 'Fuck off, Bob!' in the middle of the surgery while Bob was safely tucked away in his cage, but he wasn't going to cuddle him while the vet put the needle in and administered the drug that would take away Bob's life. Pain, I reminded myself. We're taking away his pain.

But he doesn't get to live after that either, I thought.

"Um…" Eric said. "I just…I don't…what does the crying mean?"

"I'm letting Bob _down_" I sobbed. "And his last thoughts will be that he hates me."

"Or possibly he'll just wonder when they're going to insert one of those thermometers into his…"

"Yes, OK Eric. Thanks for that image" I said. Although I had stopped crying at least. "I guess I'll just have to live with it" I said. "I mean, I guess I can, if you can?" I looked at Eric.

"Yeah, sure. I'll be the bad guy. He never fucking forgave me for moving in in the first place."

"Thank you" I said, and I busied myself getting Bob's cage out of the garage and then getting Bob into it. The saddest thing of all was that he barely put up a fight, and I'd seen him once take a huge chunk out of Eric in a bid to avoid going to the vets for a routine set of injections. It was heart-breaking.

And then Amelia appeared. "Is he going now?" she asked.

"Yeah" I said. "So best to say goodbye now."

"I can't" she whispered. "Not yet."

"I know it's tough. But we have to do this."

Amelia looked at me sideways. "No, I mean. I want to be there…you know. At the vets."

"Oh. You do?" I asked.

She nodded. "Yeah. He'd want me there. He likes me. Don't you Bob?" Amelia stuck a couple of fingers into the cage and gently stroked Bob's shoulder.

"Um, well. Get your shoes then. Daddy's just about ready to go" I said.

"You're not going?" Amelia asked.

"No…I…" I wasn't sure about admitting my weakness in front of my daughter. I still had some pride. "Someone needs to stay here with the others."

Amelia looked a bit sceptical. "I'll go get ready" she said, and then she left. I wondered when she'd suddenly got so brave and grown-up. Was this the result of spending so many years living with the knowledge that she'd lost one parent? I'd never really know.

The other kids all turned up to say goodbye to Bob. Felicia looked a bit sullen about the whole thing, the boys were kind of off-hand and Pam said a quick "Bye!" and ran off. I guessed she was far too little to really grasp what was going on.

Eric came to collect Bob's cage off the kitchen bench where we were all gathered around him. "OK" he said. "Let's get going." And then he looked in the cage. "Is that your bathrobe?" Eric asked.

I nodded. I was having trouble making words. I took a deep breath and managed to say "I thought he should have something that reminded him of me…so you know, it's like I'm there. And you guys got me the new one for Mother's Day…" Yeah, Eric had always hated my pink dressing gown, but I'd had it for years and it was comforting. Bob had always thought so too, because if I left it on the bed he was pretty quick to curl up on it. "They can keep it for afterwards" I said to Eric.

"Afterwards?" asked Sam.

"Yeah…um. Well, we'll just get Bob's ashes back" I said.

"Oh" Sam said, processing that.

Amelia arrived. "OK, I'm ready" she said, pulling her jacket closed.

"You're coming?" Eric asked.

"Yep" Amelia said nodding. "Bob needs a friend." She looked up at Eric, I guess in her eyes Eric didn't count as Bob's friend.

Eric looked over at me, silently asking if I thought that was wise. I had no idea, but trying to stop her going probably wasn't a great plan either, so I nodded.

Eric picked up the cage and then he and Amelia walked out the door to the car. I stayed where I was, listening to the distant sound of them driving off. And then I went to the bathroom and I bawled my eyes out.

I was such a coward.

When I gathered myself together and came out Sam was kind of loitering in the hallway. "Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine" I said. "Just…a bit sad about Bob."

"Um…yeah" Sam said, and then he hugged me. "Don't be sad."

"I'll try" I said, even though I didn't hold out a lot of hope. I felt sick thinking about what was going on and I really wished I'd gone now. I busied myself fluffing around and trying to find things to do, but I couldn't really settle and a lot of things got half-cleaned, or over-scrubbed. Felicia came to watch me.

"I think…should I have gone too?" she asked me, frowning.

"Um…did you want to go?" I asked. I hadn't realised she had.

"Well, Amelia went. With Daddy" Felicia said. She looked pensive. I thought that maybe this was more about missing out on stuff Amelia was doing than really saying goodbye to Bob. Felicia was struggling with the fact that Amelia, at 12, was headed towards being a teenager and at 9 her own world was likely to be static for a few more years. I hoped so anyway. I didn't need another one swooning over stupid bloody vampires.

"Amelia wanted to help Bob" I pointed out.

"Yeah. You didn't go" Felicia said.

"No. Someone needed to look after you guys."

"Mmm" Felicia said, and I thought maybe she didn't believe me either. And then she wandered off.

Yep, I was definitely a coward.

When Amelia and Eric did get home Amelia was a mess and Eric was only barely coping with it. "I can't believe he's gone. And he's not coming back. Ever!" Amelia sobbed.

"Well, you knew that was happening" Eric said, with only a hint of exasperation in his voice. I put my arms around Amelia and tried to take over the comforting.

"He would have been pleased you were there with him" I said to her.

"It was very quick" Eric said. "Literally, it was like he just went to sleep. And he looked so relaxed when it happened, like he could really let go. So I don't think it was a bad thing. Not for him."

"But he's dead now!" Amelia wailed. "He just looked at me, and then he died and it was _awful_!" Yeah, I didn't think I'd be in a much better state than she was.

I looked at Eric and he did look a bit down, but it was hard to tell how much was due to the fact we'd just had Bob put down, and how much was due to trying to deal with an emotionally fragile, and slightly hysterical, Amelia.

"What's for lunch?" Eric asked. Or how much even was due to that. I gave him a look that, I hope, conveyed the fact that if he was that hungry he could sort it out himself, and took Amelia off to her room so she could have a good cry in peace. And maybe I could join her.

"It's for the best" I said to her, when we were sitting on her bed. "He won't be in pain anymore and he won't be trying to drag himself around to find a comfortable spot, or to avoid the boys or anything like that. He had a good life, really. All that time he got to hunt and roam and stuff. He loved that."

Amelia nodded. "He did. He was lucky he wasn't an American cat." Ever since I'd read something about how so many cats in the States were indoor cats, we'd been telling Bob he was lucky he didn't live there. Eric pointing out that the cats had to stay indoors to avoid the many cat-eating predators that apparently roamed backyards in parts of the States and it might actually do Bob good to go somewhere where he wasn't top of the food-chain, eating all our stupid, defenceless native animals. Me pointing out that rats and mice weren't native either, didn't sway Eric's opinion that any country in which cats were feared predators had a pretty poor excuse for wildlife.

'He was lucky" I agreed. "And he was very lucky that you were with him at the end." Now I was crying too, thinking of poor Bob taking his final breath.

Felicia came in. "Was it horrible?" she asked Amelia.

Amelia's eyes shone, perhaps not just from tears, but maybe also just a tiny bit from the fact she was going to relish the opportunity to tell the story. "It was very sad, but it was for the best. We're sad of course, but Bob's in a better place now." She nodded emphatically.

"Was there…do you think it hurt him?" Felicia asked, and Amelia looked horrified and then quickly turned to me.

"No" I said. "No, he wouldn't have felt anything. It would have been like going to sleep."

"Except he doesn't wake up" Felicia said.

"No" I agreed.

"That's just weird to think about" she muttered.

"Everyone dies, Felicia" Amelia informed her. "_Everyone_."

"Yeah…but I'm not dying" Felicia said.

"Well, not yet, but one day you will" Amelia said loftily.

"You'll go first. You're older" Felicia said, and then she flounced out of the room.

By mid-afternoon Amelia had recovered sufficiently to come out to the supermarket with me for a 'top-up' shop. It was scary just how much stuff we went through in a week, and no matter how hard I tried to fill up the freezer or buy in bulk we always ran out of something. Usually milk. Or toilet paper. Possibly bananas. But at any rate, I was kind of used to the fact that at some point I'd have to do an in-between shop.

Amelia wandered around helping me find things, and it was all going well until the cat-food aisle, when both Amelia and I stared at the selection of food for a little bit too long, and I realised I should have cleared out what was in the pantry and brought it in to dump into the collection bin for the SPCA.

We gathered ourselves and carried on, until we got to the display of DVDs. "Hey" Amelia said, "Can I get this?" She held up a DVD set of all of the _Twilight_ movies.

"Oh, um…sure, OK" I said. I figured if Eric could buy Pam a doll simply for pointing out a jewellery shop, then I could buy Amelia a cheer-up present on the day she cuddled poor Bob while he was put to sleep.

And I had to try really hard not to cry in the middle of Pak N Save after that.

So movie night that night was a split affair. Amelia and I took over my bedroom and watched the first two _Twilight_ movies in there. Eric, Pam and the boys sat in the family room and watched the original _Star Wars_, again, so they could enjoy a nice discussion about X-wing versus Y-wing fighters and what colour light-sabre they all wanted. Felicia drifted in and watched most of the first movie with Amelia and I. Well, she watched Amelia watching it. It was kind of like she expected something bad to happen to Amelia at any minute because she'd seen Bob's last minutes on earth.

I still felt like a coward for hiding behind my child. When the movies were done and Amelia wandered off to bed still gushing about how 'beautiful' and 'romantic' the whole thing was, and saying repeatedly "Wasn't it just so _cool_ that he couldn't live without her? Like, he just couldn't imagine being without her."

"Um…I don't know if that's exactly cool, Amelia" I said. It was kind of creepy if you sat and analysed it. "I'm sure they would have been fine if they'd broken up. They're young. Well, she's young…he's, um…" I tried to think of a way to finish that sentence which didn't end with me saying 'totally against the laws of nature', but it didn't matter anyway because Amelia didn't listen.

"Well, one day I'll have that" Amelia announced. I sighed. I kind of liked the days when she wasn't going to let boys come anywhere near her.

But eventually she was tucked up in bed, as was everyone else and I was free to tell Eric how crappy my day had been. "I hear your movie was shit" Eric said, as I came out of the ensuite. "Felicia reported that the fight scenes sucked."

"The whole thing kind of sucked, but it was mostly for Amelia's benefit really" I said, getting in to bed. "Although she actually seems to be doing OK. I was kind of worried that it might be too much for her, but I think she can cope."

"She's pretty strong" Eric said.

"Yeah, I just wish I had been" I said. "I'm such a coward. I couldn't go, and Bob will have wondered why, and now I can never tell him that I'm sorry I did it." And that was it, the floodgates opened and I just put my head on Eric's chest and sobbed and sobbed.

"You're not a coward" Eric said. "You're strong too."

"But I couldn't be there, I couldn't make it better for him and I'll feel guilty about that. Forever!" I wailed between sobs. Luckily Eric didn't have a comeback to that one, but just let me cry.

EPOV

I got the feeling the tears weren't just tears over Bob. Sure, she was upset the poor old thing was dead. They were all going to miss him. I maybe wasn't going to miss tripping over him quite so often, but even I knew it wasn't going to be quite the same around here.

But Sookie felt she couldn't forgive herself for not being there for him, which was just fucking nuts. I was there, and I'm pretty sure Bob wasn't wondering where Sookie was. In actual fact, I'm pretty sure he was glad she wasn't there; I don't think he wanted her to see him anything less than his usual dignified self. And then it was over, and it was just a relief for all of us.

For everyone except Sookie of course, who was determined to chastise herself for not being a better owner to Bob, and not holding his paw at the last, and not saving him from something terrible.

Yeah, that was not fucking Bob she was talking about.

So she cried for a while, and then gathered herself together. "I'm sure he'll forgive me" she said. "Eventually."

"I'm sure he will" I said. "In fact, he probably already has."

"Well…maybe." Sookie sat up and took a tissue off her nightstand and blew her nose. Fuck, she was noisy when she did that. "I'll be OK. I'm just glad that Amelia seems to have come through the experience unscathed. Now we just have to wean her off the vampires and we'll be OK."

I sighed. "They sparkle, I thought she was past the sparkly stuff and it was only Pam that liked it."

"No, Pam said they were kind of sucky, but that's because she had to watch _Star Wars_ again and not the one where, and I quote, 'the Princess gets the pretty gold outfit and the really fat pet blob-thing'."

"Um…OK. I'm not really sure Pam's getting the whole _Star Wars_ thing" I said.

"Yeah" Sookie agreed. "She thinks there should be more about the princess. The princess is apparently pretty and doesn't spend all her time waving the dumb light sticks around."

"OK, well next time maybe she can pick the movie."

"That seems fair" Sookie agreed, as she reached over to turn out her light.

I just felt relieved that we'd made it through the day, and that Sookie seemed to be over her whole 'no one will ever forgive me for what I've done' vibe. Of course I didn't realise quite what Bob's death had set off.

SPOV

The day we got Bob's ashes back from the vets was pretty sad. Eric had thoughtfully arranged to get them delivered in a little rimu box with a name plate on it, and I'd picked it up in the morning. Amelia came home and immediately wandered off with it to her room, which was a slightly better reaction than I'd had from the boys who'd wanted to examine the contents and know exactly how I'd made Bob small enough to fit in there.

When I went to talk to Amelia she was sitting on her bed, holding the box in her lap. "I still can't believe he's gone" she said.

"No" I agreed. "I keep expecting him to turn up to be fed." It had been difficult, fighting that urge to fill his bowl in case he was hungry.

"Yeah…" she said. "But he's happier now."

"Oh, he is" I agreed. "Much happier."

"Even though it's sad we don't have him here anymore?"

"Yep. It's always sad when you lose someone."

"Like, um, like your parents?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"And…um. Well…" Amelia looked confused. "And my, um, the first dad? He was sad to leave me, but, um, we were sad too?" Amelia looked at me for confirmation.

"It was very sad" I said. "So very sad."

"Yeah…" Amelia said, lost in her own thoughts. I waited for a while, and she just twisted the box with Bob's ashes around in her hands. "I don't know where he is" she said in the end.

"Oh" I said. "Well, it's probably somewhere nice, you know. With um, lots of mice and rats. And it's really sunny, all the time."

"What?" Amelia said sharply, looking up at me. And then realisation dawned. "Oh no" she said. "Not Bob. I mean, him. You know. Bill. I don't know where he is now…"

Oh fuck. Did I have to talk her through heaven, I wondered? But Amelia carried on. "I don't know what happened when he died. Is there a box for him too? Do we have it?"

"No. No, he was buried. At Waikumete Cemetery. There was a service, but I didn't take you, because you were a bit young. I left you with Halleigh for the morning."

"I don't remember" Amelia said. "I should remember, shouldn't I?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. I just…you were very young. I don't remember much from when I was that young. Mostly I just remember running after Uncle Jason a lot, or running away from him after he'd put dead cicadas down my sundress." I smiled at Amelia, but she still looked worried.

"I should go" she said. "I should go and see. Where he is. In that cemetery place. Because maybe I didn't say goodbye, and I should say goodbye now. I said goodbye to Bob, and he was a cat, so I should say goodbye to my first dad."

"Um, yeah. OK. We can do that" I said. "At the weekend, we'll drive out to Glen Eden. Just you and me." Crap, that wasn't something I particularly wanted to do, but I figured it was probably time for her to face her past.

"And Felicia" Amelia added. "She should come too. He was her first dad as well."

Oh, double crap and bugger as well. I wasn't sure if that was going to be on Felicia's agenda. Amelia looked at me hopefully, and I figured that for once she didn't want to be the only kid in the family who was different.

"Yeah" I said. "Well, I'll ask her anyway."

Felicia of course wasn't having it. "No!" she said, when I suggested it. "I have a dad, and he's not dead."

"Yeah, but, um. Well I thought you might just want to see. Where Bill was buried."

"I don't care" Felicia said. "It's not my problem, it's Amelia's. She's the Compton."

"You were once too" I said, and immediately realised that was the wrong thing, as Felicia looked horrified.

"I'm not!" she cried. "Daddy is my daddy, and I don't want another one!"

"Um…he won't mind if you go" I said, wondering if that was her worry. "He won't love you any less. I mean, he knows because, well, he turned up and he picked you. You and Amelia. And me, I guess. So he won't mind."

"No" Felicia said vehemently. "I don't want to."

I wasn't sure what to do; I really didn't want to force her to come with us. Maybe she'd want to when she was older. Amelia would just have to do this alone if she really wanted to do it now. "OK" I said. "I'll just take Amelia then."

"Yep, whatever" Felicia said dismissively, as I left the room.

EPOV

I had not quite realised what a shit-storm Bob's death was going to bring with it. By the time we got the little box with his ashes back, I thought the worst was over. Sure, there was the problem of trying to explain to the boys that we weren't getting a dog right now because it was going to upset a few of the other people in the house, but other than that, the whole thing was over and done with and Sookie was past the memories it had dredged up for her.

Well, she was, but Amelia decided to delve into the past instead, and even that wouldn't have been so bad, except that she wanted to take Felicia down with her, and Felicia wasn't going. And Felicia expected I'd be the one who'd save her from Amelia.

"She keeps going ON about it" Felicia complained. "I don't want to see a grave. I don't care."

"You don't have to go" I said. Sookie had said she'd made the offer and Felicia hadn't bought it. I would have thought that would be the matter closed, but I think Amelia might have been campaigning behind the scenes.

"I know I don't!" Felicia said. "But she's SO annoying. She goes on and on and ON! I wish she'd shut up about it."

"They're going on Saturday afternoon" I pointed out. "After that she will probably shut up about it."

"I want her to shut up now" Felicia muttered. "Shut her big fat gob and stop going on about how sad it is. I'm not sad."

I shrugged. I wasn't either, so I could kind of sympathise with Felicia. "It's nothing to do with me" Felicia muttered. "I don't _need_ another dad. 'Specially not a dead one."

I kind of wished that maybe she'd take all this back to Sookie and leave me out of it, but she looked at me like I had all the answers, which really wasn't fucking true. "I don't think it's about having another dad" I said. "Maybe just remembering the one you had."

"I don't remember" Felicia said. "I don't want to remember. Anyway, there's nothing to remember. He died."

"He did" I agreed.

"So what's the point? He wasn't here and I don't have to do anything for him."

"I don't know that it's about doing anything for him" I said. "Maybe it's more about…um, knowing where you came from. Or even just acknowledging it." Although I couldn't fucking talk. The less I thought about my fucking parents, the better. Fuck, sometimes I thought it would have been better if they'd just left me on a doorstep somewhere.

I really hoped Felicia didn't end up like me, dragging a huge pile of shit around with her for the rest of her life.

"But I have you!" she said. "It's just…well." She turned away. "I don't want to be mean to you."

"Oh, I think I can cope" I said. "I mean…I kind of know I wasn't here…then."

Felicia sighed. "That's what Mum said. But I don't remember, so I can't imagine it. It's like…they made _him_ up, you know? I don't feel anything. It's just a person, who died when I was a baby. Might as well have been nothing to do with me."

She was kind of lucky in a way. At least she got away clean. Bill did that right; at least he fucking died on us and didn't keep dragging them through the shit for years. Or run off and keep them hoping he might one day come back. And it was only that thought that stopped me telling her that she was mine and he couldn't have her and of course she shouldn't go and look at his fucking stupid grave.

"Leesh" I said. "Maybe you just need to go and say that. To him."

"But he's dead. He can't hear me."

"No…but you might feel better if you think it. While you're there. And just, I don't know, see what it feels like."

Felicia sighed. "I guess it will stop Amelia twittering on."

"Probably."

"Alright then. But only because you said so." Felicia agreed, and we were interrupted by Pam who wanted to show us the new song Amelia had taught her. I really didn't think having the three year old sing 'I kissed a girl and I liked it' was that fucking appropriate. Amelia had a lot to answer for sometimes.

SPOV

Felicia was adamant she wasn't coming with Amelia and me, right up until the last minute when we were walking to the car and Amelia was complaining again that Felicia didn't want to come. I had tried explaining that I couldn't do anything to change her mind and it was totally her decision, but Amelia somehow thought I could wave a magic wand or something and turn Felicia into a totally obedient sister.

Yeah, like that was going to happen.

So it was a total shock when Felicia appeared at the front door. "I'll come" she mumbled. "But only because it's really boring here."

"It's going to be sad" Amelia said, as Felicia climbed into the car. "So, you know, we have tissues." I got the feeling that maybe Amelia was relishing this a bit too much. Felicia just looked at Amelia like she had arrived from another planet and did up her seatbelt.

Of course I was the person who really didn't want to go and do this. I kind of knew it was my duty as the parent who hadn't died when they were small to do the guided tour of their birth father's grave, but I liked my life now, and I didn't like the memories from that time and the whole thing kind of sucked.

But we got there in one piece, although Felicia loudly objected to Amelia's choice of music on the drive to Glen Eden. The part of the cemetery where Bill was buried was pretty new, and not much to look at. Just a bunch of headstones set in some grass. I pulled up alongside and parked the car.

"Is this it?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah" I said. "It is."

"But…I thought there'd be trees. And it would be dark…or something..." Amelia said, looking around.

"No. This is what you get" I said, getting out of the car. Amelia got out too, but Felicia stayed where she was.

"Come on, Leesh" Amelia said.

"No" Felicia said. "I might just stay here."

"But…" Amelia started, and I cut in. "That's fine. If you want to join us, feel free."

I led Amelia over to Bill's grave and we just stood there. It looked quite tidy, I wondered how often Lorena came these days. Or if she came. It wasn't something I talked about, with anyone, not even Judith. It was like there was some kind of unwritten agreement to leave it all in the past and each deal with it in our own ways.

And now I'd brought Amelia here to see how she could deal with it. She stood there, and sighed, and looked around and then back at the simple plaque that marked where Bill was buried. I was staring at the same thing. It struck me how much younger than I was now Bill had been when he died. Actually, he was even younger than Eric was now. That was weird. And sad. It was such a stupid waste of a perfectly good life.

I was lost in my own thoughts and hadn't heard Felicia come up. "What's happening?" she asked.

"Um…we're looking. At the thing" Amelia said, nodding at the grave.

"Just…looking?" Felicia asked.

"Yeah. I don't know" Amelia said. "Mum, are we supposed to do anything else? I mean, what happened at the funeral?"

"Oh, well I don't know. There were prayers, people spoke. It was…it was very new then, so everyone was very sad."

"Well I wasn't there" Amelia huffed.

"Me neither" Felicia added.

"Yeah, you were" I said to her, which got me two pairs of shocked eyes. "You were too little for me to leave with anyone" I said. "You were only a few weeks old."

"Oh" Felicia said, and Amelia looked grumpy, thinking she'd missed out.

"I don't remember" Felicia said.

"Well, duh. You were a baby!" Amelia reminded her.

We stood there for a bit longer. "I thought it would be sadder, to be here" Amelia said. "I feel kind of sad, because, you know. Maybe he was nice. But mostly…it's just a thing. With writing on."

"I don't feel sad at all" Felicia grumbled.

"Well" I said. "Maybe that's a good thing. And it means you're happy now, sooo, you maybe don't have to feel sad about the dad that you lost. Although it's sad that he died, of course, because he was so young…" I was trying to figure this out in my head as I said it, and maybe I wasn't getting it quite right.

"I don't think he was young" Amelia said looking at the headstone.

"Well…relatively young. And he missed out on seeing you guys grow up."

"Yeah…" Amelia said. "He might have liked us."

"He would have loved you. Both of you" I assured them. "But you were lucky, and you got someone else who loved you just as much."

"Dad" Felicia interjected.

"Yep. We all did. So it's sad being here, and I'm sad for Bill, but I'm not sad for us. Do you get that?"

"I guess" Amelia said. Felicia shrugged. I wasn't sure we'd really had an epiphany this afternoon, but it was probably as good as it got.

EPOV

I wasn't exactly thrilled when Sookie, Amelia and Felicia went to visit Bill's grave. Sookie looked pretty miserable about the whole thing, and so did Felicia. Amelia was the only one who actually seemed happy, in a ghoulish kind of way. Fuck, I wasn't sure it was a good idea letting her watch all that shit about vampires. Fuck knows what she thought she was going to find at the cemetery.

Sam and I watched them drive off. "Mum's sad" Sam announced.

"Yep" I agreed.

"Did you do it?" he asked. Fuck, I don't know why everyone was always so keen to fucking blame me for everything.

"No" I said. "She's sad, because, um…" I wasn't sure what to say to him. I think he maybe had the idea that Sookie had been married before. Maybe. But it was probably kind of abstract in his mind. Fuck, none of them could properly picture a world in which they hadn't been born yet, yet alone a world in which Sookie and I weren't together.

I had trouble with that sometimes too.

"She went to that place with the dead people" Sam finished. "I heard them talking about it. Why'd they go?"

"Oh, well. Someone they knew is buried there."

"Not ashes like Bob?"

"Uh, no." Fuck, that would have been weird if we were all still living here with Bill's ashes. Sookie would have got rid of them though, surely? "No, this person was buried."

"Who is it?" Sam asked.

"He's, um. He was married to Sookie. Before me. And he was Amelia and Felicia's dad first." Well, kind of. I didn't think he really fucking qualified as Felicia's dad because he'd been half out of his mind on fucking drugs the whole time, but that was just me, and I was trying to keep it simple for Sam.

"Aunty Jude's brother?" he asked.

"Yep" I agreed. Maybe he knew more than I thought. He was silent for a bit.

"He makes Mum sad."

"Yep" I said again. It was true, and I hated it when she got all fucking maudlin over him. The past was the past and no good ever came of dredging it back up all the fucking time.

"Did you kill him?" he asked me, which was really fucking weird.

"No!" I said. "No I definitely didn't." I'm not sure what Sam thought, that we were all lions queuing up to kill the incumbent and take Sookie. If that was the case I should probably be worried about who thought they were going to fucking take me. Luckily I didn't have to.

It would fucking be Quinn, I got the feeling he was sneaky fucking shit, but he was shit out of luck on that front. I wasn't going anywhere.

Sam didn't look convinced. "Really?" he asked. "Because you always tell us not to upset her or there'll be consequences, so you know…"

"No" I said. "I wasn't even here when he died. Not even in the country."

"Really? You didn't know Mum?"

"Nope. Well, I've known her for nearly nine years now. But I didn't know her before that."

Sam went quiet again. "So he just died one day."

"Yeah. Car accident."

"But you won't die?" Sam asked.

"No, I'm definitely not going anywhere" I said, and Sam slowly wandered off.

It was only later on when I was in the garage trying to find where Sookie had stashed the hedge-clippers so I could finally get around to dealing to that piece of tree which kept scraping my car, that I realised that maybe Sam hadn't paid attention to everything I'd said.

There was a dull thud on the side of the garage, as something was thrown against it. Then another and I thought I might go and investigate when I heard Sam say. "Don't throw the lemons, Tray!"

I didn't hear Tray's reply, but there was another thud. "Mum said!" Sam added. "If you pull all the green ones off we don't get yellow ones. Or lemon pudding!" Yeah, I liked the lemon pudding too, so I'd be really pissed if Tray destroyed all the lemons now.

"It's just some" Tray said, obviously throwing another one.

"Yeah, but Mum said not to" Sam said, getting a bit worked up. He really didn't like it if anyone broke the rules. But then Sam said "You know Dad killed someone. Someone who made Mum upset."

"He did?" Tray asked.

"Yeah."

"Was there blood?"

"Heaps."

"Oh. Cool." Tray said. "He probably wouldn't kill us though."

"Dunno" Sam said.

"Yeah…" Tray said thoughtfully. And then their voices got quieter as they drifted away to do something else, hopefully something less destructive. I wasn't sure whether I should go out and correct what Sam had said, or just leave them to it. They'd gone, and I'd finally found the hedge-clippers…so it could probably wait. I figured it maybe wouldn't hurt them to think that. For a little while. As long as they didn't tell Sookie of course.

I was still in the driveway when Sookie pulled up, having been distracted from trimming the tree by Danny and Kennedy coming home and wanting to talk. At first I'd been a bit worried because technically the tree I was trimming back was on their side of the fence and I wasn't sure whether I'd over-stepped the bounds of neighbourliness, but they didn't seemed pissed. Mostly they wanted to make small talk until Kennedy finally asked whether we could have Kassidy on Friday night for them. I said fine because really, at this point, another small girl was neither here nor there for our house, and Pam loved having her over. I'm not sure Kassidy loved it quite as much in return, but there were more of our kids than there were of her, and I think she was relying on Pam to get her through it all in one piece.

I'd just said goodbye to them when Sookie pulled up in front of me and Amelia and Felicia got out, carrying plastic shopping bags.

"How was it?" I asked.

"OK" Felicia said shrugging. "We got hot chocolates and went to Smiggle."

"Oh, OK" I guess maybe there'd been cheering up to do afterwards. "And before that?"

"Um, it was sad" Amelia said. "But you know, we're sad for him, not so much for us…oh hang on, did my pencil fall out of the bag? MUM! Don't lock the car yet…" Amelia disappeared from view back inside the people mover.

"Yeah" Felicia said happily. "S'OK not to be sad about it. We got you, and I got a new pencil case. Look, there's a frog on it!"

"I don't know why you got a frog one" Amelia said, getting back out of the car again. "Frogs are yucky. They're all slimy and gross."

"You're slimy and gross" Felicia taunted.

"Shut up!"

"You shut up!"

"Everybody shut up and go inside" I said, and they both looked at me like I sucked, before they walked off. Yeah, they always got on so much better when there was a common enemy.

"Oh, you did the tree" Sookie said, appearing from her side of the car.

"Yeah. So it went OK?" I asked her.

"It did. I think they expected something different though, and then felt guilty because they weren't sad. But I told them it was OK, because, well…their lives turned out pretty good. It's hard for them to be sad about something they never really had."

"Yeah" I agreed. "Guess it is." I just wish Sookie had looked a bit less sad about the whole fucking thing.

She was quiet for the rest of the day and kept staring off into space, lost in her own thoughts. It doesn't sound like much, but that's actually quite a feat in our house sometimes. Especially when she managed to ignore Pam jumping up and down in front of her going "Pink milk, pink milk, PINK MILK!" for at least two minutes.

So I was glad when I found her in the laundry by herself after dinner. Granted she was staring into the washing machine with a rather forlorn air, and I could bet that it wasn't because she'd made all the white laundry pink, although that might please at least one member of the family, so she didn't look like she was having much fun, but at least I could try talking to her.

"Are you OK?" I tried.

"Fine" Sookie sighed.

"Just fine?"

"Yes! What do you want me to say?"

I shrugged. "Just the truth."

Sookie looked from me, back into the washing machine. "I just hate feeling this guilty" she muttered.

"I think Bob's long forgiven you" I said. "He's probably been on an endless hunt since he got…well, wherever he went. I bet they even provide freshly dry-cleaned suits for him to sleep on." Yeah, Sookie didn't even smile at that.

"Not Bob" she said. "Bill."

Fuck it; I knew he was at the bottom of the whole guilt thing. I really hated he could still do this, hated that he'd been dead for nine years and there was still a fucking ball of pain inside Sookie that I was never going to fix. Hated that every time she went into the past, there he was, fucking taunting her with her choices.

This shit had to stop.

"Don't go there" I said. "Just don't."

"Don't be bossy" Sookie said. "You…you don't know what it's like. I mean, it's not like I hadn't lost anyone before. And it's not like I sit there and think, 'gosh, if only I'd been there to strap Mum and Dad into their life jackets, it would all be different', but with Bill it's like…" She turned to look at me again. "It's like I always say he didn't choose me, but I feel like I didn't choose him either. I sent him away, when he needed me because, fuck knows, the rest of his family had no clue what to do to help him and clearly turning a blind eye to it wasn't working. But I said I was done and then he never got the chance to know Amelia and Felicia, and they're not sad I know, and that's to be expected given they've had pretty good lives. But I feel like I took something away from Bill, his chance to be a dad, and I'll feel guilty about that until I die, Eric. Nothing's going to change how I feel."

"I don't think you really had a choice, Sookie…" I tried, but she wasn't buying that.

"You weren't there" she said, sharply. "So don't tell me I didn't have a choice."

I sighed, and tried to think of another way of putting it. "So if you didn't choose him, what did you choose?" I asked.

"Well, me of course" Sookie said, finally beginning to pull the laundry out and put it into the dryer. "Selfishly, perhaps, I chose me."

"Because you couldn't handle it anymore?"

"It was…it was just too much. But I should have been stronger. For Bill. For the years we had together if nothing else. That history…it meant something."

"He was your family" I said. I kind of got that, when you saw Sookie's history you could see how he'd ended up being it for her.

"Yeah, he was" she said, her eyes huge with tears that hadn't fallen yet. "And you stick by family."

"Sookie." She turned. "He wasn't your only family."

"What? Oh, well yeah. But that's the thing; I should have done it for them. For the kids. To keep their family in one piece."

"But maybe…maybe you couldn't. And you had to choose what part of your family you were going to protect. And you chose…" I waited.

Sookie stared at the wall again. "My kids" she softly. "I chose my kids.'

"And it was the right choice. Look at them, they're fine. They're great, thanks to you. I don't think you could have done it any differently."

Sookie sniffed. "I don't think it's just due to me" she said, wiping her eyes with her hand. "I think you helped too. But yeah, I guess they are OK."

"It was a shitty choice, and I'm sorry you had to make it. But I'll never think you made the wrong one" I said. "And it's not just because of what it meant for me, but because, well, fuck it. You're a great mother. And I'd hate it a thousand times more if you were here today feeling guilty for having put your kids through nine years of hell on account of some loser who wanted to do drugs more than he wanted you and them."

"Yeah, I know" Sookie said, and I hoped that might be it, but obviously the tears needed to come out because she came over and put her arms around me and cried. I really did hope this would be the end of it.

When she finally came up for air, she gave me a small smile. "You know" she said. "You're really quite good at this stuff. I just hope you don't charge me for it."

"Oh" I said. "I can't send you a bill?"

"Oh, hell no. You charge the earth for when you talk bullshit to people; I hate to think what actual sense costs. I'd have to sell Pam to a nice Korean family or something."

"Hey" I said, "Don't knock my job. It helps keep this family in shoes."

"Oh no" Sookie said. "Sam?"

"Yep, he was complaining earlier his sneakers are too small, and he's kind of right."

"Just once" Sookie said. "I would like to get through a whole winter without having to replace someone's shoes." She looked at my feet. "You have a lot to answer for" she said, but she was laughing, and I hoped she was over it.

"Yeah, I'm not the one who keeps feeding them" I grumbled, and Sookie laughed some more.

I really wanted her to be over it, and I hoped to distract her further. Especially when I discovered what she had been hiding on the top shelf of our closet at bedtime.

SPOV

It wasn't a lot of fun going out to Bill's grave, although at least neither of the girls seemed to be that upset by it. They were clearly more upset by not being upset.

The same couldn't be said for me. I was always going to feel a bit guilty about Bill's death, even though I was hardly driving the car when he died. There was something about the fact I'd pushed him away that just never felt right. And although what Eric said made total sense, and although I knew that mostly it was the truth, that I'd been in a difficult position and I'd had to make a choice to protect my daughters, I was always going to wish I'd done something, anything more to help him.

But that was my cross to bear and it was no good inflicting it on other people.

And when I came out of the bathroom at bedtime I realised Eric had moved on quite successfully anyway. "I found your terrible secret" he announced.

"What?" I asked, thinking I didn't really have any more secrets. Well, not that many.

"Mmm-hmm" Eric said, smirking. "Because you know the shelf where you keep your sweaters is a really shitty hiding place, don't you? It's pretty much at my eye-level."

Oh, poo. I should have left it where it was in one of the laundry cupboards, but I'd wanted to read the damn thing and thought somewhere in the bedroom might be better. However the biggest nosey-parker in the family had struck again.

"It looks glorious" Eric announced, pulling the book out from under the covers and holding it up. Yep, it looked pretty lurid. It was one of the romance novels of the 1980's I remembered fondly, a big, fat bodice-ripper with an appropriate cover showing a bronzed and shirt-less hunk, resplendent with mullet hairstyle, clutching a woman in an off-the-shoulder gown which didn't seem to belong to any particular time period.

"Um…I just got that for the nostalgia factor" I mumbled. "I read it before…but I think I might give it a miss…"

"No, that would be a shame" Eric said, clearly mocking me. "Because I don't think I've ever read anything like…_A Voyage Beyond Passion_." No, well he wouldn't have. And those of us who had, mostly kept quiet about it. But when I'd stolen books from Mum, these were the ones I'd loved. Probably due to the sex in them.

And, see I'd grown out of that, but somehow Eric never had.

"You'll have to tell me the plot" Eric said, settling down against the pillows and looking enthusiastic.

"Oh" I said, getting into bed myself. "Oh, well what I can remember is that, um, there's this down on her luck daughter of a minor nobleman, called, um, Serena Proudfoot, and she takes a job as a companion, to…some woman I can't really remember and they're going on a ship. Possibly to America. Anyway, she gets on board, but there's a mix-up and she ends up in a cabin by herself…" I trailed off.

"Go on" Eric said.

I sighed, knowing how much worse it got. "So then she's in bed, and this guy comes in. He's all new money and no class. Jeremy DeLancey. And he...oh, hang on. See, he's pretending to be gay…"

"Um, why?"

"So his parents don't marry him off, and he still gets to go out and create mayhem with his friends. What? It was a radical plot move for the '80's."

"Um…OK?" Eric said, looking dubious.

"So he's been whoring around, while pretending to be gay…"

"So, he sleeps with guys?" Eric asked.

"No! Not that radical. He sleeps with prostitutes and just drinks and gambles with his mates."

"He sounds, um…so he's the hero?" Eric looked confused.

"Well, kind of. But anyway, he's asked for a prostitute to be brought to his cabin on the ship, but there's a mix-up, and he's really, really drunk, and he ends up in Serena's cabin and he gets into bed with her…"

"As you would" Eric commented.

"No, you wouldn't if you had half a brain" I said. "Plus, I have no idea why he doesn't try to have sex with her. Possibly drink. Anyway bizarrely, it doesn't wake her up. I guess he doesn't lie all over people like you lie over me."

"It's cuddling Sookie."

"Whatever! So in the morning, they wake up and she's distraught because it's her reputation ruined, and she yells at him, and he laughs because he can't fathom how a prostitute can worry about that, so he tries to have sex with her, and she's in the process of fighting him off…"

"She doesn't just say no?"

"Yeah…but you know. Anyway, so someone else comes in. His mother? Manservant? Both? And they figure out the problem, and I seem to recall his mum is delighted because she wants to marry him off and Serena is from a good family, so they arrange for the ships' captain to marry them, and he's pissed and won't talk to her for days, just drinks, and she's upset and doesn't want to be married to him. And then in, um…oh I can't remember what port, she gets off the ship and runs away and he chases after her."

"This is getting complex" Eric commented.

"Well, I'm probably missing stuff out. Um…then there's the part with the orgy…"

"Wait, what?"

"Oh, somehow she ends up in a brothel, and they sell her, and there's an orgy…but it's OK, because Jeremy rescues her…"

"Thank goodness" Eric said, dryly.

"Yeah…um. Except that he's upset that she ran off, because really she's his…"

"I thought he didn't want to be married to her?"

"Yeah…but you know. Doesn't mean he wants her with anyone else. So, um, then what happens is, oh, well, um…" I wasn't sure how to tell him about the next bit.

"So this would be the big sex scene would it?" Eric asked.

"Yeah. Kind of. It's a bit rapey though…" I said.

"Rapey?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, it kind of used to be the standard…"

"What, rapey like in, he rapes her?"

"Um…it's not quite that explicitly clear that he does, but there's a certain amount of, um, forcefulness that maybe isn't quite, um, well it's a fine line…"

"I'm not sure it is" Eric said.

"Yeah, anyway. So that's the first bit of the book and then they continue on to America…"

"Oh, I don't know I need any more plot" Eric said, looking at the book like it might explode in his hands. "I think, I might just have a look." He started flicking through it.

After a few moments he spoke again. "Yeah…that's pretty shit actually. Not just the, um, rapey-ness of it. Is that even a word?" Eric looked at me and I nodded. "Yeah, I can't help but fucking feel in real life he'd be arrested." I shrugged. "No, it's more the whole, um, language…"

"Yeah, it's different" I agreed.

"Like, um, the bit where, apparently, '_His manhood, like velvet covered steel, sought entry to Serena's lady-cave. Jeremy took her, forcefully, plumbing her depths and pushing through the sacred barrier of her maidenhood in one movement, causing a deep shudder from Serena. He briefly wondered at the fact of her continued innocence, despite the den of iniquity he'd discovered her in, but that thought was lost as he realised she belonged to him fully now, and they'd never be apart again.'_ I mean, it's kind of shitty writing."

"Yeah, probably not as good as I remembered it being" I agreed. Maybe I didn't want to read it again. Maybe the whole nostalgia trip had been a bad idea.

"It actually makes that vampire shit Amelia reads look…well, at least there was no rape. I just…I'm surprised you ever actually had sex, Sookie, if this was your introduction to it all. The reality must have shocked you."

"I did read _Cosmopolitan _magazine too" I said.

"OK, well that's something. But this book…its shit."

"It is" I agreed. "So you think you have some better ideas on the subject of sex?" I asked, moving over so I was straddling Eric's lap.

"I'm pretty sure I could come up with something better" he said, as he kissed me.

Eric did have some pretty good ideas, and when he pushed into me, it felt great and really didn't need all that purple prose to describe it. "That feels better" I said to him.

"Yeah" he agreed, as he shuddered ever so slightly. "I don't know why we don't do this more often. All the time even."

"Well, the kids might ask questions" I said, and Eric laughed. As much as I enjoyed him being inside me, I liked the laughing too. I'd always like the laughing, even if maybe, once Eric started moving, I didn't feel quite so much like laughing anymore.

Later on, as we lay there feeling nice and relaxed, I had one final thing I wanted to say to Eric. "You never asked me" I said. "you never asked me to turn your machine off."

"What?" Eric said, and I realised that maybe he'd been trying to go to sleep.

"When we talked about it, when I said I wanted you to turn the machines off if they were all that was keeping me alive. You didn't say what you wanted."

"Oh" Eric said. "I just…I didn't…"

"It's OK" I said. "I know you don't maybe think about your own mortality as much as I do. But I would. For you."

"OK…" Eric sounded a bit worried.

"I'm not going to kill you now though, so you're OK." I said to him.

"Right. Good" Eric said.

"Even if you do rip people apart with your bare hands."

"OK, what?" Eric asked, sounding more awake than before.

"Well, I heard, from a reliable source, that you killed someone. And that you may have even ripped their head off in fact. And there was a lot of blood. And it was gross, and really, really awesome."

"OK, that wasn't _anything_ I actually said, that was all Sam's doing. He's totally responsible for all that bullshit."

"Uh-huh, sure. But you didn't stop him either."

"Oh…well, no. Might be useful."

"Like the Air Marshals?" I asked.

"They did work well until Felicia realised there weren't any in New Zealand" Eric agreed.

"Anyway, you might have to correct Sam and Tray before they start telling the neighbourhood about your exploits, but I'll still make sure that when it's your time to go, you get to go, and we don't keep you hanging around."

"Well…thanks, I think" Eric said. And then we were silent for a bit.

"You kind of think you're going to live forever, don't you?" I asked him.

"I think it's more I just don't have any intention of leaving you" Eric said, "So, I guess. Kind of."

"And you said the sparkly vampire was creepy."

"That's the sparkles, Sookie. It's like they let Pam loose with her glitter glue. Sparkles and fangs don't mix. It's like….mixed messages or something."

"Like creepy guys luring kids with lollies?" I asked.

"Exactly Sookie, except I was thinking candy."

I laughed, and then I snuggled down further. "'Night, Eric" I said. "I love you. And your scary mind."

Eric chuckled. "I love you too. Even if you do read shitty books. 'Night, Sookie." He kissed my hair, and I relaxed against him, as everything else slowly faded away.

**A/N Twilight is by Stephanie Meyer, and Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews.**

**Waikumete is pronounced Why-koo-mitty.**

**Smiggle is a chain of stationery shops.**

**Thanks for reading!**


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